How to refer to the 'other' language

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Forums > Your Questions — General > How to refer to the 'other' language

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Emily

Posted 01/04	Reply with quote #1

Hi My husband and I are planning to raise our future family bilingually (perhaps multilingually). However, when discussing how we want to do this, we encountered the following issue: we keep referring to English (our non-native language) as the ‘other’, ‘second’, ‘foreign’ or ‘extra’ language (when we’re not just using the word ‘English’, obviously). Although this isn’t really an issue per se and it won’t harm anyone, we were still wondering if there’s a better word for it. A word that doesn’t put English in second place, but makes it sound more equal. We’re both native speakers of the community language and will both use that language at certain times, so we can’t use ‘home language’ or ‘mommy language’ and ‘daddy language’. We’d just like to avoid giving the impression that English is merely an added language in any way we can. We want both our native language and Dutch to be equal parts of our children’s homes and identities.

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