My trilingual toddler preschooler starts mandatory French preschool in just a week, and friends, to borrow a line from My Chemical Romance, I’m not okay.

I’ll skip the waxing poetic about how quickly she’s grown, and get right into sharing my plan of attack for keeping our target languages strong as she starts school.

If you’re a parent raising a bilingual child who feels like summer went great, but the school year feels like an uphill battle when it comes to keeping the language alive, you’re not alone!

It’s partly a numbers game, partly social pressure, and completely predictable. One of my favorite linguists to turn to on this topic is Dr. Silvina Montrul, who writes extensively on the struggles of heritage speakers growing up with second (or third) langauge at home. What she found is that, they tend to do quite well with the everyday, but things get more complicated when it comes to abstract vocabulary (think words like justice) and the kind of academic vocabulary you learn at school (which makes perfect sense!)

There’s also a psycholinguistic layer, where less input = weaker connections in the target language = more time to find they words they need = more frustration. Patience WILL be your winning virtue here.

So while you can’t control the words coming out of their mouth, you can give them the best possible environment for success:

Make the Invisible Curriculum Visible

Here’s an easy one to start with that I learned from my good friend, Sunny: ask your school for a copy of the curriculum, or if you live in a place like I do with a national curriculum, take a peak online. Follow along with what they’re learning at school, but in your home language.

Look up the vocabulary yourself if you need to and learn together. You don’t need a daily activity recapping everything they learned, but being able to pull out a few books on the topic of the week, a YouTube documentary, or just having a dinnertime conversation about the water cycle does double duty of helping them synthesize what they learned at school AND get that precious target language vocabulary. It’s the “buy one, get one free” of learning!

Read About the Experience Together

Grab a children’s book with bilingual characters and use it to talk about what your child might be feeling as they navigate school again. Why do they need time to find their words? How does it feel to code-switch? Why does it still matter to you that they speak the home language?

Then, if your child is old enough, have a family meeting. Come up with some family rules together. Kids care about agency! They want a say in what matters.

Create a Ritual to Switch Back

Design a physical transition when they come home from school. This signals: we’re switching languages now.

The details depend on your child’s age:

• A special hat, funky socks, or accessory

• A little flag they wave

• An after-school snack from your home

• A song you sing together (think of it like an after-school jingle)

Pick something visible and/or tactile to physically mark the shift.

Give Them Time to Decompress First

Here’s what a lot of miss in an attempt to get our kids speaking the target language as quickly as possible: don’t jump on your kids to speak the home language the minute they walk through the door! Or speak at all for that matter.

They’ve been listening all day. Auditory processing is exhausting. They’ve been making social decisions, managing peer dynamics, code-switching between classroom and playground. Especially because we tend to ask open and vague questions (at least from a child’s perspective) like, “how was school today?”

Let them tell you about their day in whatever language comes out then use the transition like the car ride, the walk, to recap their day in your language. Give them a few minutes to just be, THEN introduce the ritual.

Lately, as my daughter speaks more, much like a Robert Frost poem, my husband and I have diverged more and more in our parental discourse strategies. If OPOL and time-and-place are bilingual parenting strategies, what happens inside those frameworks is often called parental discourse strategies: the specific ways you respond when your kid answers in the “wrong” language.

The concept was first written about by Dr. Elizabeth Lanza. She identified a set of parental discourse strategies and wrote about which were most effective.

Minimal grasp is the most monolingual strategy. Contrary to what gets shared online, it doesn’t mean ignoring your child when they speak the non-target language, but is more like saying Hmmm? or What’s that?

Move on: you keep going in the target language.

Translation: you translate or recast what they’ve said

Expressed guess: “Guessing” what the child has said by reformulating their demand

Code-swtiching: following their lead and moving between languages

What’s happening most often is that she starts conversations with me in English, but she starts conversations with my husband in French, despite their target language being Algerian Arabic. But why? Let’s investigate!

I’ve talked before about how my husband is second-generation Algerian, and French is technically his dominant language. Before our daughter was born, he said that if he weren’t married to a linguist, he’d probably speak mostly French to her. He’s much more used to it now, but in reality, he does use French than he realizes (and that’s okay; I think he’s doing a fantastic job). So, French is probably winning the input race by a landslide.

My daughter also knows that we speak French. What’s interesting is that she seems to have worked out that dad is a “native” French speaker, and I’m not, despite being a pretty convincing C1/C2 speaker. Amazingly, research has shown that children actually prefer the target-language speech of a native speaker. Now if you’re raising a child in your second language, there is no need to panic. This simply suggests that they’re attuned to very fine details of speech. So it’s very likely that at 2.5 years old, she’s picked up on Dad having a different cadence than Mom in French.

Now add in a bit of a peer pressure, where all of her cousins, who are also third-generation Algerian-Arabic speakers, speak French to each other. And there is nothing my daughter wants more than to be cool like her cousins. When we come home from grandma’s every weekend, I notice her speaking a lot more French. I’m sure this will only increase when she starts mandatory French preschool in two weeks (Is someone cutting onions in here?!)

Because she speaks more French to my husband, he has to be more direct about getting her to use Darija, whereas I rarely need to prompt my daughter to “repeat it in English.”

In my case, simply recasting in English is enough for her to make the switch. Perhaps because those Arabic pathways are not yet as well-trodden as the English ones, the switch seems to take a bit more of a conscious effort. My daughter only speaks French to me when she has to code-switch mid-sentence, usually to fill in a word. When that happens I recast what she’s said without giving her the script. I don’t say “can you ask mommy in English?” because discourse-wise we both understand she’s doing it because she doesn’t have the word.

He’ll ask her to repeat the phrase in Darija by saying “I don’t understand. Can you tell me in Arabic?” but he always gives her a script if she falters. This first time he did this, I felt myself get a little nervous. Was she going to shut down? Get frustrated? What actually happened is that she immediately switched her request to Arabic and moved on with her day. A little nudge, and nothing more.

He doesn’t withhold things from her, but he will sometimes wait for her to rephrase a request. This works because she doesn’t get frustrated, and he keeps it at her level. He knows there are things she can’t yet say in Darija, but there is a lot she can that just needs to be activated in the moment (with a big dose of patience). When she doesn’t know, her current strategy is to look at him with a big smile, and say, “You tell me!”

(And a big footnote here: all of this goes out the window when she’s scared, or wakes up in the middle of the night. In those instances, we respond to her needs in whatever language she calls out in).

So far this is working for us, and I think it’s important to adjust, while being aware that her output (speaking) might require more focused input from us, and upping our family time in Arabic.

Can two parents mix-and-match these parental discourse strategies? Absolutely! In fact, I think it may just be the key to creating the bilingual strategy of your dreams.

This week, I was reading a magazine article about how we’re all becoming desensitized to our five senses because we scroll too much. It thoroughly stressed me out, but in my favorite part of the article, the author asks us to remember what we liked to do in our free time as children.

For me, that was learning languages, and I realize that after a decade in academia and two years as a mom, it’s been quite awhile since I picked up a language textbook! One of my favorite ways to learn languages as a kid was through music, so this week, in a fit of over-scrolling guilt, I decided to take 15 minutes out of my daughter’s nap time and try learning the lyrics to a popular Algerian song, “Zina” by Raïna Raï.

On my first listen, I couldn’t make out a single word. Frustrating! I pulled up the lyrics in English, and suddenly, something amazing happened. I could now pick out 80% of the words, despite having not looked up the lyrics in Arabic.

So what’s that all about, and what does it have to do with your bilingual child?

The problem here is a little topic called segmentation, that psycholinguists love to study. Segmentation is the ability to cut words at their boundaries. So,

hellohowareyoutoday becomes “Hello, how are you today?”

When I was a research intern at the babylab at Paris-Descartes University, several of the lab members there were studying how early bilingual newborns could start to segment words. This is probably the most important thing for a bilingual infant to learn, so they can start to figure out which sounds go with which words and which words are assigned to each language. This usually happens around 7-9 months of age.

So back to my song blanks:

Speech has no reliable acoustic (sound) boundaries between words. When you’re a highly proficient listener, you don’t notice this, because your brain isn’t relying purely on the acoustic signal to find word edges. It’s using stored lexical knowledge to do the parsing for you. Kind of like reading and not needing to decode words anymore.

In a language where your vocabulary is bit thin (like me and Algerian Darija) you’re stuck doing doing analysis on a sounds that don’t have clear boundaries, so it smears into an undifferentiated stream. The moment I read the translation, however, the relevant words became “active” in my lexicon. I saw the light!

It’s a bit like hearing your favorite misheard song lyrics (“Hold me closer Tony Danza,” anyone?) that become crystal-clear once you see the lyrics written out.

This is really important for your bilingual kids because it explains why they might not understand the target language in rapid speech, and especially why they might freeze up in a group conversation. Their brain might still be working to segment those unknown words that they know in an isolated context.

So don’t forget to be extra patient as they search for those word boundaries, and don’t hesitate to give this song lyric exercise a try with your bilingual kid!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a devastating family loss. In the weeks that followed, we decided that, somewhat paradoxically, we needed a change of scenery and what one might call a vacation, but we all know as simply “parenting-in-a-new-location.” Being the millennial that I am, I saw an overwhelming positive review of a child-friendly hotel in Alcúdia, hit book, and thought little of it.

Only after confirming our reservation did I discover that we’d chosen the week when Mallorca was experiencing the highest anti-tourist protests in its history.

I immediately felt terrible. I did my research. Years of overtourism have strained local infrastructure, housing, and resources. Non-refundable tickets in hand, we decided to try and be the best possible tourists we could be. We stayed at the hotel, not an Airbnb (as this was an important concern raised by locals) and did our best to seek out local restaurants and shops.

One of the ways I think about being a good tourist, though, is through language.

