How We’re Raising our 1-year-old Son to be Trilingual
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This article was last updated on Nov 13th, 2024
Table of Contents
Challenges international families face
Why do we speak 3 languages?
“Why do you still speak English with each other?”
5 things that has helped us as a trilingual family
“Is it too late if our kids are already older?”
The beauty of being a multilingual family
International families are becoming more and more common these days.
There are some incredible blessings but also challenges that come with being one.
Especially when you speak different languages.
For me and my wife, it has been really important that our son has a connection to the cultures we grew up in:
Sweden and Finland.
Since we’re raising our 1-year-old son as trilingual I wanted to share with you what that looks like.
Especially for those of you who are in a similar situation (or if you just find the topic interesting).
I’ll also share some things that have helped us along the way and made our home life seamless when it comes to incorporating 3 different languages.
No matter where you are on your journey (whether you’re dating, engaged, married, expecting your first child, or already have kids):
It’s not too late to get started speaking different languages together as a family.
Challenges international families face
If your spouse doesn’t speak your native language, you’re faced with two options:
“Speak my native language to my children and my spouse feeling left out”.
Or:
“Not speak my language to my children and have to deal with them being disappointed in the future“.
These two things are both real sources of pain for many people I know.
There’s however a way to eliminate the pain of both of those:
Learn your spouse’s native language.
This can feel like a huge challenge, especially for those of you who have never learned a foreign language.
It doesn’t happen overnight.
But being able to speak your spouse’s language is so worth it in the long run.
It will make things so much easier because you’ll both understand each other when you speak your native language to your children.
And when you spend time with each others’ families.
Even if they already speak a common language with you (such as English) you’re going to win their respect and appreciation in a huge way by learning their language.
It’s one of the greatest ways to honor your spouse’s family.
Why do we speak 3 languages?
Me and my wife both grew up in monolingual homes.
I spoke Swedish, and she spoke Finnish growing up.
(even though we both spoke English to some level by the time we were teenagers)
What we decided (before we even had our son) was that my wife would speak only Finnish and I would speak only Swedish to our children.
Making that decision early on made it a natural thing for us.
It has kept things from being confusing.
Both for our son and for us.
For our son, it’s normal to hear mommy speak Finnish and daddy speak Swedish.
That’s all he has ever known.
As for English, it’s not something we focus on intentionally.
It’s more of a “bonus language”.
Me and my wife use a lot of English with each other so our son is naturally picking up words and expressions from that (he says things like “I don’t know” and “see ya!”)
We also lived in the US for a few months not long ago so he got used to hearing the language there as well.
We have a lot of American and international friends, so for him to be able to understand English at an early stage is a plus.
“He speaks Spanish too!?”
The funny thing is that even though we didn’t plan it, he’s even picking up some Spanish!
I don’t know how much Spanish he’s going to speak in the future.
It depends on how much exposure he will get.
I have just been listening to Spanish videos here and there when he’s with me.
A few days ago as I was listening to the video he was repeating words like:
“No”, “mundo”, “muy”, “hace”.
(He can also count to 3 in Spanish when he just repeats after me)
He has no idea what these words mean.
He just heard them and repeated them.
Which is so fun.
There’s no problem for a child to learn 3, 4, or even 5 languages at the same time.
They will have years of exposure so they will be able to develop a good level in all of them if you’re just intentional enough about it.
“Why do you still speak English with each other?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just skip English and just speak Swedish and Finnish with each other?”
It might seem like it would, but there’s a reason why we don’t do that right now.
I often hear things like:
“Well your wife is Finnish, so you get to practice Finnish all the time”
Well, that’s not exactly true.
I do get more input by being married to a Finnish woman (especially when we’re with her family).
That’s for sure.
However, the majority of my Finnish learning comes from my own time spent with the language.
Intentionally.
The same goes for my wife’s Swedish.
Because we still speak English the majority of the time with each other.
Why?
After all, we both speak each other’s languages so it would make sense to just speak Swedish and Finnish, right?
Here’s the thing:
In everyday life, convenience takes precedence (at least for us).
Most of the time, we just want to get our message across.
(it can get a bit tedious if the other person doesn’t understand and you have to repeat yourself)
Right now, most things are just easier for us to talk about in English.
We’re just used to it since it’s the language we first started speaking with each other (neither of us spoke each other's native language at the time we met).
It also takes time to get used to speaking a different language to your spouse.
Especially when you have been speaking a different one for the whole relationship.
Because we all have a bit of a different personality in each language.
Sometimes quite a bit.
