Bilingual upbringing: do these children learn to speak later?

From the age of 12 months, your child already speaks the first words. Then Baba becomes banana and Dada becomes all sorts of things. Up to this point, children perceive the words and sounds of their environment, their mother tongue. But what if a child grows up bilingually? Are there too many sounds and words for him to memorize – so that he later starts speaking? We have the answer.

In children who grow up with a mother tongue, communication takes place purely through screaming and the first babble on average up to the sixth month of life . It then learns to string syllables together and can soon say “Mama” or “Papa”. From then on, it’s only a matter of time before it speaks the first real words. This can happen between 12 and 18 months of age.

Children learn from an early age

Even if your baby can “only” articulate after a year, it still understands you before that. It is therefore very important that you talk to your sweetheart as much as possible. It doesn’t matter whether your child only hears one mother tongue or even two in the cradle.

Because, as the Bielefeld Institute for Early Child Development informs, bilingual children learn to speak just as quickly as children who only grow up with one mother tongue.

Bilingual Education: A Real Advantage

So if you and your partner speak different languages, don’t let that stop you from teaching your offspring both languages ​​right from the start! It can happen that your child will mix both languages. But according to the Institute for Early Childhood Research, this is not a disadvantage, but simply shows the creative use of both languages:

“For example, the children have the opportunity to fill in vocabulary gaps in one language with words from the other language and can thus maintain communication – but of course only if the communication partner understands both languages.”

Children growing up bilingually also have a different understanding of the language and thus a possible advantage when learning another language – for example at school.

All in all, just because your child has had a multilingual upbringing does not mean that they will speak later than other children. Because every child – no matter how many native languages ​​they grow up with – reaches their milestones, such as speaking, at their own pace. You can read more about this in our article “Language development in children: How your child learns to speak”.

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