I don’t think anyone expects you to master a language before landing (does anyone remember that Simpsons episode where Bart studies Spanish cassettes for the duration of their 10-hour flight, only to find out that Brazilians speak Portuguese only minutes before landing?) BUT a few greetings and a lot of politeness can definitely open doors. I hadn’t used Spanish consistently in probably fifteen years, but growing up in the Southern United States, I was surrounded by Spanish speakers. My best friends were of Mexican background. I went to their quinceañeras, ate at the local pastelería, got tres leches cake for my birthday. All of my Spanish teachers were from Puerto Rico. They were famous for saying “I’m not going to teach you vosotros because you’ll never need it.” (Guess who needed it?!) My mother spoke Spanish well too.

At the resort, I was genuinely thrilled to try it again. I did OK, but often times when I had a missing word, Darija came out instead. That’s the fun thing about being multilingual and having lots of languages “on” in the brain at once. We call this language inhibition and suppression: the brain’s struggle to keep the right language “on” while keeping the others “off.” It’s one of the fascinating, frustrating realities of multilingual life.

What struck me, though, was how the hotel staff responded.

Every time I stumbled through my Spanish, they were warm and encouraging, “Your Spanish is so good!” they’d say. My ego was thoroughly stroked! But every night when I lay in bed, I couldn’t help but wonder (enter Carrie Bradshaw) “Was I actually helping them? Or were they helping me?”

English probably would have been faster and more efficient for us all. And yet they responded to my attempts at Spanish with genuine encouragement and praise. I thought I was doing them a favor by trying their language. But they were the ones doing me the favor, allowing me to practice, affirming my attempt, making me feel good about my struggling Spanish.

This dynamic repeated itself outside the hotel, in the shops and small boutiques of Mallorca. I’d try out my Spanish with a shopkeeper, and they’d respond in French.

French!

My Spanish had clearly been shaped by fifteen years of living in France and speaking French far more than any other language. The shopkeepers defaulting to what they perceived as my strongest language in an incredible act of linguistic accommodation.

It reminded me of my early days in Paris, when I first arrived. I was determined to speak French. I spoke it constantly. And constantly, people would respond to me in English. I’d insist, gently at first, then with more persistence. Month after month, this happened. English back, every time. Then one day, after many months of this small daily negotiation, a waiter responded to me in French, and I thought “I have ARRIVED!”

My daughter had her own similar experiences in the linguistic microcosm that is the baby pool.

She’d run up to a group of children and say, “Tu veux jouer avec moi??” or “Comment tu t’appelles?” Then she’d look to me to see if they understood. When they didn’t, I’d gently explain: they speak English, not French.

She met a little girl from England who was genuinely concerned she spoke more than one language. I assured her it was perfectly alright. She was particularly concerned that we were teaching her to speak “Arabian.”

“Don’t worry, she can handle it!” I said.

Much like our time in Italy, my daughter relished picking up little phrases here and there. Piso cero. Hola. Gracias. Repetition and exposure and a toddler’s natural enthusiasm for language created miniature lexicons overnight.

Then there was the French family at the pool.

My daughter ran up to them and asked, in French, if they wanted to play. He looked at me and said, “Ah, tu es française !” (You’re French!). Which then took me a long time to explain that I wasn’t French, but she was, well actually my husband is and we live in France, but I speak French, and ah, you’ve already swam away.

In another instance, we thought the large pool floats were for everyone, and after parading our toddler on a giant turtle for awhile, were greeted by a

“Hel-LO! Do you speak English?! This (aggressive pointing and finger wagging) our float!” “No problem!” I answered back. I couldn’t help but wonder if she would have been less irritated if she had heard us speaking English instead or French or Arabic.

Before we left Mallorca, I also noticed the presence of Catalan.

On signs, on menus, on every official surface, Catalan appeared alongside Spanish. It’s the language of the Balearic Islands, spoken by many locals and part of the official linguistic landscape. However, I don’t think I heard it spoken much. Or if I did, my ears were too untrained to catch it. Poking around internet forums, local Mallorcans explained that 1) They have their own variety of Catalan called Mallorquí and 2) many people working in tourism come from mainland Spain and may not speak Catalan themselves.

I don’t have deep fieldwork on Catalan. But I understand its long struggle a place in Spanish society and the politics of language revival in regions where minority languages are fighting to survive.

As a linguist-on-move, I can’t help but watch the hierarchies or the negotiations or the small, constant work of understanding each other across the boundaries of code and accent and prestige.

If you and your bilingual child are changing environments this summer, be sure to keep an ear out for your own linguistic fieldwork!

I’ll never forget the day I was at the park with my daughter, speaking a mix of English and Arabic, when I was approached by another mom, eager to chat.

“That’s so wonderful that you speak two languages with her. I wanted to do that with my son, but I was told it would be too confusing for him. He’s austistic and communication is already a challenge for us.”

Mom spoke Swahili and was devastated to not have the support she needed to raise him bilingual.

Unfortunately, this advice is still pervasive today, despite being debunked by the latest research.

What do we actually mean by bilingualism?

One of the most persistent myths about bilingualism is that it requires equal fluency in two languages. This is on par with the idea that a “real” bilingual is two monolinguals rolled into one. This is what linguist François Grosjean (1989, 2010) called “the monolingual bias.”

Bilingualism, in reality, is a continuum of language use across everyday life (Wei, 2000). It includes:

• Heritage speakers who understand more than they produce

• Children who switch languages mid-sentence

• Parents who speak “imperfect” versions of their home language

• AAC users who draw on vocabulary from more than one language

• Anyone who uses more than one language in any domain of daily life

Let’s not forget that over 50% of the world’s population is bilingual or multilingual (Grosjean, 2010)! Monolingualism is the global minority. Our assessments, norms, and advice were built on a monolingual default that doesn’t reflect most of the world’s children.

What does the research say about bilingualism and autism?

Hambly & Fombonne (2012) compared groups of 40–50 bilingual- and monolingual-exposed autistic children aged 4–5 and found no significant difference in language outcomes.

Petersen et al. (2012) looked specifically at lexical skills in 14 English-Chinese bilingual and 14 English monolingual preschool-aged children with ASD. Bilingual children performed comparably to their monolingual peers.

Drysdale et al. (2015) conducted a systematic review of 9 studies and concluded there is no evidence that bilingualism worsens outcomes in autism.

Uljarević et al. (2016) found that bilingual autistic children showed similar adaptive behavior to monolingual autistic peers.

And the most recent addition to this body of work: Zuban, Baumeister, Wolfer & Durrleman (2026) looked at passive voice comprehension, which is a pretty complex syntactic structure, in autistic German- and French-speaking children with varying degrees of bilingual exposure. The finding: there were no detrimental effect of bilingualism, even on this harder linguistic skill.

The research consensus is clear: the advice being given to families is not aligned with the evidence practitioners are supposed to be working from.

Will bilingualism help my child_______?

Bilingualism can:

• Strengthen family bonds and intergenerational relationships

• Support cultural identity and sense of belonging, which have documented protective effects for wellbeing (Tannenbaum, 2012)

• Work alongside, not against, speech and language therapy (Kohnert, 2010)

It cannot:

• Cause or worsen autism-related communication differences

• Make evidence-based intervention less effective

The real cost of dropping the language

Lily Wong Fillmore (1991) documented what happens to families when children stop speaking the heritage language. Korean children who could no longer use honorifics with grandparents. Spanish-speaking mothers and children who found themselves, over time, unable to fully understand each other. The loss of a family language, Fillmore argued, is the loss of the relationship.

You do not have to be fluent

Kohnert et al. (2005) found that emotional warmth and consistency drive heritage language acquisition more than parental linguistic accuracy. Imperfect input is still meaningful input. A parent speaking imperfect Darija, or halting Punjabi, or accented Cantonese is still transmitting something identity, belonging, and the message that this language, and the culture it carries, has value.

I’ll be talking more about this at the online Child-Led Autism Summit! It will take place August 10-13. Save your spot here!

Tell me more!

Drysdale, H., van der Meer, L., & Kagohara, D. (2015). Children with autism spectrum disorder from bilingual families: A systematic review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2(1), 26–38.

Fillmore, L. W. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(3), 323–346.

Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and Reality. Harvard University Press.

Gunning, C., Breathnach, O., Holloway, J., McTiernan, A., & Mahon, S. (2019). A systematic review of speech and language therapists’ practices for bilingual children with primary language impairment. Speech, Language and Hearing.

Hambly, C., & Fombonne, E. (2012). The impact of bilingual environments on language development in children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(7), 1342–1352.

Kohnert, K., Yim, D., Nett, K., Duran, P. F., & Duran, L. (2005). Intervention with linguistically diverse preschool children: A focus on developing home language(s). Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 36(3), 251–263.

Kohnert, K. (2010). Bilingual children with primary language impairment: Issues, evidence and implications for clinical actions. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43(6), 456–473.

Tannenbaum, M. (2012). Family language policy as a form of coping or defence mechanism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 15(4), 471–489.

Uljarević, M., Katsos, N., Hudry, K., & Gibson, J. L. (2016). Practitioner review: Multilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(11), 1205–1217.

Wei, L. (2000). The Bilingualism Reader. Routledge.

Zuban, Y., Baumeister, S., Wolfer, S., & Durrleman, S. (2026). Comprehension of passive voice in autistic German- and French-speaking children: No negative effects of bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

When my daughter was born, my husband seemed to feel like a music box of forgotten sounds had opened inside of him. Our newborn in his arms, he suddenly started remembering a slew of words and phrases from his childhood. One of them was “Rouh tnebbeg,” a favorite expression of his father’s. He knew it meant “go find something to do,” but strangely enough, he wasn’t entirely sure of the exact translation. “I think it means go pick olives,” he said one day. “But isn’t olive zitoun?” We were puzzled.

And then, one night, around my in-laws’ dining table, we were discussing their hometown in Algeria and its stunning produce. Karmous (figs), and of course, as my father-in-law reminded us, tnebbeg-ah-ha! There it was. “Rouh tnebbeg.” “Go pick jujubes.”

