swedish parents

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tom

Posted 11/16/14	Reply with quote #1

Hey We are living in a small town in Sweden and as you guessed, people here mainly speak Swedish. I would like to speak English to our baby, who will be born in upcoming weeks and my fiance would speak Swedish to him. I studied in the u.s. for four years and I have tried to keep up with the language since. So I am not native speaker but I feel like my vocabulary and grammar is good enough to do this, and I know it would get better everyday if I would use it with him and started to “think” more in English. English is taught very well here in schools but I am fascinated by the language and I would like to pass it to my own son at early age. That would probably give him courage to study/work abroad and give him better chance at learning other languages as well. This would bring awkward moments at start and some close minded people would probably laugh at it, but at the end I feel that it would be advantage to my son. Has anyone else been in same kind of situation and have had the courage to speak foreign language to your child? Did you use OPOL to the end or did you for example switch to the language spoken around your environment if other people where around? I mean for example kids birthdays where you know the people around you and their children and parents don’t speak English in this case.

Santiago

Posted 11/24/14	Reply with quote #2

Hi Tom, My son was born a month ago and ever since I have spoken to him only in English. Right now he’s too little and it’s too soon to see the resutls, but it feels great to pass on my English knowledge to him. I live in a Spanish speaking country. I haven’t found any resistance from anyone yet. As I”m a linguist, some people are expecting me to talk to him in a foreign language and even ask me. It doesn’t feel awkward to me to talk to him in English at this point, but it just feels weird to talk to him in English in front of others outside the family. I need to figure out how to do it naturally. Right now, since he’s really small, we haven’t gone out much with him, so I don’t know the real feel of that. For now, I’m using OPOL. We’ll see how everything develops in the future. I think it is a great idea and I encourage you to do it. Please let me know how it goes when the baby is born and whatever you decide. Congrats on your new baby! Regards, Santiago

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