I am now checking in at 6 years and almost 12 months. Or in other words, just about a week shy of 7.
The language mix-up has changed quite radically since V started first grade this autumn. She is now imbued within the system of values of the Finland-Swedish speaking world. She is a part of this social system now, she just happens to have an (American) English speaking mom. This would change, obviously, if we were to suddenly pick up and move to Argentina or Belgium or Canada. That's kind of the point: these things are arbitrary, yet so profound.
Our walks home from school in the afternoon are some of my favorite moments of each day. It's a 10-minute walk through our neighborhood, noting if there are still leaves on all of the trees, if the rabbits who live in the park are out of their burrows, that type of thing. And of course we talk about her school day.
Increasingly, she seems to be getting agitated about trying to find words to explain to me in English what they have been doing. The "What did you have for lunch?" question seems particularly challenging. She simply doesn't know what to call the school's lunch dishes in English.
"Say it in Swedish, then," I try to convince her, knowing full well that this is not a solution, either. V hates speaking Swedish to me, even if it is just a few words. This started way, way back, and has to do with the socialization of language use. Ask anyone: for the vast majority of people, switching into a different language in an already established relationship seems throws everything off. It is something that bilingual speakers just don't tend to do. This, for example, is the reason that my husband still refuses to speak Swedish to me after all these years, and why he is distinctly uncomfortable if we find ourselves in a situation where we have to speak Finnish together.
But that's a different story.
Last week, on our way home, V was talking about a fun game she had played outside with her teacher and the other children. It involved running and pretending to be different kinds of animals.
"But, Mommy, I hate it that English doesn't have a different word for 'game'!" she wailed, then launched into an extremely physical and heartfelt description of how a 'game' in English should be just the kind of thing that comes in a cardboard box and has little colored pieces and a board and maybe a spinner or some dice. What they do outside, in her bilingual opinion, is different enough to warrant a name of its own.
Well, OK, I concede that she has an interesting point, but that's only after the fact. At that exact moment, I was in no mood to admit to any perceived inadequacies of my mother tongue, which in our family situation is now officially relegated to a role of a distant second in terms of status. So I behaved like a very, very bad linguist, and I launched into a tirade all my own:
"You know, you are actually very lucky to speak English as a native language. Do you know how many people in the world try to learn English, and how hard they have to work at it? And you just speak it naturally. If you think about it, English is actually a much more useful language than Swedish. You can speak English to almost anyone in the world. You can speak Swedish here in Finland, but only to some people, and to the people in Sweden. That's it. You may not appreciate now how lucky you are to speak English, but someday you will."
At this point I am cringing as I type, because I know how thrilled (not) my Swedish-speaking friends would be to read those words. But please try to understand the emotion of that moment--it wasn't my language I was defending, after all, it was ME!
Last summer we were in the United States for about a month. V seemed to be able to hold her own in English, even with other English-speaking children, but there are definitely a few idiosyncratic features that are based on the fact that Swedish has become her dominant language. Her default English possessive (determiner) pronoun, for example, is always mine: "mine socks, mine arm, mine lunch," etc. She is not confusing this with the possessive pronouns--in other words, mine, yours, his, etc. Rather, she is conflating the Swedish possessive (determiner) pronoun min with English my.
There are various syntactic constructions she takes from Swedish, as well. One that she uses very often is "How does this see/look out?" to mean "How does this look?" Another one that she uses very often is "What is this for food (or whatever)?" to mean "What kind of food is this?" Both of these constructions are straight from Swedish, just translated into English.
Her phonology seems to be there in all languages now; the last sounds still in flux are those tricky "th" sounds in English. Every once in a while, they still come out as "t" or "d." This has little to do with her Swedish, though, in my opinion, and more to do with the fact that those sounds are among the last that any English-speaking child learns. They are tough sounds! I notice that some of her school friends, who are Swedish-speaking, obviously, have not yet mastered the trilled "r" sound of Swedish. That's a tough one for kids, too.
I used to be able to keep up pretty well with these Swedish-isms in her English, but lately she has thrown me off a few times. Most recently, it was during our fabled walk home from school, and she was explaining how one friend seemed to be hurt that she was playing with a different friend. "I think he was black sick," she announced.
"Black sick?" I queried.
"Yes, you know, he felt bad."
I really couldn't figure that one out, but my husband got it right away. Swedish svartsjuk is literally translated into English as 'black sick,' but it means 'jealous.' First of all, what a wonderfully expressive word in Swedish (which I later realized is the same idea in Finnish, as well). Second, things are getting interesting on a whole different level as her language skills expand and grow as a result of starting school and entering into a new phase in her life.
Hang on to your hat, linguist mamma!