The jujube, known as Ziziphus jujuba in scientific terms, is, according to my deep research on Wikipedia, “a small deciduous tree or shrub reaching a height of 5–10 metres (16–33 feet), usually with thorny branches.” With many medicinal properties, jujubes would have taken a long time to harvest meticulously, making them the perfect fruit for this expression.

Last week, my daughter lost her beloved grandfather, one of her oldest links to the Arabic language. He took enormous pride in how well his grandchildren spoke Arabic. He was so supportive of our trilingual family plan. When we told him we were holding off on introducing French at home for as long as possible, he said simply, “Well, of course, she’ll learn at school.” No need for a PhD in sociolinguistics to support us so fully.

The delight on his face when she produced such wonderfully mixed sentences as “nhab some biscotte kima Jeddi” (I want some crackers like Jeddi).

Despite never having had the opportunity to go to school, he faithfully worked his way through the Qur’an in Arabic every day. Only a few days after my wedding, he said, “Welcome to the family, l’américaine. From now on, we’re only going to speak to you bi Arabiya. That’s how you’ll learn.”

And learn I shall.

Two weeks ago, in a fate of rather cruel irony, I wrote about language death and why we should keep transmitting family languages even when society deems them “not useful.” I had no idea I’d be comforted by my own words so soon.

The dedication we had in teaching our daughter Darija let her build such a deep bond with her grandfather. He was so encouraging when I muddled my way through her children’s books. I can’t imagine how much more limited our relationship would have been without it.

His hometown’s landscape shaped his language, much like the jujubes did. It’s an extremely regional expression, one that will keep us tied to his home every time we use it.

As a high-schooler, I was always known for having a Lonely Planet phrasebook with me in whatever language I was studying that week. I loved them because the format made me feel like I could start speaking a language right away. My friends liked them because the “Romance and Dating” section often had a few eyebrow-raising pickup lines.

In any case, I earned a reputation as someone who was “good at languages,” but I never did and still don’t feel like I had any kind of particular gift. But what I found is that studying the concept of “aspect” in Polish or the Cyrillic alphabet in Russian or tones in Mandarin Chinese simply gave me a bit of an easier jumping-off point when it came to my next language.

Many parents I see in family language consultations wonder if being bilingual will help their child learn other languages down the line. At least one new study finds that there’s no “intrinsic” superpower when it comes to bilingual children, but there may still be some important advantages.

Germain and Hummel (2025), published in the International Journal of Bilingualism, set out to answer the question: does growing up bilingual make it easier to pick up a third language?

They worked with French-English bilingual children in first and second grade and compared them to monolingual French-speaking children the same age on two tasks:

1. discriminating sounds in Spanish and Mandarin (languages none of the children had been exposed to)

2. and imitating those sounds with something close to native-like pronunciation.

The bilingual children and monolingual children showed no differences.

Before you feel too deflated, it’s important to remember that infant literature (Petitto et al., 2012; Graf Estes & Hay, 2015; Singh & Tan, 2021) on bilingual children shows “delayed perceptual narrowing” at around 2 years old. This means that a bilingual child’s “ear” stays relatively flexible when it comes to new sounds, and that window slowly narrows and eventually closes. BUT, bilingual children might have another advantage when it comes to language learning: vocabulary and metalinguistic awareness (awareness about language and how it works) rather than raw sound perception.

So if you’re wondering whether it’s “worth it” to maintain a minority language in order to raise a super-powered polyglot…the question itself is a neoliberal one, measuring languages by their market value. The answer is yes, always maintain that heritage language! Even if it won’t give your child a magical ear for language learning, maintaining two languages in early childhood is still building metalinguistic awareness, motivation, and a curiosity that may help drive them to want to learn other languages later on. And where else can you find that kind of ROI in this economy?

“We know everyone will be very excited, but we just ask that you don’t bring any foreign flags to the wedding ceremony.”

I turned to my husband, curious.

We were at an obligatory pre-wedding meeting at the City Hall, where we were to have our official French wedding in a month’s time. The mayor had walked us through what to expect, when to arrive, a few documents, and, oh yes, the peculiar request to not bring any foreign flags. This is because, as Algerians, it’s quite common to bring your flag, well, everywhere! (And yes, I did dance with it, but at home, before we got to City Hall!)

July 5th marked Algeria’s Independence Day, and it was the perfect time to reflect for me on the power of Algerian pride, and especially, its language and others like it, existing in spite of years of colonialism. For all of the immense pride Algerians have in their country’s history, I have at times been surprised at the disappointment certain Algerians have shared when they find we’re teaching our daughter Darija and not MSA (Modern Standard Arabic).

I’ve written previously about my research on Darija (North African Arabic) transmission, and the struggles many parents face to maintain it as it’s often relegated in France (“too Arab”) but not always held to a high standard in its own country (“not pure enough Arabic”). MSA is the formal written language of school, news, and religion; nobody grows up speaking it at home. Darija is the language of everyday communication. This is a very, very oversimplified explanation, but mirrors another unlikely language family, which is Creole languages.

I’ll never forget the day I was interviewing a mother in Guadeloupe, who was less than thrilled her daughter was having Creole lessons in school instead of English. “But aren’t you glad she’ll be more connected to her culture? Be bilingual?” I asked.

The mother paused. Shook her head.

“Look, you already speak English. You speak French. You can work anywhere you want. My daughter is living in Guadeloupe. How do you expect her to get a job in the hexagon (Mainland France) if she doesn’t speak English? What use is Creole to her?”

In that moment I felt her hurt, and the concern for her daughter’s future. I was waxing poetic about standing up to the Colonial Powers That Be, and she just wanted to make sure her daughter was going to have a better life than she did.

“What if I told you that learning to read in Creole could help her read more easily in French? Or that it may help her learn English later on? Would that make you feel any better about how this teaching time was being used?”

I felt her soften. I turned off my recording device. We talked for another hour, not about research, but just about how hard it was to make educational decisions that felt right. I wasn’t yet a parent when I did that research, and I was a young and rather green researcher. If I could go back in time, I would probably give myself a pinch for having my own research agenda, and give Mom a hug for feeling frustrated.

What both of these language families have in common is that they were born out of languages in contact, and nearly erased by struggle. This means that today, like many languages that are minoritized their place in the school system is often absent. The most use they have is in the familial sphere.

covers the topic of language death quite profoundly in her new book How to Kill a Language. It was wonderfully validating to see many of the same questions I’ve been wrestling with parents for a decade as a researcher, and now as a family language consultant. How do you keep your family language alive when it hasn’t been deemed useful by society? Why keep passing Kichwa to your children in Ecuador when you believe Spanish is the only door to a better life? (It’s a wonderful book, go get a copy!)

Languages like Darija and Creole don’t risk dying out in the sense that they’re no longer in use by their own society, but the "usefulness" ideology could actually kills is its transmission in specific niches: diaspora families, upwardly mobile urban households, schooling contexts.

So what happens if the diaspora can’t keep them going?

Let’s imagine, in the most extreme case, that Algerian Darija disappeared tomorrow. If Darija disappears, MSA wouldn’t be able to fill the vacuum alone. One of two things would likely happen: MSA would vernacularize under pressure, becoming a new Darija within a generation, or French/English would fill some part of that space, which would be one of the largest language shifts in modern history.

French is Haiti's language of school and officialdom, but only a sliver of Haitians speak it fluently. If Kreyòl stops being transmitted, you don't get a francophone Haiti, because there's no infrastructure to deliver French to 11 million people. You get mass linguistic dispossession: a population with reduced competence in the elite language and severed from its own. The MIT linguist Michel DeGraff has spent his career making this argument, building Kreyòl-medium materials so Haitian students can learn in their language instead of memorizing lessons in French.

Not only that, but the losses would be staggering. The great grandparent-grandchild rupture. A loss of literary tradition, religion, and culture. A loss of knowledge about fishing, farming and midwifery. But what’s a parent to do when the burden of language transmission feels like too much?

What to say when someone says your child’s heritage language is “useless”

If you’re raising a bilingual child, you may, at some moment, hear some variation of this comment, from a relative, an internet commentator or simply the voice in your own head. Here’s what I’d say to each.

To the relative who asks “why confuse her?”: “She’s not confused. She knows exactly who speaks what. Babies sort languages before their first birthday, and mixing is a sign of skill, not confusion. She’s using everything she has.”

To the person who says “focus on French/English/X Language first”: “We do focus on French/English/etc. And the reading she does in [your language] helps her French. Children who learn to read in one language don’t start over in the next one. They carry the skills across.”

Decoding, sound awareness, and print concepts transfer between languages, even between different scripts. A child who understands that letters map to sounds in Creole already understands it in French.

To yourself: A CV is one kind of useful. Being able to sit in your aunt’s kitchen and understand the jokes is another. Knowing the words your mother used to comfort you, and having them ready for your own child, is a third.

Nobody asks whether piano lessons are useful. Nobody asks whether bedtime stories will get her a job. The question only comes for languages that have already been pushed to the margins, and that tells you the question was never really about your child. It’s about what the person asking believes counts.

A few days ago I reached every budding content creator’s dream: a video that got out of 200-view jail! As of this writing it sits at almost four hundred thousand views. Not technically viral, but far more than anything my bilingual parenting account has ever seen.

The video features a clip of Belgian footballer Amadou Ba Zeund Georges Mvom Onana switching between French and English (specifically British English). Since the World Cup started, football has been all over my feed, and not just because I’m a fan. I’m currently doing linguistic coaching with a France national team player. What started as public speaking coaching turned into weekly lessons on sociolinguistics, dialects, and code-switching, since he wants to move easily between AAE (African American English) and other varieties of English.

So football’s been on the brain, and I’ve been enjoying it. When I saw this clip, I thought it would be a fun way to introduce a simple sociolinguistic concept to an audience that might not have heard of it before. I didn’t think much of it, and I recorded a short response.

