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?

And counting

Probably the biggest news over the last few days is that V is keen on counting everything from the steps to our apartment to the number of macaroni pieces on her plate. She now gets up to about four, then she might skip to six or seven, but some semblance of the numbers 1-10 are all in there. I can also hear her counting to herself (sheep, maybe?) when she falls asleep at night. What's encouraging about her counting objects is that this makes me think she might actually understand that numbers quantify things--in other words, she's not just reciting a list, she might actually understand what numbers signify. Clearly, this would be a milestone. I should note, however, that I am only aware of her doing this in English. I think she knows at least the first three numbers of both Finnish and Swedish, but I don't think she uses them productively.

There has been evidence of other kinds of abstract thinking. She has been making comparisons about what she wants today based on what she had yesterday, for example. I noted some weeks ago that she lacks most prepositions, and this is still the case, so she strings together whatever words she knows to get her point across. One day she didn't like the yogurt I tried to give her for her breakfast, so she advised me, "Same yogurt yesterday." OK, so the as was missing, but she got her point across.

Here's another milestone: she has figured out that our matrix language in this country is Finnish. It used to be that in a new situation she would follow my lead, speaking whatever language I spoke (often accompanied by weird looks at me -- "Mom, why are you butchering Finnish when you're supposed to be speaking English?" We follow the one parent/one language rule). The other day we were in a store where there were model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and V found this very exciting. I asked the sales clerk a question in English, and V, still excited about the airplanes, said to him, "There's a ..." Then she thought for a moment and switched to Finnish: "lentokone" (that's airplane in Finnish). Ever since, she has spoken Finnish as default when we have been in public. I find this an amazing revelation.

Here's something else of interest. V has been home with us during the holidays, meaning that she has not been with her babysitter for two weeks. Apparently, during this brief time, V's English started to subsume her Finnish. Today the babysitter reported that V was very talkative in Finnish, asking the same questions over and over again, as if trying to reconnect to the language (and, no doubt, to the babysitter, as well. V really missed her!).

I haven't written about particulars here for a long while, so here is a brief list of language-related occurrences during the past few weeks.

October 27: The first time V constructed a question in English, using verb inversion: "Can you make (it)?"
October 28: first use of a possessive pronoun + noun: "This is my bottle." Since, she has pretty much nailed the use of possessive, including mine, yours, etc.
November 1: Baby's first curse words! "Damn it!" OK, not my proudest moment as a mother, but, in my defense, we had just moved to a new apartment, so there was plenty of stress in the air ... along with the cursing.
November 17: Another example of semantic extension: She referred to the skin of a kiwi as a "crust," asking me to "take the crust away."
November 30: She spontaneously counted three meatballs.
December 21: The first time I noticed her using a dependent clause: "I think it's a light." She now uses such constructions frequently.
December 27: OK, this is just an unabashedly cute story. She kept wanting to open her Christmas calendars even after December 24, although I tried to explain numerous times that Christmas was over. Finally, one morning, she pointed to her room, where the calendars and plenty of other Christmas detritus was still hanging out. She said, as if to correct me, "Christmas is over there."

One more point I have been meaning to mention is her developing system for negation. She understands that both not and no are related to negation in English, but she hasn't yet figured out the positioning. She'll accurately say, for example, "No, not this one," but she also sometimes says, "No this one." She has yet to acquire the use of negation with verbs. Usually, she says something like, "Mamma not do it." I suppose the use of the periphrastic do will come much, much later ("Mamma doesn't do it.")

Two-year inventory

There's a lot going on in that head of hers, language-wise and otherwise. A lot of people have been asking if she ever mixes her languages, which she does, and I'll explain that in a bit. Another frequent question is what language she speaks to herself, when she is playing alone. I'll get to that, too.

I've been doing a fair bit of travelling in the past month or so, which means lots of time spent in airports, trains and whatnot, without much to do. To pass the time, I started compiling a list of the words that V knows so far in English. Even though she knows plenty of words in Swedish and Finnish, as well, it's harder for me to put a count on those, because those are languages she doesn't speak with me.

Little V turns two in about two weeks. Here is an overview of the words and categories she has so far. There are a lot of words, so I won't list them all, I'll just give the categories and counts here.

People's/pet's first names (including a few fictional characters, such as Mickey Mouse): I estimate she knows distinct names for about 35-40 people/characters/pets at this point.

