Now it's at three

Now at the age of 17 months, there is ample evidence that there are three codes in place, all in the same brain. There was one good example of two codes just this morning. The point of this blog is to write about language, not other developments, but let's just say that Vera had a big accomplishment for the first time this morning. When her dad woke up, I whispered to her, "Tell Pappa about your potty." Vera looked up at him, a look of pride on her face, and said, "Pottan!" I was surprised that she knew how to translate so easily, and so instantly.

Last weekend, V's Finnish grandmother was visiting. V's "mummu," as she calls her, has always been worried that V wouldn't be a proper little Finnish girl who speaks proper Finnish. Last week's visit, I would say, quelled at least some of her fears. V chattered nonstop to Mummu in Finnish, talking about everything from her leipä 'bread' to potta 'potty.'

One of V's favorite things to do right now is to hand things back and forth, so that you have to say "Thank you!" then give whatever it is back to her, so she can say "Thank you!" and so on. I watched as V did this in three languages one morning last weekend. First she was doing this with me as I fed her breakfast: "Thank you!" Then came her pappa, and she handed him something and encouraged him to say, "Tack tack!" Then came her mummu, and immediately she switched to "Mummu, kiitos!" It seems quite clear that she divides her languages according to the interlocutor. I'm not sure at this point that she has a default language. I am tempted to say it would be English, but I have no way of knowing, of course, how she communicates when she is around other people (I'd love to be a fly on the wall!)

A few days ago, I am pretty sure we had what counts as our first kind of recap conversation of our day. I was putting her to bed, and she showed me her night-night bear and said, "Bear, water, uh-oh. No no no." At first I thought she was asking for a drink of water, but she corrected me. "Bear, uh-oh." I soon realized that she was reminding me of something that happened on our way back home from her babysitter. We were walking through a big mud puddle, and V chose that exact moment to drop her bear down onto the ground. I made a big show of telling her, "No no! Now your bear is all dirty! Look at that, you got your bear all wet and dirty. Now we have to go home and wash it." Obviously, this all made some impression on her -- surprise, surprise. When V brought this up later, at her bedtime, I went along with her, saying, "Yes, you dropped your bear. It got all dirty in the water. We had to wash it." You should have seen the delight on her face when I understood and responded to what she was trying to communicate! She was so excited. I can understand the thrill she must feel as she recognizes that she is able to relate to others through language.

"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.'

Ribbit

Yesterday morning, like most mornings, I woke up early with V and set out to complete our ritual. The first thing she always wants to do after she gets out of bed is to turn on the star-shaped lamps in our windows. This is what we were doing when I looked outside and noticed a heavy fog obscuring everything.

Never one to miss offering an educational experience, I pointed outside and told V, "Fog, look at the fog."

She obliged and peered out, and of course in my mind's eye we were like some Mary Cassatt-style depiction of mother and daughter, both in our pajamas, V in my arms, looking out the window at the sea and fog.

Then V, her eyes transfixed outside the window, began to quietly repeat, "Ribbit. Ribbit. Fog," she pointed. "Ribbit. Ribbit."

So this is what I have succeeded in teaching my child, apparently: that there is an abundance of frogs lurking outside our windows. Foiled again!

All day yesterday, she repeated her observation, pointing out the window and saying, "Fog, fog. Ribbit. Ribbit."

This beckons a few words about both perception and production. It would seem that V's ears are tuned into English phonology, but not quite. Fog and frog are pretty close, after all. I have noted several times that her pronunciation is not perfect all the time, either. Some words, like her sister's name, she says perfectly some of the time, but other words, like bunny, socks, and lampa ('lamp' in Swedish) are, for the time being, consistently a bit off. She says bunny like "buddy," socks like "hocks," and lampa like "almpa." I can't quite find rhyme or reason as to why she says what she does the way she does; however, it seems that the sounds that seem to give her the most trouble in English are /r/ and /s/.