Perhaps some combination of the footballer, the surprising quote, and the short, clean explanation made the video do well. As comments trickled in, I saw a lot of familiar faces: my favorite internet friends leaving encouraging comments about what a fun example of code-switching this was, how cool it was to see football and linguistics meet. New followers came in. Exciting, at first!

Then things turned. Instead of comments about linguistics, I started seeing comments that fell into a few categories:

“You’re wrong about what you’re talking about.”

Several people said this isn’t code-switching, and that code-switching means moving between standard English and African American English. A totally understandable reaction! That is one modern use of the term, but the term originated in the 1950s, referring to switching between any two codes or languages, and its meaning has since expanded. (I hope no one feels their definition was taken from them! I just wanted to add some history.) In many fields like psycholinguistics, it’s used as an objective way to say that an interlocuteur has switched languages.

A few others said this was actually translanguaging. I’d say code-switching is a tool of translanguaging, translanguaging being the idea of drawing on your entire linguistic repertoire. It’s often used in educational setting to describe a set of practices that can allow bilingual children to access and activate all of their languages in order to succeed. (Like working with partners who speak the same language, or having multilingual assessment options).

Bilingual parenting takeaway: If your child switches languages mid-sentence, that's not confusion. It's the same skill Amadou Onana used on camera, reaching for whichever word or language fits the moment. Let it happen instead of correcting it. (It often slows down around age 4). You don't need to keep your child's languages in separate boxes. Translanguaging means letting them use everything they've got at once. Mixing languages in the same sentence is a normal part of how bilingual kids think, not a sign they're behind in either one.

“This is only impressive in America! The rest of the world does this.”

They’re not wrong! Bilingualism IS the global majority. I reminded a few commenters I’m not actually based in the US, I’m in France, and in our own family we speak three and a half languages between us. But I understand the sentiment, especially from parents pointing out how common this is in Africa. They’re right! My North African family is a great example. According to Amadou Onana himself, he speaks five languages, including Wolof, a Niger–Congo language spoken in Senegal.

The only thing I can say is that when I record, I imagine sitting in a cozy café talking to parents in an environment where bilingualism isn’t well supported, where passing on a second language is a real struggle. These commenters are right that it should be “normal,” but for a lot of parents, it still isn’t. I always want to acknowledge that.

Bilingual parenting takeaway: If you're the only one in your family or your neighborhood speaking the minority language, try to keep speaking it even in public. It helps your child see just how “normal” it really is!

“Your face is weird” and other remarks

I got a few no-so-lovely comments about my appearance. Listen, I was heavily bullied in middle school. I once had a girl tell me that if I straightened my hair, dyed it blonde, got blue contacts, and got a proper tan, I might actually be kind of cute. Yikes! I spent a summer at a Vaganova-method ballet school. As the Internet meme goes, “You can’t hurt me!”

I’m a linguist, not a supermodel for good reason! But let’s not be so mean on the Internet, OK?

Bilingual parenting takeaway: Kids get teased for accents and mixed-up words the same way adults get picked apart online. When it happens, “People sometimes make fun of things they don't understand” goes further than pretending it didn't happen.

I’ve been mulling the whole thing over for a few days, and what keeps coming back to me is that sociolinguistics, bilingualism and language-learning aren’t just topics for linguists or people already interested in language. Sociolinguistics studies the intersection of language and society, from folk etymologies to the science behind how we actually talk to each other.

The video reached a very different audience than I intended, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it opens up a conversation about bilingualism that wouldn’t have happened otherwise with more discussion, in popular spaces, about how rich bilingualism actually is, and the science behind it.

But for now, I think I’ll leave the football reactions to the commentators.

Picture this:

You’re two-and-a-half, munching the half of bagel you begged Mom for but surely won’t eat because the cream cheese wasn’t spread clockwise. Baba has cut you some fresh fruit, and he’s playing your favorite Arabic game with you, quizzing you on your favorite breakfast food words. You’re smashing vocabulary left and right. Life is good! Suddenly, he asks you, Wassim hadtha? (What’s this?) while pointing to your favorite pink plate.

You’ve heard this word a hundred times at Mouima (grandma’s) house, but you can’t quite remember what it’s called. “I don’t know!” you shrug, with a trademark French mouth pop. Baba, who’s always patient with you, gives you the first sound: Za…

Oh wait, you remember now! ZALEFA!

I watched this very cute scene unfold over breakfast yesterday, trying to imagine what was going through my daughter’s head, watching the wheels turning as she tried to retrieve a word that was on the tip of her tongue. At 2.5, she’s even started using the very French “euhhh” when looking for a word as she switches between languages, or asking “____ means?” which means she’s asking me for a translation equivalent. When she’s especially tired, she’ll fill in a missing word in English or Arabic with the French word truc (thing/thingy).

So if she didn’t know it, how did one syllable bring the whole word back? And if she did know it, why couldn’t she say so ten seconds earlier?

It turns out this exact puzzle has a name and sixty years of research behind it!

In 1966, two Harvard researchers, Roger Brown and David McNeill, ran the first real study of what they called the tip-of-the-tongue state. They read people the definitions of rare words and watched them land in that maddening place where you cannot produce the word but you are certain you know it. People stuck in that state could very often give the first letter of the missing word, the number of syllables, even where the stress fell.

Their bigger point was that finding a word happens in stages. The meaning comes first, fast and sure. The sound comes last, and the sound is where it jams. Which is why you can stand there knowing exactly what you mean, knowing the word starts with a B, and still not get it out.

None of this is just a bilingual thing, or a toddler thing! The tip-of-the-tongue state is close to universal, and the average adult has one about once a week. You know the feeling. Someone asks you the capital of some country and your mind goes blank, but show you three options and your finger lands on the right one before you have even finished reading them. The knowledge was in there the whole time. Recall failed and recognition rescued it. Extracting the word is the hard part.

So back to that Za.

There is research on this specific move, on whether handing someone the front of a stuck word actually helps. It does. And interestingly, it is the first syllable that does the work, not just the first letter. Hearing Za strengthens the weak little sound-connections that caused the jam, and the word drops through.

Bilingual children, and bilingual adults, actually hit the tip-of-the-tongue state a little more often than monolinguals do. This sounds alarming for about four seconds, but just hang in there. The simplest explanation researchers give goes like this:

We each get only so many hours of talking in a day, and a bilingual splits those hours across two languages. So every individual word gets used a bit less often than the same word would in a monolingual mouth. Less-used words have weaker sound-connections. Weaker connections jam more easily. Researchers call it the frequency-lag, or weaker-links, hypothesis, and the key thing is what it does not mean. It does not mean the bilingual brain knows less. It means every word is getting slightly less practice, because there are simply more words in rotation. A little bit like that vintage iPhone charger you have to hold juuuust right to charge. Not to mention, both languages stay switched on in the background, so the words can get in each other’s way a little on the way out.

When your kid pauses, or says I don’t know, or calls the thing a thing, it is so easy to to feel like they don’t know something they “should.” But the tip-of-the-tongue research keeps telling us the opposite. The word bank is in there, but the retrieving takes a minute.

So cut them some slack at breakfast. Give them a second. And if they are still stuck, give them the Za (Great name for a ska band!)

**One important note, because I never like to wave away a real worry. The everyday, occasional version of this is universal and nothing to fix. The thing worth raising with a professional is the persistent kind. The child who is hunting for words constantly, and crucially, in all of their languages, not just the one you happened to ask in.

Share I love you, bezaf │Painless Bilingual Parenting

As a child, I had three big dreams: to dance en pointe (check), to write a book (one day), and to make toys.

…Check. Well, not quite Santa’s-workshop style. But over the past six months I’ve branched out into a new part of my business, working with bilingual apps, toy companies, and start-ups, and it has been eye-opening as a parent, a researcher, and a family language consultant. I get to do what I love, which is bury my nose in the research on bilingualism, and they get to take those insights and build them into their products and programs.

For all the founders I happily work with, there’s a small number I end up turning down. And it almost always comes down to one thing, and it’s not the budget nor the timeline. It’s that somewhere along the way, we won’t quite see eye-to-eye on what bilingualism is actually for.

Come on a little thought experiment with me (feel free to bring a snack!)

A little girl taps through a beautiful Arabic learning app. It teaches her to say al-ān for “now,” in Modern Standard Arabic. At home, her Algerian dad says darwaqt. She has just learned a word she will almost never hear anyone in her family say. There were no parent materials to bridge that gap, no images that looked anything like her daily life. The app worked exactly as it was designed to. It still missed the point.

Because bilingualism is never black and white. No two parents come to it with the same story, the same languages, the same confidence, or the same emotional and sometimes post-colonial baggage. And yet so many products are built on the same assumptions: that there’s one standard version of a language to aim at, that translating content is the same as teaching it, that the second language is a subject to be acquired. For a language like French, that template mostly holds. For Arabic, Tamazight, Wolof, or Tagalog, it starts to fall apart.

Arabic is the example I come back to most. “Arabic” isn’t one language, it’s a big family: fusha, the standard, and then the living regional varieties of North Africa, the Gulf, the Levant, and beyond. Heritage gets passed down almost entirely in the spoken variety. A product that teaches only fusha hands a child vocabulary for a register her grandmother never uses at the kitchen table. Fusha matters, absolutely, for literacy and for the wider Arabic-speaking world, but it’s important to address these gaps, even if it’s in parent materials.

And those regional varieties aren't just what matters, they're half the fun! Although Spanish was not one of my heritage languages growing up, my mother spoke great Spanish, and our home was filled with Spanish books. One of my absolute favorites included a chapter on childish Spanish insults in ten different regional varieties. I was obsessed! What do you mean I can now playfully tease someone from Costa Rica to Argentina? Children notice this kind of thing.

Then there’s the promise I trust least, the one that says bilingualism will make your child smarter (!!!) What does that mean? How do we measure that? Any honest linguist will tell you this is shaky ground. Bilingualism maaaaay be linked to some cognitive advantages, quicker executive function for instance, but that is not the same as five extra IQ points. And IQ was never a very good measure of intelligence anyway. There are so many kinds!