Food items: She can distinguish between something like 30 food items, including juice, fish, coffee, cheese, chocolate, and ice cream (she is REALLY good at identifying the last two items in the list, which means the mom has to be extra sneaky)

Household/dining items: She is familiar with probably 20 or so terms of things that are either in the house or that we use in the house, such as fork, spoon, brush, toothpaste, sofa, floor, lamps, candles, etc.

Animals: She knows the names of something like 15 different animals.

Clothing items: She pretty much knows them all--socks, stockings, boots, shoes, jackets, shirt, diaper, underpants, etc.

Body parts: she can identify tongue, mouth, teeth, nose, eyes, head, arms, feet, legs, belly, fingers, bum, hair. She recognizes chin, cheek, forehead, but she doesn't use these words yet.

Things that are outside: When we go outside, V is very excited to point at everything she sees and call it by name, especially boats, cars, trucks, tractors, airplanes, bicycles, and, as she says, motorbicycles. It's hard to estimate how many distinct terms she uses when we are outside, as there are loads of them, relating to the flora and fauna, animals, buildings, playgrounds, etc. Just for the sake of completeness, I'll put my estimate at around 30 distinct terms.

OK, so that's a summary of all her nouns. Nouns, by far, make up the majority of her vocabulary (hardly surprising).

Here comes the adjectives she uses on a regular basis.
Color terms: She uses color terms, such as orange, pink, blue, yellow, but not with 100 percent accuracy yet. Maybe 70 percent accuracy.
Other adjectives, in no particular order: nice, big, little, naughty, cute, hot, cold, warm, funny, tired

She doesn't have so very many verbs yet. Here are those I can think of: to run, to kick, to hit, to be, to want, to have, to cuddle, to kiss, to hug, to fly, to clean, to (be) hurt, to sleep, to eat, to play, to swing

The slowest words to come to her are the so-called "function" words: prepositions, articles, conjunctions, etc. She doesn't really use any conjunctions yet, not even and. Well, sometimes she uses and, for example when she says, "Want milk AND bread," but that's usually after I have asked her a question, so she is just repeating what I say (I think). When she is speaking without prompting, her way of expressing that something is an addition to, she uses words such as also, other, too. She uses too in English very frequently.

She has some adverbs, such as out, in, under.
Her prepositions are pretty much limited to to, in.

I think that's about it!

It would be interesting to compare her word knowledge in English to her other two languages, but, like I said, since she doesn't speak theses languages to me, I really can't estimate. Let's just say that I have been quite amazed a few times recently when I have heard her speaking to her babysitter, other children, or even her father--she really does speak three languages now!

People have been asking if she ever "mixes" her languages. Previously, I have always answered "no." Up until recently, it always seemed that she separated her languages depending on who she was talking to. This is still mostly true, but lately I have noticed that her languages go more into separate domains, depending on what she is doing and what she is talking about. For example, she knows more words relating to playground play in Finnish than she does in English, because she plays with her babysitter and friends at the playground, speaking Finnish. Sometimes, she even uses Finnish play-related words with me, because she doesn't know the equivalent in English.

Another question I have been asked lately is what language she speaks when she is alone, playing by herself. English is still by far her dominant language (at least for now), but more and I more I hear her speaking Swedish or Finnish to herself. It seems to have to do with the activity, or what she is thinking about at the moment. This morning, for example, I heard her switch into Finnish when she was playing with her Legos. I know that she often plays Legos with her babysitter, so clearly she was thinking about being with her babysitter at the time.

"Shhhhhh!"

V has a constant monologue going on, and I am not sure if it is because she is playing with language, or if she is actually trying to interact. Probably the former. It's nonstop babble, with everything coming out of her mouth that seems to enter into her head. One surprising aspect of her babble is the number of names that come out. She still repeats--actually, very often--the name of her little friend, our upstairs neighbor, who moved away now close to three months ago. That represents something like twenty percent of V's short life, so I would have thought that she would have moved on to new concepts, but apparently the name and idea are seared into her consciousness.

She also repeats the names of people she has only met once or twice, and, again, quite some time ago. For example, Tessa was the name of a little girl that V played with for one day only, and that was about two months ago. Today when V was falling asleep, she was saying, "Tessa, Tessa, Tessa." Does she just happen to fall upon the sound sequence and remember the name, or does something, in fact, prompt the memory of Tessa? I guess there is no way of knowing.

