Upbringing bilingual kids

“Does she speak English?” –she speaks both Nepalese and English. I am talking about my 26 months old daughter who is on her way to becoming a chatter box. As she is learning to speak at a lightening speed, I am also realizing that she is mixing up two languages Nepalese and English while communicating.

I think in a multicultural country like America, it’s very common to see a bilingual kid and more remarkable is to hear them switch between two languages while speaking. For example, my daughter calls me “my mommy” when we are in her daycare in front of her friends but as soon as we step out of the facility I am “mamu” (means mommy) to her. Raising a bilingual child is every parents welcoming challenge and I feel fortunate that we have been able to give the bilingual edge to our daughter since both me and my husband are from Nepal and we mostly speak in Nepalese language with each other. However, as she grows up it will be interesting to see if she will favor one language upon another to speak with us.

Recently, I have been doing some research on the internet on bilingual upbringing and I have found very resourceful topics on this subject. Here is a very intriguing piece of information that I found on the internet.

There are two different recommended methods of bilingual upbringing:

1.     The person orientated method: One or more persons always speak to the child in a particular language.

2.     The time or place orientated method: The whole family always speaks a particular language in a particular place e.g. at home or at a particular time e.g. in the evening or on a stipulated weekday.

While we have not implied any one of the above mentioned method to our daughter, I think it is a very helpful and simple guideline by which we can help our daughter to be fluent in both the languages. Do you have such multilingual topics to share? I would love to hear from you.