So I tend to back away, Homer-Simpson-in-the-hedges-style, from products that sell bilingualism as a checklist for getting ahead, and lean toward the ones that treat it as what it really is: a way of deepening family and cultural bonds.

There’s one more thing, and it’s code-switching. Children raised in two languages mix them, and the research is consistent that this is a sign of competence, not confusion. Products that promise to correct it, or wall the two languages rigidly apart, are usually not the right fit.

The best projects already feel this in their bones. They’re parent-facing. They understand that raising a bilingual child takes a whole ecosystem, and that parents arrive with wildly different language backgrounds and levels of confidence. They build for the family around the child, not just the child tapping the screen.

Here’s why this should matter to a founder or a parent, and not only to a linguist like me. Families won’t necessarily leave angry reviews (their child is probably too busy interrupting them), but they’ll eventually just stop opening the app, or reaching for the special book, because at some point it stopped feeling like it was made for them. And by the time that shows up in your numbers, the decision that caused it is months behind you.

This doesn’t mean you need to build a new product for each language, but do make sure that what you’re building matches how these children actually learn their languages and feel about them. And if you’re a parent, trust your gut when it comes to bilingual shopping!

The nurse asked me how I was feeling, and I knew the answer. I KNEW it in French, fully formed, the right register and everything: un peu dans le brouillard, mais ça va (a little foggy, but okay). The sentence was sitting right there at the front of my mind, complete. What I could not do was make my mouth produce it. The words and the machinery that says the words had come apart, and I lay there in recovery, watching the gap between them like it belonged to someone else.

I had gone under general anesthesia for what was supposed to be a small procedure. I have done this before, but never like this. This felt like swimming through a vat of salted caramel spread (though arguably less delicious). And as always, somewhere in the part of my brain that never fully clocks out, there was the stress of: will the French still be there when I come back up?

I have spoken French every single day for nearly fifteen years (I wrote my doctoral thesis in it!) but I still know, in some structural way, that it is my second language. It did not come in with my mother’s voice. So every time someone is about to switch off my consciousness, a small irrational part of me wonders whether French is stored somewhere more precarious than English, somewhere the anesthesia might reach first.

What happened was the opposite of what I feared, and far more interesting.

The French was fine. The thinking was fine. I was composing perfectly good sentences in there. What had failed was the delivery. I could not get the words out, not because I had lost them but because the part of me that turns a thought into a moving mouth had not woken up yet. It was the most vivid demonstration I have ever had, in my own body, of something I usually only get to describe to other people: that knowing a language and physically producing it are two different jobs, run by two different systems, and they do not always clock back in at the same time.

It turns out this is documented, and almost eerily specific to what I felt. When researchers built an assessment to track how people talk as they come out of general anesthesia, they found the same dissociation: comprehension, naming, and repetition came back relatively intact, while fluency dropped. People could understand and find words but struggled to push speech out smoothly. The researchers noted it resembles what is called transcortical motor aphasia, the clinical picture where the message is there but the motor route to speech is impaired. Which is a very technical way of describing exactly the indignity I was experiencing: full sentences, no exit.

So my fear had the architecture backwards. I was worried the anesthesia would dissolve my second language, as if French were a delicate file that might corrupt. But a language you use every day for fifteen years is not stored like that. The fog was not in my French. It was in my mouth (which apparently, kept asking the lovely nurses for a sandwich. So sorry, friends!)

Which brings me to the thing language learners always want to talk about, the I’m-fluent-after-two-glasses-of-wine phenomenon. Although I don’t drink myself, I’ve heard from many friends and colleagues I swear I speak better after a drink. Believe it or not, there is real research behind the feeling. In one study, native German speakers who had recently learned Dutch were rated by native listeners as having better pronunciation after a low dose of alcohol than after water. The effect was specifically on pronunciation, not grammar or vocabulary, and the leading explanation was not that alcohol did anything clever to the language centers. It was that it quieted the anxiety and the self-monitoring, the executive functions that, when speaking a non-native language, can tighten everything up.

So the substance didn’t teach anyone anything. It just got the inhibition out of the way long enough for what was already there to come through. And tellingly, the same review of this work notes that more alcohol does the opposite: past a small dose, fine motor control for speech degrades and you slur, in any language. The window where it helps is tiny, and it helps by subtraction, not addition.

Put the two things side by side and they are really the same story told from opposite ends. Coming out of anesthesia, my production system was switched off while my language sat there ready and waiting. After a single glass of wine, the production system is loosened and the language flows because the nervous little monitor has stepped away from the controls. In both cases the language was never the problem.

I think about this a lot in the context of our kids, and the parents I work with who are so sure their own second language is “not good enough” to pass on. So much of what we call not knowing a language is really not being able to get at it under pressure: the self-consciousness, the fear of the wrong gender on the wrong noun, the certainty that someone is listening and judging. The knowing is often more intact than we believe. It is the gate that has rusted shut.

You cannot put yourself under anesthesia to find out what your French really knows (and please don’t try!) But you can notice the gate. You can notice that the words tend to come more easily when you are tired, or laughing, or talking to your toddler who could not care less about your accent, and that they vanish the second a stranger turns to look.

The most useful thing I took out of that recovery room, once my mouth finally caught up with my brain and I croaked out my foggy little sentence to the nurse, was this: the words are almost always there, but we just spend a lot of our lives standing between ourselves and them without realizing it!

Where the stern voice comes from

Growing up in the United States, I didn’t really get in trouble. I was, for better or worse, a “good kid” and a good student. My most serious offense on record was an overdue library book, and being mildly chewed out for forgetting it was enough to make me cry. I was so scared of “discipline” that it was one of my biggest fears recorded in my first-grade diary, along with “booldogs” and “birglars.” Exhibit A:

I also wasn’t navigating the administrative side of adult life yet. That part started the moment I landed in France at 19.

From immigration onward, it always felt like something was not quite in order. I’d show up to renew my visa, my papers would be in the wrong sequence, and I would get, let’s call it, firmly addressed. The register people used here, including the way some parents spoke to their children, was sharper than anything I’d grown up around.

This is not a sweeping verdict on France, and definitely not a complaint. (France, I love you. I love living here. Please do not revoke my documents.) but it was genuinely different from how I grew up. Even at my very strict classical ballet school, where I got yelled at plenty, it was in Russian, and somehow my brain files that away in an entirely separate drawer.

A few weeks ago, on a long car drive with a very grumpy toddler, I noticed something that seemed to land on the opposite end of the spectrum. My husband’s encouraging phrases to our two-and-a-half-year-old (who is being raised across Algerian Arabic, French, English, and a little Polish) were coming out almost entirely in English. I appreciate how patient you’re being. It’s frustrating to stay in your car seat, I know. We’ll get out and stretch soon.

Later I asked him whether it was a question of habit or of vocabulary. He told me it was both, but mostly the second. A lot of the parenting phrases we’re trying to use, he simply doesn’t know how to say in Algerian Arabic. The things we say to our daughter are very different from what his parents said to him. Not that they didn’t show love, or express pride, or validate his feelings. They just tended to do it with a bowl of cut-up fruit as opposed to words.

The first time I really clocked my own version of it was the day my daughter smacked me in the face and the words that flew out of my mouth were in French. When I think about the why, the answer isn’t mysterious. I’ve spent almost fourteen years in France. But it isn’t only about the years. Moving here was the first time in my life I started regularly getting in trouble in French.

So here we are. My husband reaches for English when he wants to be warm and affirming, because that’s the register he hears most from me, and probably from the parenting accounts on his feed. I reach for French when I want to sound stern, because to my ear it lands harder. Which leaves us with a strange problem: I don’t always know how to be firm with my daughter in English, and he doesn’t always know how to be gentle with her in Algerian Arabic.

It turns out this is a real phenomenon

I assumed this was just my own wiring until I went looking. There’s a whole body of research on what bilinguals call the difference in emotional resonance between a first and a second language. Bilingual speakers routinely report that swearing, praying, lying, and saying I love you feel different in a “native” language than in a “foreign” one. Researchers have a tidy phrase for the flip side of this: the foreign language effect. Communicating in a language you learned later tends to put a bit of distance between you and the emotional charge of what you’re saying. In one set of studies, people using a foreign language got some emotional distance, and that allowed them to take the more utilitarian, less gut-driven action.

That’s the part that explained me to myself. French isn’t where I store my strongest feelings, so it’s easier for me to be sharp in it. The native language, the one absorbed at home in childhood, is the one wired straight into the feeling-brain. As one review put it, a language learned in childhood carries strong emotional resonances, because the family context means everyday language carries the full range of human emotion. So when my daughter hit me and the autopilot kicked in, it didn’t reach for the language closest to my heart. It reached for the one that already had a “getting in trouble” setting installed.

My husband’s situation is the mirror image. The tender, narrate-the-feelings register of modern positive parenting wasn’t part of the Algerian Arabic he grew up with, so when he wants it, he has to import it. And research on swearing in a second language found something telling here: when people aren’t explicitly taught a kind of language, they’re forced to navigate the conventions on their own, and they often either make mistakes or avoid that type of language altogether. Avoidance. That’s exactly what’s happening. It’s not that the warmth isn’t there; it’s that the script was never handed over.

So what do you actually do

There’s no shortage of psychology accounts and lifestyle accounts, but very little focused specifically on positive parenting in Algerian Arabic. Interestingly, this space seems further along in other Arabic-speaking contexts: Lebanon and the Emirates in particular, where gentle-parenting content in Arabic has really taken off. So one genuine option for us is borrowing from those varieties and adapting.

A good friend of mine, Sunny, who runs Spot of Sunshine Chinese, has a lovely video series where she shares the phrases she wishes every child could hear, in Mandarin Chinese. The response every single time is enormous, which tells you how many people are carrying around the same gap, waiting for someone to put words in it.

