On girls and boys and my

The communication level has definitely gone up a notch -- or several, actually.

Little V just turned 3. Lots has been happening in the past few months.

Perhaps the most major milestone is that she started going every day to a Swedish speaking nursery school. Within a few weeks, she was using Swedish words in her English when she talked to me. What she usually does, though, is to use an English (American) pronunciation, and she leaves off the word endings that would be there in Swedish. What a useful trick! It's usually nouns she substitutes, which makes sense. A good example is, "Let's put the baby in her säng." Säng is Swedish for 'bed.'

There is a shift in her competences -- Swedish is no doubt her strongest language already -- and, along with that, a shift in her preferences. She likes speaking in Swedish. Whereas English used to be the default choice, she now regularly switches into Swedish, even at home. For bilingual children, this is pretty well attested. Even if they are playing alone, they subconsciously switch into the language of the person who is there, even in a background role. So if I'm alone with her at home, but in the kitchen while she is in the bedroom, for example, she'll speak English to herself. But if it's her dad at home alone with her, she'll speak Swedish to herself. This can change, in an instant, however; if she starts doing something when I am there that "feels" Swedish, like doing some kind of play that she does at her nursery school, she'll momentarily lapse into Swedish. It's amazing to see how a language goes along with other cognitive factors.

V's Finnish has definitely deteriorated. She simply isn't exposed to it in a systematic way any longer. Although we live in Finland, she actually hears very little Finnish. She is able to respond in Finnish if someone speaks to her in public (which doesn't happen too much -- this is Finland, after all) but her breadth of expression in Finnish has become tiny compared to her capability in Swedish and English. She is quite uncharacteristically subdued and quiet in situations where the people around her are speaking Finnish. (On a personal note: I know how she feels. I am absolutely uncharacteristically quiet in Finnish, simply because I lack the overall communicative repertoire.)

In terms of her grammar, there is one interesting thing she has been doing now for a few weeks. She is mixing the use of the first person object pronoun in English with the possessive pronoun. She'll say, for example, "Mamma, can you carry my to my bed?" Or, "Emma gave it to my." For now, anyway, no amount of correcting her seems to be sinking in. She has pretty much nailed other deictic expressions, including I and you, but these other pronouns are still in flux.

And now for a heartbreaking story. I have been teaching a course on language and gender at the university, and for several weeks we have been talking about how the default gender in English is he, and how toys, games, books, clothing, etc., are marked for gender even for young children.

One thing I have been doing lately, although I know it doesn't make a difference in the big scheme of things, is to replace the he with she when I read children's stories to V. Seriously, take a look around you: a HUGE majority of the books for children are about boys or "he," even when the book is about a character that doesn't really even need to be marked for gender (like a turtle, for example). Women make up more than half of the world's population (I think it's 51 percent), so why should children's books not mirror this?

Anyway, I have been carrying over the same kind of ploys when we play with her toys and games. So, for example, when she got a Legos set for her birthday, which included an airplane and two human-like figures to go with it, I said, "Look, here are two girls that go with your airplane!" Because I'm thinking, of course, why should these little Logos figures be marked for gender? Here comes the heartbreaking part: she didn't buy it. She picked up one of the figures and scrutinized it. "Mamma, this one is not a girl," she said. "This one is a guy." And she was right: she has already been socialized. The figure she was looking at was depicted wearing a baseball hat and overalls--clearly clothes for "guys." I am pretty sure that even a couple of months ago she wouldn't have known the difference; she would use girl and boy pretty much interchangeably. I wonder what happened?