A language is not just words.
It’s a culture.
A personality.
When you’re used to expressing feelings and other things in a certain language, it’s quite challenging to all of a sudden switch that to a new language.
That being said, in 2 or 5 years from now, it might be different.
Our language abilities in each other’s language are improving all the time so it’s possible that English won’t be part of our communication in the future…
….or it might still be.
Time will tell.
We just don’t want to force it.
It might work to do that for a couple of days (we’ve tried), but for us, it’s not sustainable.
Instead, we just let it happen naturally.
Because we do speak Swedish and Finnish with each other.
Finnish when we’re with her family and Swedish with my family.
We also speak both languages at home with each other.
We just do it when we feel like it.
That way, it remains a fun and relaxed thing, rather than a point of frustration and pressure.
There are however a way we do this that requires less effort.
(it’s called “crosstalk”, which we’ll talk about soon in this post)
5 things that has helped us as a trilingual family
We’re still at an early stage of being a multilingual family.
Our son is still very small.
I’m sure that there are many more nuggets of wisdom that we’ll learn along the way as our families grow and our kids get older.
We have, however, learned a few things over the years that we’ve found helpful for us as a multilingual family.
1.) Being relaxed about it
One of the most important things when navigating different languages is to just be relaxed about it.
Some people worry that their children will have two weak languages and no real native languages if they learn more than one.
I think this is a largely unfounded worry.
Children are fully capable of learning several languages at the same time.
What we do is just make both Finnish and Swedish a natural part of our daily lives.
We are intentional about that I only speak Swedish with him, and my wife only Finnish.
By doing that, our son will get most of the language development he needs to be able to understand and speak these languages.
Right now he’s mixing the languages a lot, but we just find that charming.
Some words he says in Swedish and some in Finnish.
Other words, like “ball”, he says in both languages (“pallo” in Finnish and “boll” in Swedish).
What we’ve noticed is that he has started to use more Swedish words when speaking to me and more Finnish with my wife.
So he’s already able to separate them to an extent.
Children’s brains are wired to pick up languages.
They accept things for what they are, without us having to explain it to them.
If they are exposed to a language regularly and have an emotional connection with it (such as speaking it with a parent) then they absolutely will learn it.
Having that belief that our son will learn our languages without any problem gives us a lot of peace and confidence.
2.) Being intentional with learning each other’s language
“My mom never spoke x language to me because my dad couldn’t speak it, so he felt left out and that’s why I never learned it.”
I have talked to so many disappointed adults who have said this.
Their dad (or mom) didn’t want to feel left out so they only spoke the language that both parents understood.
So they ended up not knowing one of their parent’s native languages.
This is heartbreaking because it could have been avoided.
There are many reasons why you don’t learn your partner’s language:
Fear of failure,
Not believing you can learn a language
Not knowing how to even do it
Regardless of your beliefs about language learning, the reality is that you absolutely can learn a new language.
It just takes a decision and commitment from you.
Accepting being uncomfortable for probably the next few years.
Because nobody can teach you a language.
You can only learn it.
Learning your spouse’s language is the most important thing to sustain a multilingual family in the long run.
In our case, our mutual language was neither of our native languages.
It was English.
So we have both learned each other’s language.
Which we’re so glad that we did!
It’s such a meaningful part of our marriage and family life.
Some languages might take longer than others to learn. But no matter how difficult the language may seem, you can learn it.
If your partner is learning your native language, it’s very important that you’re supportive and encouraging.
Because it is a process that’s going to take time and persistence.
It requires courage.
The good thing about learning your spouse’s language is that you’re in no rush.
You’re going to have this language for life.
Even if it would take you 10 years to learn his or her language (which it doesn’t have to by using the right methods), isn’t it still worth it?
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3.) Adding extra input to the “weaker” language
Since we live in Finland (and have most of our marriage) our son currently has a larger vocabulary in Finnish.
Our son is also home with his mom all day and the activities we do outside the home are in Finnish.
Does this worry me?
It doesn’t.
(maybe it’s partly because I had way less exposure to English as a child but it has still developed into being just about as strong as my Swedish)
His Swedish is actually not far behind his Finnish.
I only speak Swedish to him, so he gets a lot of input in the language.
But since it could be considered his “weaker” language we just try to add a little extra time in Swedish.
For example:
Whenever we watch TV with him (which is not that much) it’s going to be mostly in Swedish.
We’re not strict about it, but me and my wife have always been intentional that he watches more kids’ shows in Swedish than Finnish. To get extra exposure to the language.