In general it’s been a bit of a relearning for both of us. I’m trying to retire the phrases that were handed to me: the I’ll give you something to cry about school of motivation, and find gentler words in my own first language. My husband is trying to move past dok tshouf (you’ll see) the classic Algerian threat-adjacent line, and find softer ones in his. Plenty of parents say it feels almost awkward to express certain feelings in their heritage language, like trying on your jeans after they’ve been in the dryer, but we’ll keep trying until we finally have the right words we hope they’ll use with their own families one day!

Last Friday, under the hum of two fans and a smoldering heat wave across France, I sat with a lovely mom in a family language consultation, trying to make sense of her trilingual two-year old’s language development. We broke down days spent across routines and play with Mom and Dad, some time at the crèche, and a lot of questions about just how much a bilingual child should know at 2 years old.

We talked a lot about milestones: what’s considered a range, when to use them without becoming obsessed, and when it’s a good time to get support from an SLP.

Conversations like this always transport me to my daughter’s first few months, where I religiously tracked her sleep, milk, diapers, into a little app, that I eventually deleted for my own sanity. That’s not to say it’s not helpful to have some data! But did I really need a down-to-the-second timer that she was only napping 27 minutes and nursing for 4? Probably not. In reality, I eventually got so bogged down in minutiae, I missed some of the actual struggles she was having. After accepting that she needed some extra help, a few months of work with a physiotherapist, she blossomed!

Milestones and goal posts can be so helpful, especially for language. They can help you see what might be coming next for your bilingual child, and especially, if you might be expecting a little too much for now. Most importantly, they can help us look at the big picture and see when we might need to ask for a little help, and when we just need to back away from Google (or Claude).

So as my summer gift to you, here’s a breakdown of some common specifically bilingual language milestones.

Your swaddled little bean is already hard at work at 0 months

• Newborns can already tell languages apart based on rhythmic/prosodic cues, a sensitivity shaped in utero! One study demonstrated that two-day-old newborn had a preference for their own language.

• Newborns can already distinguish between languages.

• You can observe your baby at home and how they respond to different languages. What you speak at home vs. a new language they’ve never heard before. Which seems to interest them more?

2 months: turn-taking like a tennis pro

• Turn-taking begins. Infants engage in conversation-like exchanges (”protoconversations”) from the end of the second month, involving both turn-taking and overlapping vocalization similar to adult conversation. They even demonstrate sensitivity to the “rhythm” of a conversation!

4–6 months: let’s tidy up in here!

• Bilingual infants understand there are different languages from birth. However, they really start to discriminate their own two (or three!) native languages at around 4–4.5 months

• At 4 and 6 months, infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from silently viewing a speaker’s articulations AKA speaking with no sound!

6–8 months: it’s my turn to talk

• At 6–10 months, infants can still discriminate sounds that don’t exist in their native language, and this ability declines sharply toward 12 months. (But that doesn’t mean it’s too late for bilingualism after that!)

• Babbling emerges here early in the first year (around 6–7 months), on the same schedule for bilingual infants!

8–12 months: let’s lock in on my language sounds

• Between 6 and 12 months, infants’ initial ability to discriminate all phonetic contrasts narrows, and they start focusing on their own language sounds exclusively.

12(ish) months: Look ma, my first words!

• Children approximate words and say their first word around 12 months, and these milestones are met at the same time for children learning one or two languages.

• In one study, caregiver responsiveness to babbling at 5 months predicted vocal turn-taking at 10 months, and increases in turn-taking from 5 to 10 months predicted language outcomes at 18 months. Keep talking back to them!

  12–24 months: The Big Bang

• Both lexicons grow; “concept vocabulary” matters. When only one language is measured, bilingual children tend to show smaller productive vocabularies than monolinguals, which is why researchers combine across languages using total/word vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary measures.

• Translation equivalents appear very early. Even when infants can say 12 words or fewer, bilingual infants produce translation equivalents (words with the same meaning in both languages)

18–24 months: Let’s put it all together

• By the end of the second year, around 24 months, children begin producing their first word combinations, again at the same time for one- or two-language learners.

2–3 years: Let’s switch it up!

• From a very young age bilingual children differentiate their two languages and use them according to sociolinguistic and pragmatic principles. Translation: they know what language to use and with whom.

• They adjust to their interlocutor. Two-year-olds tune their rate of code-switching to that of the person they’re talking to, showing sensitivity to others’ language choices

• Mixing dips as the lexicon grows. Between ages 2 and 3, as children acquire more lexical and grammatical knowledge, the frequency of mixing decreases, since they no longer need to borrow between languages. This is a sloooow process, so be patient!

4–6 years Let’s talk ABOUT language

• Around age 5–6, kids start thinking about language itself. Up to now, language has just been a tool for getting things; milk, hugs, the Bluey sunglasses. Around 5 or 6, children can step back and notice how language actually works: that words are made of sounds, that sentences follow rules, that you can play with all of it. (Linguists call this "metalinguistic awareness”)

• Being bilingual can give this a boost. Juggling two languages seems to sharpen kids’ ear for sound, noticing that “cat” and “car” start the same way, or that “pato” and “gato” rhyme. This skill, called phonological awareness, is one of the building blocks of learning to read.

• Skills learned in one language can carry over to the other, and the more the two languages have in common, the more they share. If your child’s two languages have similar sounds and spelling systems, a skill picked up in one (like sounding out words) often transfers to the other.

• Code-switching gets sophisticated. By 5 or 6, kids aren’t mixing languages by accident; they’re switching on purpose, in the right moments, and following the grammar of both. It already looks a lot like the way bilingual adults switch.

• They figure out who speaks what. Your child starts keeping clear track of the languages around them: Mom speaks Spanish, Dad speaks Arabic, that person over there is speaking English.

So when should you reach out to an SLP? If your child doesn’t seem to understand basic language in either of their languages, isn’t producing any language in either one (and remember, code-switching is not a red flag), or if you’d simply like some peace of mind — reach out. When it comes to language, being proactive almost always beats “wait and see.”

Further reading:

Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life.. Infant Behavior and Development, 7(1), 49–63.

Kuhl, P. K., Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N., & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age.. Science, 255(5044), 606–608. DOI: 10.1126/science.1736364

Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F. M., & Liu, H. M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(15), 9096–9101. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1532872100

Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development.. Journal of Child Language, 22(3), 611–631. DOI: 10.1017/S0305000900009971

Paradis, J., Genesee, F., & Crago, M. (2011). Dual Language Development and Disorders: A Handbook for Professionals in Education and Health (2nd ed.).. Paul H. Brookes.

Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., Lewedeg, V., & Oller, D. K. (1997). The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants.. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18(1), 41–58. DOI: 10.1017/S0142716400009863

Lately, my 2.5 year-old-toddler has been obsessed with the “six-seven” trend. Now I dare not break her heart and let her know she’s about a year late to the game, but ironically, she learned this delightful bit of child meme-ery from her French cousins, and the amount of whimsy she gets from just blurting it out from her stroller honestly tickles me. Yes, it’s a bit annoying to hear it allllll day, but what I love is that

1) It’s in English

2) The pleasure she gets from saying it and getting a reaction are helping her fall in love with the language.

But can making your child fall in love with their target language actually help their brain switch between two languages more sharply? A study published this month (hot off the press!) suggests the answer might be yes, and the results were more surprising than even the researchers expected.

The surprising effects of a good attitude?

The way that researchers study code-switching and language management is pretty fun! Most will use something called a language switching paradigm. You show a bilingual person a picture and make them name it, sometimes in their first language, sometimes in their second, and then you measure how fast their brain makes that switch. In this study, it was done using a voice-activated microphone that captured the exact millisecond the participants began to speak.

What they consistently find is a “switch cost,” which is a tiny but measurable delay every time the brain has to change linguistic gears. (And this isn’t a good or a bad thing!) What’s interesting is that these costs are asymmetrical: switching back to your dominant language after using your weaker one is actually harder, because your brain has been actively suppressing the dominant language to let the weaker one through.

Switch costs are usually explained by proficiency. The better you know your second language, the smoother your switching. Makes sense. But this new study, out of the University of Groningen, asked a different question: what about attitude? What about how you actually feel about the language?

The researchers took 34 Dutch-English bilinguals, who were all Dutch-dominant with strong English as a second language and had them complete a picture naming task, switching between languages on a visual cue while reaction times were recorded. They also filled out a validated attitude questionnaire measuring their beliefs, emotions, and relationship with English, their second language.

As expected, higher proficiency predicted smoother switching, but here’s where I think things get pretty unexpected:

Participants who reported more positive attitudes toward their second language also showed measurably reduced switch costs, independently of proficiency. The researchers compared it to driving in a metaphor I absolutely love: you can be technically competent after years behind the wheel, but someone who genuinely loves driving will seek out harder conditions and develop sharper skills. The same may apply to bilingual children and their relationship with a language.

And here’s the finding that really stopped me: on one specific switch measure, when switching back into the dominant language after encountering a cognate word, positive attitudes produced a larger effect than proficiency itself. 330 milliseconds of attenuation, versus proficiency’s smaller contribution on the same measure.

Now the authors are careful to note this particular finding needs replication with larger samples before drawing firm conclusions. But the direction of the effect is striking.

The second study: when emotional words don’t feel emotional

Tang and colleagues (2026) looked at something adjacent: how bilinguals process emotionally charged words in their second language. They drew a distinction between emotion-label words — words that directly name emotions (happy, angry) — and emotion-laden words — words that evoke emotions through association (wealthy, abandoned). Using EEG, they tracked the brain’s neural response to these words in Chinese-English bilinguals’ L2 English.

The finding: the emotional weight of these words only registered neurologically when participants were actively paying attention to the emotional content. When the emotional dimension was irrelevant to the task, the brain largely didn’t respond to it.

In a first language, emotional processing tends to be more automatic. In a second language, it appears to require active engagement. At the risk of sounding like a broken record from my previous posts, your bilingual child will likely feel something when speaking the target language, but it will often land differently than it did for you.