V seems to enjoy putting things into categories. I have noted previously in this blog, for example, that she likes to point out shapes. "Star. Ball. Heart. Moon." Lately, she also enjoys noticing body, face parts, and clothing on other people, toys, and from all sorts of pictures: "Fingers. Toes. Mouth. Eyes. Hat. Boots. Foot." Fingers are especially exciting. She often looks at her own, and then, as if ecstatic to discover that they are still there, she exclaims, "Fingers!"

Her predilection for categorizing things according to shape and appearance has led to conundrum when it comes to numbers. She has a book she really likes called, "Let's Count Baby." The premise of the book is probably easy enough to catch from the title. For the past couple of days, she has been interested in the actual numbers that are printed on the pages. She will point to the figure "8" and say "eight." Then she'll point to the figure "7" and say "eight." So then I correct her, saying, "No, that's a seven." So she'll say, "Seven," and then point back at the "8" and say "seven." And so on. I suppose this is the first time she has encountered a break from the usual pattern: even though these things (the numbers) all look more or less the same, they actually all have different names. And this seems to be confusing her! I am not sure how to deal with this, because I don't want her to think that a "7" is called "eight," and so on. But I guess I should just calm down. After all, she is only sixteen months old, and I am sure she has plenty of time to learn what the numbers are called.

In other news, she has a few new adjectives and adjective phrases: clean, nice, all gone. She also says "Nam!" if she really likes some food she is eating, so I guess that counts.

One of her favorite routines is to go through what all of the animals say. Quite typical, of course. What cracks me up about her, though, is when we start asking what certain people say. It doesn't matter who it is -- Mamma, Daddy, her sister, grandma, babysitter, even our dog, Cava -- the answer is always the same: "Shhhhh!" You would think we spend most of our time telling her to be quiet, which is most certainly not the case!

I am not sure what else to note about her languages other than English. Only to say that they are developing, but at a less noticeable pace than her English. Of course my reports are biased, as well, because she speaks English with me. However, I do hear her speaking enough Swedish to her dad and sister and enough Finnish when we are out in the city to know that these other languages do exist for her. Yesterday, for example, when we were in town, she was saying over and over to people in shops and so on, "Kiitos!" which means 'thank you.'

Let the trilingual status begin!

The title for this post is admittedly exuberant. Here's why: yesterday I brought V home from her day with the babysitter, set her down in her chair for a snack, and she promptly looked up at me, pointed at her nose and said, "Nenä." Nenä! This is the Finnish word for nose, of course, and, as far as I can tell, this marks the first official trio of words all connoting the same concept. She has already nailed English nose and Swedish näsa. OK, multilingualism is still a long way off, but what an exciting start.

Funny, actually, that the first example has to do with nose.We have somewhat of a history with noses, thanks to my mother. During a visit to my mother, when I was pregnant with V, my mother, out of the blue, told me, "You were the one kid of mine that, when you were born, I looked at you and thought, 'If this kid ever wants a nose job, I'll pay for it.'" Yeah, she's funny like that. Then when V was born, my sister asked our mother if she had seen any pictures of V yet, and my mom answered, "Yes, she has a big nose like her mom's."

So that's our history with noses, although it has little to do with language. (Are our noses really that big?)

Continuing on from my digression, then. Here are some new English words as of the past week or so: kiwi, mouse, ears, truck, again, boots, and mackey, which means 'macaroni.'

She has also learned some new names of people. She says Pia, Sirpa-täti, Amber, and Emily (actually, she says that name constantly, because she wants to play with her friend).

And a new animal sound: the sheep says "baaa," of course!

There is one morpheme that V has uses for such a long time that I actually overlooked it. This is the diminutive -y that we use in English. It's interesting that her use of this is absolutely grammatical; we attach this morpheme only to nouns, and this is what she does, and very productively--"Sockies, ducky, doggy, kitty," etc. The diminutive form is in addition to the base form of each of those words, of course, so it's not just a matter of her mistakenly thinking that the word dog, for example, is actually doggy.

In terms of semantics, V continue to use a couple of general words when she doesn't know a better word. Examples are her use of apple and dog. In V's world, an "apple" is any round or circular food, either real food or what she sees in pictures. So oranges, cucumber slices, meatballs--those all get called "apple." Any picture she sees of an animal with four legs, provided that she doesn't have another name for it, gets called "dog." A little argument that we have over and over again when we look at her picture book goes like this:

Me: Horsey. What does the horsey say?
V: Heeeeeeeee. (pointing) Dog. Woof woof.
Me: That's not a dog, that's a horsey. What does the horsey say?
V: Heeeeee. (pointing) Dog. Woof woof.
And so on, for as long as I allow it to continue. At this point, there is simply no convincing her that the horse is not a dog. Oh well, you have to pick your battles.

