Don't worry; be natural; be a parent

Read this FAQ if you have questions like the following: 

Similar questions:
Can my toddler learn a second language at home before starting school?
Can my baby learn 2 or more languages at home?
My spouse speaks language X and I speak language Y, can we teach our children both languages?
My infant is a year old and has not learned to talk. Why not?
Will I confuse my child if I mix languages?

Don't worry; be natural; be a parent 

We get many questions from worried parents and prospective parents, often people who are in mixed marriages and are involved in migration. Children grow up in all kinds of bilingual or multilingual settings. My answer is always the same: do what comes naturally. Children suffer if they are unloved or treated cruelly. They do not suffer if their parents talk to them and play with them in only one language, or in two, or in three or four. Whatever languages you choose to speak with your children, and whatever languages they are exposed to in the wider community, they will deal with the situation as they grow up. You can do no damage to children through your linguistic choices.

Although I agree with much of what Professor Ruuskanen says about this question, I would like to take a slightly different stance on one or two points. There are many kinds of multilingual settings: across the world it is probably more common for children to be raised in a bilingual family than in a monolingual one. Bringing up a bilingual child is ordinary, not unusual. My own experience of child bilinguals has been mainly in Singapore and India. In these countries (and many others, especially in Asia and Africa) speaking more than one language is taken for granted. Most children grow up in families where two or more languages are spoken, in communities where they hear many languages every day. Most parents were also brought up with two languages.

However complicated your family linguistic situation is, relax with your children and do whatever comes naturally. It doesn't matter if they hear the same parent speaking several languages (that's normal life); it doesn't matter if people begin a sentence in one language and end in another. It DOES matter if you don't spend time with your children or are uneasy around them. Children are resilient, but they are sensitive to tensions of all sorts. Keep multilingualism low key and take things easy.

You are not a teacher to your children. Your job as a parent is to raise a happy child interested in life and with the skills for living. You have to expose your child to the things that matter to you, and language is only a part of that. All children acquire language (except some with very severe disabilities) -- and children growing up in households where more than one language is spoken to them regularly will learn more than one language. You don't have to worry about it. You have to spend time with your children, playing with them, dressing and feeding them, doing art, singing, splashing around in water..... As you are doing this, talk however you like. Relax and have fun. Parents do not teach their children languages: you speak languages with them as part of daily life.

Occasionally people have deliberately introduced a second language into the home even though they are not in a situation that would naturally lead to bilingualism. This is usually because they think it is a good thing to know more than one language from an early age. Some teach a language they learnt as a foreign language. Some even teach Latin. Some parents have taught their children 'Babysign' (see The National Literacy Trust for a very good discission of the pros and cons: http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/talk_to_your_baby/key_topics/1285_baby_signing), which is signed words based on natural sign languages. A child might enjoy learning a few phrases or words in another language without you having to sacrifice your normal linguistic practice. If you want to introduce a language deliberately, even on a larger scale, you probably won't do any harm. You do need to build a natural relationship with your child, however, in a language you are comfortable in: a child can sense artificiality. Also, unless you create a need for the language it's not likely to be very successful. Lots of things are good for children to learn (e.g. swimming, painting, clay modelling, horse riding, music) -- you can't do EVERYTHING, and there is no special magic in bilingualism. One situation where you probably ought to do something deliberate and use a language you are not good at -- if you have a profoundly deaf child and you do not know your local Sign Language, learn as much of it as you can and do your best to use it with your Deaf child.

First of all, two definitions. The terms 'mother tongue' and 'native language' can mean many things. I will use them both to refer to a language that a person spoke before they started formal education (i.e. before the age of 3-7 years). Like most linguists I use 'bilingual' to refer to 'more than one language', regardless of whether it is 2 languages or 6.

In Singapore nearly all children come to nursery school at age 3 already able to speak 2 languages. Many can speak 3. A child growing up with only one language is quite rare. The reason for this is that most adults routinely use two or three languages in their daily life, both at home and at work, and switching between languages is the norm for everyone. There are also many ethnic groups in Singapore, associated with many different languages, and people need to know languages which they can speak to people from other communities. Lots of people come from families where language shift has taken place, so that their best language might not be a language their parents spoke at all. Parents are fairly relaxed about their children hearing a rather rich language stew, and expect their children to pick up languages. They do worry (like parents everywhere) about their children being able to develop good skills in reading and writing the languages they have to do at school.

In India, being able to speak only one language is a more common than it is in Singapore, but it is associated with some groups of poor people -- richer people are almost never monolingual (and many poor people are also multilingual).

In both these places, bilingualism is not necessarily linked with biculturalism. English, for example, which is one of the languages usually spoken by bilinguals, is not associated with particular ethnic groups. English is a language of India and of Singapore -- it's not part of a foreign culture -- speaking with a UK or US accent would be seen as having a foreign accent. The pattern of bilingualism and the attitudes associated with it are quite different from attitudes in parts of the US and parts of Europe.