To that end, your child is even making connections around the language, emotions, and your relationship. Another 2025 study using personal narrative retrospective reflections from a Catalan immigrant mother to New Zealand, and her two New-Zealand-born daughters, found that emotional connection was a far greater tie to the language than formal language instruction. One of the daughters even said in her interview:

Once again, it’s all about attitude!

What studies suggest together

Taken together, they suggest something worth considering: the emotional life of a second language isn’t passive.

If positive attitudes predict smoother switching in adults, those attitudes had to start somewhere. If emotional resonance in an L2 requires active engagement even in proficient adults, what does that mean for how we build a child’s relationship with their family language?

The contexts where the heritage language carries emotional weight—being comforted in Darija, laughing in Polish, being told stories in Arabic—aren't just nice to have They may be what makes the language feel real in the brain, rather than merely learned.

Proficiency is built through exposure: input, immersion, practice. You can influence a lot of that. But attitude? That’s built through joy, through pride, through your child feeling that this language belongs to them. So if you’ve been stressing about screen time in the target language or vocabulary flashcards, maybe the question worth asking first is: Do they associate it with warmth, with family, with something that’s theirs?

Because according to these studies, that might matter more than you think!

I have always passionately, ardently, loved school. I loved learning, I loved the rigid schedule that inattentive brain from flitting about in a reverie (this is perhaps why I took five years to finish my thesis!). One thing, I did not like, however, was math. The greatest nemesis to my 4.0 grade point average went by the names of calculus and discrete mathematics 201. The main reason comes down to the fact that I hate that there’s only one correct answer. I like a little wiggle room. Room for debate.

And this, I believe, is one of the reasons I love the study of what we linguists call, “heritage languages.”

You’ll find many different definitions for heritage speakers and heritage languages in the linguistic literature. They are often described in terms of gaps: they don’t have the grammatical precision of a native speaker, nor the formal training of an L2 learner. They exist in a middle ground that neither category quiiiite fits. And a new study adds something important to that picture: they are also working with a different cognitive load.

What the study did

Fuchs, Muegge, and Shea (2026) compared three groups of Spanish-English bilinguals using a dual-task design, a method for measuring cognitive effort without relying on self-report.

While listening to Spanish phrases, participants simultaneously tracked moving dots on a screen. The logic is simple: if processing Spanish is consuming mental resources, fewer resources remain for the tracking task, and accuracy drops.

The three groups were:

• Spanish-raised bilinguals (first-generation immigrants with rich Spanish input through adolescence)

• Heritage speakers (raised in diaspora families, schooled in English, Spanish mainly at home)

• and, English-raised classroom learners of Spanish

What they found

A clear three-way difference. Spanish-raised speakers were most accurate on the tracking task, suggesting that Spanish consumed the least cognitive effort for them. Classroom learners were least accurate: Spanish was most effortful, which makes sense, as it was learned in more restricted contexts. Heritage speakers landed in the middle.

This is the first study to formally test an assumption that has circulated in the heritage language literature for years: that heritage speakers require more cognitive resources to process their heritage language than someone raised with sustained, rich input in that language. That assumption turns out to likely be correct (and measurable!)

The pattern held even as syntactic complexity increased: more complex Spanish sentences depleted resources for all three groups, but the three-way difference in baseline effort remained stable throughout.

What this means for parents

When your heritage speaker child switches to English mid-sentence, or resists longer conversations in the family language, or seems to lose words they ‘should’ know, it may not be indifference. Processing in the heritage language is genuinely more effortful, even when the language sounds fluent from the outside.

This doesn’t mean reducing input or lowering expectations, but it may help you reframe what we ask of our little heritage speakers. Instead of ‘why won’t they just use it,’ the more useful question might be: ‘what would make it feel less effortful?’

The answers tends to involve rich, emotionally grounded, low-pressure exposure over time, rather than correction and performance pressure.

A note on limitations

The study looked at adult heritage speakers of Spanish, mostly university students in the US. Heritage speaker experiences vary enormously across languages, countries, and family contexts — the cognitive profile of a Darija-French heritage speaker in France, or a Polish-English heritage speaker in the UK, may differ in ways this specific study can’t capture. That said, the finding that heritage speakers occupy a genuinely distinct cognitive position, not native, not L2, something in between, is consistent with a wide body of research, and the dual-task methodology used here is one of the more direct ways to test it.

The takeaway

Your child is probably working very hard to use their target language. In fact, they may be working harder than anyone fully realizes. That deserves both patience and recognition.

The fact that heritage speakers land in the middle rather than at the bottom of the cognitive effort scale is also worth noting: their unique developmental trajectory, with naturalistic early input even if reduced, leaves a mark. They are not starting from zero. They are somewhere in between.

P.S. If there are any ballet lovers out there, I really wanted to call this article, “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” after my favorite William Forsythe piece. It’s a delight!

Every May, I forget it’s Mother’s Day until I start getting ads in my inbox. DNA testing companies, matcha gift boxes, and, memorably, a legal document signing service I keep forgetting to subscribe to. Everyone has their own way of thanking Mom.

I’m not sure why I always forget. Possibly because French Mother’s Day and North American Mother’s Day fall on different dates, so I manage to miss the women in my life on both. Or perhaps because in France, where I live, it hasn’t quite reached the level of occasion it has in the United States. In 2015, then Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem pointed out that there was “no ministerial instruction concerning the work done by children on Mother’s and Father’s Day.” If it’s not in the school curriculum, there’s unlikely to be a brunch.

But deep down, I think the real reason I tend to forget, even as a mother myself, is that I lost my own mother eight years ago. Sometimes it feels easier to forget than to take another day to miss her so terribly. Grief is weird like that.

This time of year, I also tend to think about what the research says about mothers — specifically, what it says about the outsized role we play in language transmission.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a study that stopped me mid-read. Researchers found that mothers’ language use was at least twice as influential as fathers’. And I can’t mention mothers without mentioning , who writes about the weight of mother’s invisible labor beautifully.

I see this in our home all the time. Despite my husband being the Arabic speaker, I’m the one who hunts down Arabic books, instituted Arabic at lunchtime, and looks up words when he can only retrieve them in French. I’m happy to do it! As a linguist, it genuinely brings me joy. But it is, undeniably, extra work.

What I’ve been sitting with lately, though, is this: I didn’t invent this role. I learned it by watching my mother.

My mother and I started learning Polish together when I was around nine.

She had grown up in a Polish-American household, but her parents, my grandparents, had made the deliberate decision to speak only English to their children. In one of the two phone conversations I ever had with my grandfather, I asked him about this. “I tried,” he said, “but they weren’t interested.” I always found that a strange sentiment for a parent to hold about a child. As if language acquisition were a door a child could simply choose to walk through.

My grandmother had died before I was born. Her family were Lipka Tatars who had settled in Vilnius (then Wilno), arriving there via Central Asia and Tatarstan, and even, somewhere along the way, an Ashkenazi convert who had married for love. My grandfather’s family had left their village in what is now Poland facing land scarcity, heavy taxation, Russian-imposed restrictions on Polish language and culture, and military conscription into the Tsar’s army. They carried a deep Polish identity with them across the Atlantic, and then, in one generation, stopped passing the language on.

The research has a term for this. Linguists say that a family language disappears in roughly three generations: the grandparents speak it, the parents understand it, the children don’t. My mother’s family was a textbook case. I was the grandchild generation. According to the research, Polish should have been over.

But I was fascinated by the fact that my mother could understand another language. I became obsessed. I dragged her to our local Barnes & Noble, where I bought business cassette tapes and listened to them for hours. By nine years old, I could ask “Gdzie jest lotnisko? Czy przyszedł pan tu w interesach?” (Where is the airport? Are you here on business, sir?) with complete confidence and absolutely no context for why I would need that sentence.

I spoke Polish to anyone with a “-ski” at the end of their name. I tried to negotiate a better price on my parents’ used car with the Polish salesman. He was amused. I can’t say I saved them much. I demanded my mother speak only Polish to me in public. I was devastated when the kielbasa vendor didn’t actually speak Polish.

One summer, at an intensive ballet program, one of the teachers was Polish and gave me all my corrections in Polish. I was over the moon.

My mother and I were making real progress together — until I was about nineteen. My heart was broken by a different Polish ballet professor who, upon seeing my audition tape, told me I was “a fool” to think I could ever dance professionally in Poland, and that I should “consider a career in contemporary dance due to the shape of my thighs.”

I came home and told my mother: no more Polish.

She didn’t put up a fight. And so I let it go. I had French, then Haitian Creole, then Arabic to fill the space. There were plenty of other languages to fill the void, I told myself.

That’s what I told myself right up until her death in 2017.

Suddenly, I realized there was no more mother tongue.

I booked a flight to Poland the next day.

Grief is strange, and so is the way it moves through language. In the years following her death, I had an on-again, off-again relationship with Polish. But learning about my Tatar ancestors changed something in me. Their language journey had been profound: shifting languages, shifting religions, settling in new countries, marrying across cultural lines, adapting and holding on across centuries. I visited the villages, the mosques, the churches through which they had passed.

The matriarchs kept appearing in my research. My great-grandmother, left widowed with six children. My 4x great-grandmother who watched her son be conscripted into a war 2,000 kilometers away, and whose family’s subsequent marriage to a non-Tatar woman would change the course of everything. Ordinary women making ordinary, enormous decisions about what to carry forward and what to let go.

When I had my daughter, I decided I wanted her to know a little Polish. Just enough to keep it alive.

Linguists say a language disappears in three generations. And yet, here I am.

I don’t know whether my ancestors said kocham cię to their children. I don’t know what it looked like when they held their babies, or what songs they sang, or whether, in the difficult years of migration and war and adaptation, there was even time to think about what the next generation would speak.

