Little big girl

The most important social development recently is that V has started going to her Swedish-language daycare. We're well into Week 3 now, and she is flourishing. Already, her Swedish language skills are burgeoning; she is more articulate than ever. Her vocabulary in Swedish has expanded enormously. In fact, she has already started using some Swedish words when she speaks English to me. She seems to do this most frequently with words that are similar in the two languages -- and there are a lot of similar words. For example, the other day she said, "Look, Mamma, there's an äpple (which in Swedish is pronounced "epp-lay").

Her Finnish is noticably weaker than English and Swedish, which, of course, is hardly surprising, since she very rarely uses Finnish. Still, she does communicate freely in Finnish, although at a much more modest level. She is normally a very talkative child, who can tell stories about what has happened at home or at daycare and to her friends, and so on, but in Finnish, her conversation is limited to more along the lines of "Look at this. What is this? Put it there." That kind of thing. Curiously, the one thing she seems to refer to in Finnish at the expense of Swedish or English is books: she seems to favor the Finnish word kirja 'book.'

One of her favorite language games at the moment is to choose a thing--a dog, let's say--and describe all the words she knows for it, like this, "Pappa says hund. Mamma says dog. Mummu (Grandma) says koira." She doesn't yet have the concepts of Swedish, English, and Finnish, so she expresses this idea through who in her world uses what language.

A few months ago I wrote something about her consonant clusters. Basically, she didn't have them yet. Snake was "'nake," play was "p'ay," strong was "st'ong" and Steve was "'teve." I would venture to say that she gets most combinations at this point, although I am not 100 percent sure.

Also in terms of phonology, there has been some substitution of sounds in English, although this seems to be subsiding. For example, for a long time she would express the desire to be "make-ed" rather than "naked," and Pippi Longstocking's friend Annika was "Ammika."


There are clear developments in syntax and morphology, as well. Today she surprised me by saying, "It keeps falling down." I don't know why I thought she shouldn't have this structure, but for some reason it stuck out. There has also been progress in her use of negation in English. A few months ago, she would say something like, "Maybe it goes there not," rather than "Maybe it doesn't go there." That doesn't happen any more.

One feature that is in flux right now is her use of first and second personal pronouns. She still routinely uses "you" when she means "me" in a sentence like "Mamma help you!" This really means "Mamma help me!" She seems to have learned this expression as a unit, and it's taking her a while to figure out that it's a "you" that belongs there. In other contexts, however, she uses "I" freely and also grammatically, especially in her new favorite sentence: No, I'll do it!" (Even though it does sometimes use her own name instead of "I.")

One interesting feature I have noticed lately is her way of marking something that has happened in the past. She knows how to use past tense verbs, but her only temporal adverbial is yesterday. So she might want to express something along the lines of "We visited our friends this summer," but instead she'll say something like "We visited our friend's yesterday." Yesterday in such a sentence can mean something that happened earlier that day, a month ago, or any other time in the past.