Since we live in Finland, something that has been helpful for us is getting a VPN. That way we’re able to stream TV shows from Sweden that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to (Swedish is an official language in Finland, but it’s a different dialect of Swedish than what we speak in Sweden).
This helps our son hear more Swedish, which is key for his language development. Having these shows playing on our TV also warms my heart as a Swede, as it feels like we’re bringing a piece of Sweden and Swedish culture to our home (it’s very important to us that this culture is part of our son’s life and upbringing).
We use Express VPN (← take advantage of their 2024 Black Friday Deal while it’s still available and get up to 7 Free months!) and we’re super happy with it. I have tried other VPNs but we find this one super easy to use and very reliable. You can unlock content from anywhere in the world with just a few clicks (which is also great for mom and dad when we want to watch a movie on a Friday night, since we can get a much wider selection!)
Other than TV, we also read to him every day.
Studies have shown that when you read with your kids their language development will be that much more powerful (just as it is for adults).
They will have a better vocabulary and ability to express themselves.
So we make sure to read to him in Swedish every night (and in Finnish too of course).
4.) Not putting pressure on our son to speak x language
It might be that our son will tend to speak more Finnish than Swedish in the future.
That’s totally okay with me.
For me, the most important thing is that my son understands Swedish.
That he acquires the language.
I want Swedish to be a positive thing in his life.
Not something where he feels pressure.
Once he understands it (even if he would tend to favor speaking Finnish) it will be easy for him to speak Swedish whenever he needs to.
Because he already has the language inside of him.
He’ll also soon realize my parents and Swedish friends don’t understand Finnish, so he’ll have to switch to Swedish out of necessity when talking with them.
It could even be that he thinks it’s uncool to speak Swedish when he’s a teenager.
But I bet he’ll feel different about it when he is 30.
5.) Doing “crosstalk” with each other
Doing everyday family life in a different language can be quite challenging.
So don’t put pressure on yourselves to switch to another language before it feels natural.
Instead, you can do what me and my wife do at times:
Speak your own languages to each other.
This is something called “crosstalk”.
It’s a form of language exchange where each of you speaks your own native language to each other.
All in the same conversation.
I’ll say something in Swedish and my wife responds in Finnish.
Once you have a good level of comprehension this is a great way to communicate.
It takes the pressure away.
Because it’s a lot more challenging to speak than to understand.
Your level of understanding is always going to be higher than your ability to speak. But if you increase your level of comprehension, your ability to speak will increase along with it.
Doing “crosstalk” keeps the flow going when you’re talking.
Not only that, but it’s very effective for your own language learning.
Because the most important thing is to hear the language you’re learning.
That way you’re getting valuable input from your own husband or wife.
The best part is that you don’t even have to set up a time with a language partner over Skype, but you can do it whenever you want to in your own home with each other!
"Is it too late if our kids are already older?"
“Is it too late if we didn’t speak x language to our kids from the beginning and they are now older”
While there are certainly advantages the earlier you start, it’s never too late to learn a language and make it part of your family life (although it could potentially be tricky once they are teenagers).
If they start at a later stage they might have an accent.
(which is not a problem, but even that can be fixed if they want to)
The most important thing is that the language is a value and a priority for you as parents.
Because when it is, your children will follow.
They look up to you and want to do what you do.
If it just becomes a natural part of your lives, it will become a natural part of theirs.
What’s worse than having waited 10 years to learn your spouse’s language?
Having waited 10 years and 1 day.
There’s no better time to start than right now.
You can just make it a fun thing where you are all learning together as a family, immersing in different types of content in the language together.
Growing your language abilities together as a family can be a wonderful source of connection for you.
The beauty of being a multilingual family
It takes intentionality to incorporate different languages into family life.
But in the end, it’s so worth it.
Think about how wonderful it is for your kids to grow up in a multilingual family.
(something neither me or my wife did)
It will enrich their lives to be part of two different cultures (it certainly has for us).
And speaking a language is a big part of that.
It’s really when we speak the language of a culture, that we truly start to understand that culture and become a part of it.
It might seem very challenging right now, but remember:
Everything is hard until it’s not.
If you’ve decided to learn your spouse’s language.
My hats off to you.
You have my uttermost respect.
It’s humbling and requires being uncomfortable and stretched.
But there are only positives to gain from learning it.
Eventually, it will become a natural part of your family life.
Just like Finnish, Swedish, and English are for us.
What a wonderful legacy to give your children.
What is the biggest challenge you’re facing right now being a multilingual family? Let me know in the comments below.