But here I am anyway, in Paris, with my fourth-generation daughter, who is growing up in French, Algerian Arabic, English, and a little Polish she mostly hears from me, her mother (the one who is twice as likely, statistically speaking, to be the reason she carries a language).

The research tells us that mothers are the ones who hold the line. I believe it. I watched my mother do it. I’ve been doing it ever since I lost her.

Kocham cię, Mamo.

Upon landing in Algeria, my daughter, used to a five-star safety, rear-facing, meticulously researched car seat was greeted with not only, no car seat, but not seat belt, and a troupe of cows blocking the road. Despite trying to hold her on my lap, she stood up, looked out the window and said “Ooh, a zoo!”

No, that’s not a punchline, but it is how her journey to really test our her Algerian Arabic (Darija) began.

There is a specific kind of anxiety that bilingual parenting produces, and if you’ve been here a while, you know exactly what I mean. The feeling of Is it working? Any of it?

We’re a trilingual family living in France with three languages (and a half) languages: English, Algerian Arabic, French, and a little Polish. After two weeks in Algeria, here’s what happened to my daughter.

She understood!!!!!

From the moment my daughter arrived at her great-grandparents’ house in Maghnia, surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins all speaking Darija at full volume and full speed, she tracked it. When her great-grandmother spoke to her, she listened. When her cousin called her name from the other room, she went.

Her comprehension, it turned out, was running miles ahead of what she’d been showing us at home.

This is consistent with the research: receptive language almost always outpaces production, especially in the minority language, especially at this age. But knowing something intellectually and then watching it happen in your own child, in real time, in your family’s living room, are two entirely different experiences. One of them makes you cry a little. I’m not saying which.

Actually, if anything slowed her down, it was the ever-so-talented Algerian people who were excited to speak English with her!

When people heard her speaking English, they wanted to participate! In the taxi, in the pharmacy, and at the park. This happened everywhere, with young people especially. It’s lovely, but also the exact opposite of what we were hoping for.

The remedy for this seemed to be the small children her own age that she found to play with wherever we went. There’s no better motivator than a game of tag!

A stranger corrected her in Darija

In a small shop in Maghnia, my daughter knocked over a display of shampoo bottles. The woman behind the counter spoke to her directly, firmly, and kindly in Darija.

My daughter was genuinely startled. She is accustomed to a fairly specific register of adult address. This was different, and this stranger meant business!

This is what immersion does that parenting alone cannot. It puts the language into the mouths of people who aren’t managing it, aren’t being careful, aren’t thinking about language acquisition goals

And then there was the moment that made the whole trip.

One afternoon, some family members went to the beach. Later, out with her grandmother, my daughter asked where her favorite cousin had gone.

Doing what grandmothers do, she tried to soften the disappointment. She just went to buy some bread, she said.

My daughter looked at her. A beat.

Then, in Darija: No, she went to the sea!

She laughed until she had to sit down.

One more thing, because I cannot move on without mentioning it: we found bilingual children’s books in a bookstore in Algiers! Published in Algeria. Beautiful ones. I had been mentally preparing to bring everything with us from Paris, to be the sole supplier of Darija reading material for the foreseeable future.

So back to the original question of is it working? I don’t fully know yet. She’s two and a half and the data is still incoming, but seeing an entire country of people that spoke (almost) just like her certainly seemed to have an impact.

In her book Overwhelmed, Claudia Hammond cites a study where 23% of men surveyed felt they could take down a King Cobra snake if it were attacking them. In a similar survey, 50% of respondents felt they had a 1/5 chance of being able to successfully land a plane in an emergency situation. Her point here, is that as humans, we tend to overestimate our abilities just a teeny bit!

I like to think our optimism is necessary — it helps us get things done. But it also means we're not always the best at assessing ourselves honestly. And at least one new study seems to suggest the same might be true for bilingual families and their family language plans.

Sander-Montant and colleagues, did something deceptively simple: they compared how well formal family language strategies — things like OPOL — predicted a bilingual child’s actual language exposure, versus how well each individual parent’s day-to-day language use predicted it. Same families, same children, two different lenses. Which one told us more?

The answer was not close.

The gap was bigger than the researchers expected

Individual parental language use accounted for roughly 50% of the variance in what language children were actually exposed to. The family language strategy label (OPOL, both-parents-bilingual, one-parent-bilingual) accounted for about 3 to 6%. The researchers themselves described being surprised by the difference.

Why does the “strategy” perform so poorly? One core reason is that it flattens two very different parents into one category. Two families can both call themselves OPOL families and look completely different in practice, because in one family each parent might spend roughly equal time with the child, and in another, one parent might spend four times as many hours. The strategy label doesn’t capture that. What each parent is actually doing, individually, does.

A note on how we got here

One paragraph in the paper stopped me because it’s directly related to the context of writing this blog:

“The literature on FLS has reached lay audiences through both mainstream media and widespread recommendations made to bilingual families… In particular, the one-parent-one-language strategy has gained popularity as a FLS to ensure children gain enough exposure to each language… Families often use expert recommendations to make conscious and planned decisions about which FLS to use, often driven by a desire to ensure that their children become proficient in their languages.”

The research on bilingual parenting has started catching up to the fact that parents are now reading and interpreting the research themselves. There’s something slightly vertiginous about that loop. But there’s also a caveat the authors raise that I think deserves more airtime: the ability to consciously choose a strategy, to research it and implement it deliberately, is not equally available to all families. It depends on time, education, socioeconomic resources, and the particular languages involved. For many families, the strategy isn’t chosen, it’s just what their life looks like.

Mothers and fathers aren’t doing the same thing

The second major finding is that mothers’ and fathers’ contributions to language exposure are independent and not equal. In this study, mothers’ language use was at least twice as influential on what children were exposed to as fathers’ language use. For French specifically, it was closer to three times.

Before anyone takes this personally: the researchers are clear that this almost certainly reflects time, not intention or ability. Mothers and fathers in the sample had similar rates of bilingualism and similar language proficiency. The difference was likely structural. In Canada, around 70% of mothers with infants under one were on parental leave in 2022, compared to around 7% of fathers. More hours with the child means more language flowing from that parent. This is a policy and infrastructure story as much as a parenting one.

Tthe gender gap shows up inside every strategy type, not just across them. In OPOL families where one parent occasionally crossed into the other language, it was the mother 75% of the time. In one-parent-bilingual families, the mother was the bilingual caregiver 81% of the time. Across all strategy types, mothers were consistently more likely to be the flexible, bridge-crossing parent.

In heritage language families specifically — which felt personally relevant to me — 85% of mothers spoke the heritage language with their child regularly or sometimes, compared to 62% of fathers. Mothers are disproportionately carrying the minority language. Even when both parents can speak it.

Language behavior shifts over time (and not randomly)

Among the families followed longitudinally (about six months apart), roughly 28% changed their overall strategy. But the direction of change is telling: most of those families moved toward more bilingual use, not less. They opened up, rather than restricting.

For individual parents, the patterns diverged. When mothers changed their language behavior, the most common shift was adding a language they’d previously avoided entirely, moving from “never” to “sometimes.” The data suggests that hesitant parents who do start using a language, even occasionally, are doing something that shows up measurably in their child’s exposure.

What this actually means

The researchers suggest that rather than asking “what strategy are we using?”, families might get more traction from asking: when, why, and for how long is each of us actually talking with our child, and in which language? That reframe moves the conversation from the label to the texture. From the container to what fills it.

The bilingual parenting conversation can tip into anxious checklist energy. Are we doing OPOL correctly? Should we switch to Time and Place? Is our minority language getting enough hours? These are real questions. But the research, at its best, is pointing back to something simpler: language transmission is a daily practice, not a strategy name!

Daylight savings did a number on us. As any parent knows, just when you think you’ve cracked the sleep thing, something comes to knock it off its feet. Right now, that something is the sun, which is cheerfully streaming through my daughter’s curtains at 7:30pm with absolutely no regard for her bedtime routine or my sanity.

So night after night, I lie on her floor. For what feels like hours, but is probably 40 minutes. In the dark (well, the semi-dark, because of the aforementioned SUN) waiting for her to stop talking long enough to fall asleep.

She has used this time wisely.

One night, she looked at me with great intent and said:

“Mama, speak arabiya?”

I said, in Arabic: “chwiya. A little.

Wentiya binti (and you, my daughter?)”

“Wa! (Yes!)”

(A win!)

Another night she was right on the edge of sleep, eyes fluttering, body finally still, and then she sat bolt upright, looked at me, and said with great triumph: “Ilan speaks English!”

Ilan is a boy from gymnastics. This was clearly a fact she had been holding onto all day, waiting for the correct moment to report it.

I confirmed that yes, Ilan does speak English. She nodded, satisfied, put her head back on the pillow, and was asleep in approximately thirty seconds.

Another time, we were looking at the illustrations in Le Petit Prince — the one where he’s frustrated with his rose. I was explaining: he’s feeling frustrated, because his rose is very demanding. Demanding means she needs a lot of things. Sunlight. Water. Protection.

She went quiet for a moment. Then looked at me.

“Layna ‘manding?”

Asking, in her most serious 2-and-half-year-old-voice, whether she herself is demanding. The answer, for the record, is yes, deeply, but I said something diplomatic about how she just knows what she needs, which is a gift, and she seemed to accept this.

The other night, out of nowhere: “I speak from Poland.”

I said, yes, you know a little Polish, and then I said the words she knows, kocham cię, dobranoc, dziękuję.

She repeated them back, and that’s the first time she’s ever done that unprompted! At 9:00 pm, when I was on the brink of losing my sanity, but still, very exciting!

I’ll be honest: the first week of this new bedtime routine, I was gritting my teeth through every minute of it. Lying on the floor in the half-light, too tired to move, waiting for a toddler to wind down, is not how I imagined spending my evenings.

But these small pockets of conversation have made it rather enjoyable. She’s just thinking out loud and inviting me in.

I’ll take it!

What unexpected language moments have happened in your bedtime routine? I’d love to hear them!