multilingual children and multi-alphabet

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Forums > Your Questions — General > multilingual children and multi-alphabet

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Ana

Posted 09/27/14	Reply with quote #1

Hello, I am portuguese and my husband is moroccan. We live in Morocco and we are planning to have children soon. I have been thinking about which languages will our children actually speak… At home we speak english with each other, but I would like my children to learn my mother-language. Of coarse the children will have to learn the local dialectal arab in order to communicate with my husband’s family and the surrounding environment and they will be exposed to english by listening to the parents. In the streets I mostly use the french language and the children will most likely go to a french school in Morocco. I am afraid that this will cause the children to mix all the languages and fail in speaking them properly. Another fact is that all the languages are very different and they will be in need of learnig two alphabets. Do you have any suggestions on how we should introduce the four languages and two alphabets to our children? Is there anything that we should be careful about? Thank you for your advice

Carlos Machado

Posted 12/13/14	Reply with quote #2

Hello Ana, I have a similar situation, I´m also portuguese, my wife is Ukranian and we speak english between us, we decided that she should speak russian with the baby and later ukranian, in the mean time I speak portuguese with the baby, the baby is now only 14 months, just say very few words but I strongly believe that when babies, the brain absorve everything pretty easy and all articles I´ve been reading say that babies sucessfully learn 2, 3 untill 4 languages. We have 2 alphabets and 4 languages. It might delay her a litlle bit on the beggining but then is going to be just fine. regards, and good luck, Carlos

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