Status update

In the very first blog entry I posted here, I wrote that I would estimate that V's linguistic input is 75 percent English, 20 percent Swedish, and 5 percent Finnish. Things have changed in our household since the mom went back to work, however. These days, V is with her Finnish-speaking babysitter and Finnish-speaking children three days a week. That makes a big difference! I would now estimate that V's linguistic input is 60 percent English, 20 percent Swedish, and 20 percent Finnish. Of course it's a bit hard to figure, because when her dad is home in the evenings, both English and Swedish are flying around, so the amount of English might actually be something like 10 percent higher. Almost all of her input at this point is through direct address--in other words, because someone is talking to her. Sometimes in the morning I have the BBC news on in the background, but I don't think she listens to it ... unless it sinks in, anyway. That's another question that I don't really know the answer to.

At this point, English is most definitely V's main language. I would estimate that something like 75-70 percent of her wordstock is in English.

Still, in the past couple of weeks or so, I have been quite amazed to see firsthand that she switches to Swedish when her dad comes home. I am not kidding! At the age of 15 months, she is already cognizant of the fact that her pappa uses a different linguistic code. A few weeks ago I reported with glee that she had a few concepts for which she has two words, one in Swedish and one in English. At this point, there are so many examples of her bilingualism that I would be hard-pressed to think of them all.

That said, there is definite mixing of codes--although, not as much as I would have thought. The few examples I can think of are a bit perplexing for me. For instance, one of her very early words was bread. She used that word to refer to any kind of food; she used the word a lot. Now, even though she still knows the word bread, of course, she seems to prefer the Swedish word, macka. She uses the Swedish word even when talking to me, and, like I mentioned, it's unclear why. Maybe she just likes the sound of the Swedish word better? It's more novel at this point than bread? Who knows.

Although English is currently her main language, I fully expect that this will change, and, depending on what kind of school she goes to, her strongest language will be either Swedish or Finnish. After all, we are living in Finland, where the matrix language is Finnish (and, to a lesser extent, Swedish). Any parent knows that the child's own peer group has a far greater influence on language (and many other matters) than the parents.

It's peculiar that, as of yet, I don't notice V using any Finnish at all. I get the idea that she mostly uses English when she talks to her babysitter, even though the babysitter always speaks Finnish to her. V seems to understand some Finnish now--although not much--and she doesn't seem to use any Finnish words. I suspect this will change quite fast as she continues to play with her babysitter and Finnish kids.

Addendum: I had just finished writing this blog entry and sat down to read some books with Vera. Immediately she pointed to a picture of a cat and said, "Kissa." That is the Finnish word for cat. So, I was wrong: she does have Finnish words--at least one, anyway. I am surprised!