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?

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.

"Are you crying?"

Last night when I was putting V to bed, she gave me an extra, extra, extra hard time. It appears she is at the age when they start testing boundaries ... and they don't stop for a long, long time, from what I understand -- if ever.

For about an hour, she was calling out, "Mamma! Mamma!" over every little thing she could come up with. She wanted to read a book. She was thirsty. She wanted her blanket. She wanted her nightlight turned off. All of these pleas I could ignore, but what finally got me was when she called out, "Mamma, put on a clean diaper!" I had put a clean one on her just as I put her down for the night, so I couldn't figure out this request. When I went to check what was happening, she was stripped naked to the waist, and was holding her supposedly soiled diaper up for me to inspect. However, it wasn't wet at all, and she officially had found a foolproof way to get me to come in her room: no way am I going to let her sleep without a diaper on at this stage in her life. I put on a fresh diaper and admonished her, saying that I wouldn't come into her room anymore, no matter what, and that it was time to sleep.

Then she started in on the fake crying. As she cried, she said to herself over and over in a loud, soothing voice, "What's the matter, sweetheart? Why are you crying, baby?"

So here I get the language-related point of this post. V continues to refer to herself in the second person, although once in a while she slips in an "I" ("I want milk," etc.). She also mimics what I say to her, which is what she was doing when she was consoling herself during her crying fit (she was imagining what a nice mommy would have said ...!). She frequently asks me a question that seems to be directed at herself, perhaps anticipating what I myself would say to her: "Did Nik give you a shovel?" (when she herself has a shovel in her hand). "Did you eat all your macaroni?" "Are you sad, sweetheart?" Etc.

Since I only speak English to her, it continues to surprise me when she comes out with conversations and words in her other languages. Tonight with her daddy she was naming letters of the alphabet in Swedish. It was kind of hit and miss, but still, she knows the right terms, even if she doesn't usually match them to the right letter. She also knows the names of all her fingers (the equivalent of middle finger, ring finger, etc.) in Swedish. She doesn't know those terms in English, so it's interesting to get clear evidence of how her language skills are related to the relationships she has and what she tends to do/talk about with different people.