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!

Det är amazing

The past few weeks have been amazing in many ways, not limited to linguistic development, but certainly the linguistic developments have been a high point (let's hear it again for dorky linguist parents!).

First, a report on a big moment for V and her pappa. Have I mentioned that V likes pictures and books? She could easily spend as many hours a day poring over books as we would let her. One of her favorite books has pictures of her with people she knows and loves. She was looking at this book with her pappa, and he asked her (in Swedish, of course), "Where's mamma?" V pointed, and answered, plain as day, "Där är mamma!" This gorgeous little utterance was her first complete sentence in Swedish, and Pete nearly jumped out of his chair for joy. I have to say I was quite impressed, as well.

Her Swedish continues to develop, but in a different direction than her English. As I have mentioned before, this seems to be bound up with the personal relationships; in other words, the output depends on who says what to her. One of the things she does with her dad is to look at pictures of animals. At this point, she knows how to respond to most of the "What does the ---- say?" questions, but mostly in Swedish. The only animal names she knows in English so far are cat and dog, and she can respond with what they say. In Swedish she knows cow, pig, horse, etc.

This is interesting: before, I wrote that she seems to have only one word per concept, without overlap. In other words, she doesn't really seem to have two languages yet, just language. However, we have now seen our first element of overlap, and it is with her favorite thing of all: the dog. She knows the word hund in Swedish, and she knows the word dog in English. When her pappa asks, "Vad säger hunden?" she answers "woof." When I ask, "What does the dog say?" she also answers "woof." This is the very first example we have of her identifying the same concept in two languages, and this is EXCITING. Let the bilingualism begin!

Her semantic field is changing, too. I wrote sometime before that, for example, all food was "bread" to her. That has changed as of a couple of weeks ago. Now, just bread is bread. If she doesn't know the word for some kind of food she wants, she might still call it "bread." Like her nighttime bottle, for instance. However, she calls a banana "banana" and cheese "cheese." She also says "apple" (she says it and certain other two-syllable words in a really cute way: she emphasizes the second syllable and give it a rising pitch, so it comes out like "app-ELL?"). This is where it gets interesting: it seems to be the case that any round fruit is, in her mind, an apple. If she sees an orange, a mango, a kiwi--whatever--she points and says, "apple." The same thing still goes for dogs: any animal with four legs that she doesn't have another name for (zebra, horse, etc.) is a dog.

There is a lot of mimicking going on, no matter what language or sounds she hears. So, for example, if her German or Finnish friends are around, she mimicks "nein, nein, nein," or "voi, voi, voi, voi, voi," clearly because she likes the sound of it, not because she knows what it means. A few days ago, a friend of ours said, "Voi, voi, voi, voi, voi," in Finnish, which means something like "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," and Vera just loved it. She kept saying this "voi, voi" thing at all the right moments in the subsequent conversation, and the laughter she elicited every time absolutely thrilled her. It's amazing how fast they learn through such positive feedback.

I have been pleased with her recent acquisition of the word more. I believe this is the first word she has used that doesn't fit into a noun or verb category. She really gets this word, too. Another exciting milestone for the linguist mom.

Is there any evidence that she is trilingual at this point? Not much, I'd say. She seems to know a few words in Finnish, but at this point they are just mixed in with her language (remember, for the most part she doesn't seem to have languages--with a plural--yet). I might be making this up, but I think she seems genuinely confused when we enter into a Finnish speaking situation, and especially when she hears me speaking Finnish. Actually, she probably is old enough to get the difference, now that I think about it. When her Finnish grandmother is around, for example, V says the words she knows in Swedish and English and isn't responsive to the Finnish her grandmother says. The other day when I took her to her little music class, she seemed confused as to what was happening in a way I hadn't noticed during previous classes. I am sure this is because her comprehension, especially in English, is very high already. For example, if I tell her to bring me her shoes, socks, her toothbrush, or a book, she readily does as requested. What I am getting at is that it must be confusing for her when we enter into a situation where she suddenly can't understand anything (like when we are with Finnish speakers). I'll be watching closely for signs that she is beginning to realize that these are different languages.