Maintaining a mother tongue abroad is like taking a rollercoaster ride. What’s more, multilingual children travel in multiple cars on different lanes at the same time. The rollercoaster cars of their various languages do not go up hills, go straight ahead or go down slopes at the same speed, and sometimes repeat the same peaks…
I received a letter from a father who moved to Barcelona from Germany. He wrote that: “Basically, we want to help our son learn Spanish and Catalan as quickly as possible. He is learning both languages at school at the same time and I think that might confuse him. I was hoping for more help…
Even multilingual children do not always consciously decide which language to use. During my studies in Budapest, I was given the task of studying a Hungarian-speaking student from Slovenia’s language use. For three hours I asked her to address me in her dialect, but it was not possible for her. She could only answer my…