V is starting to put together larger chunks of language. Because she speaks English with me, I can only really comment on her English, of course. It seems to be the case that she is trying to formulate the right way of expressing more complex thoughts. For example, she says "Pepper back," when she has finished playing with the pepper shaker (like a lot of kids, she needs some sort of distraction so she can eat, right?) and wants me to put it back into its proper position. Her favorite new word is "help," and she gets a lot of use out of it. "Mamma, baby, help." "Put the baby's leg back on, Mamma." (I realize this might seem like a weird request. In explanation, the legs of one her baby dolls falls off all the time). Or "Spoon, help." "Help me eat my yogurt with this spoon, Mamma."Or today a new one was, "Daddy, Cava, bye-bye." "Daddy and Cava went outside."

Same old

This is a little embarrassing to admit, but V's vocabulary is growing so fast that it's actually kind of boring to try and chronicle it all. So I'll change tactics. Well, OK, I'll mention just a few items, in English: head, hair, help, break it/broken, flower, hammer (yeah, I know, that's a weird one; it surprised me, too), and maybe that's about it for now. And now I really will stop with these word lists. Wait, just one more, because I find it interesting: she uses the word back, but not as a noun, as a preposition. Most of her other words are nouns, so that's why I like this example.

The most exciting news lately is that she does seem to have three distinct codes--that is, English, Finnish, and Swedish. For a long time I wasn't totally buying it when her dad claimed that she only speaks to him in Swedish, and that when he says Finnish words, she gives him "weird looks." I still don't know if I buy into the "weird looks" thing, but the babysitter's opinion backed up dad's. The babysitter said that V seems to know that English doesn't work when they are together. I was surprised to hear this. Somehow I felt quite certain that when V is with her babysitter, she would be using English, simply because it is her strongest language. But no. Apparently, just like she did with English for a long time, she spends her time with the babysitter repeating whatever Finnish she knows. For one entire day it was kiitos, which means 'thank you.' The next day, it seems to have been ole hyvä 'you're welcome.'

Needless to say, I find it incredible that children in a multilingual environment, even at such a young age, know how to separate when they should say what, and to whom.

A couple of days ago, in a class that I teach, the students got into a discussion about views of multilingualism. It seems that today the general public is much more enlightened about such things than they were, say, twenty years ago, but you still hear some pretty weird stuff. For example, there are parents (or well-meaning grandparents, neighbors, whatever), who seem to believe that kids will get confused with more than one language, that their speaking and cognitive skills will be delayed, or that they will lack an identity or such muck. This is all completely unsubstantiated.

Only once in my life have I ever met anyone who actually complained about being multilingual, and her complaint was something along the lines of "I speak four languages badly." I call bull---- on that, because even monolinguals speak "imperfectly." We all are still acquiring vocabulary, pragmatic skills, etc.--it's a lifelong process.

The simple fact is that, if a kid is systematically exposed to any number of languages early enough in life, the constructs of that language will be in that kid's head forever. So all the grammar and so on that the rest of us try and struggle with when we try to learn a foreign language as a teenager or adult? It's already already programmed into bilingual kids' heads. Bilingual kids might lose expressions and vocabulary and so on if they are not exposed to the language throughout their lifetime, but the grammar of the language will still be in there somewhere.

I have never heard a multilingual person say, "It's terrible to speak so many languages." On the contrary, when parents choose not to teach their kids their own mother tongue, the kid is likely to grow up and say, "Why didn't you?" It's a missed opportunity. To me, it simply doesn't make sense for any parents to not speak their mother tongue to their own children. I know that sometimes there are intervening factors, but this remains my basic opinion. At the same time, I don't think it's wise for parents to try to speak a language to their kids that isn't their mother tongue--or pretty darn close to it. But that's another story.

Now I'll get off my soapbox.

Something truly exciting happened yesterday. Anyone who knows much about my research interests knows how much I love the word please. Last night as we were finishing our dinner, V was trying to take the lid off a jar or something like that. For the first time, I was able to get her to repeat, "Help, please." And she did repeat it, probably nothing short of one hundred times. Baby's first please. I'm in heaven!

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!

"Mouse!"

Words come flying out of V's mouth now that make me think, "Where did you learn that?" Words like mouse, boots, pretty, and macka, which is Swedish for a little sandwich.

I was successful in making a voice recording of us looking at a book together, but I was not successful in figuring how to upload it in a very good way onto this blog site. It is strange to me that this blog service we are using would support video but not audio, but that seems to be the case. So now you can see a very shaky and seasick-inducing visual and audio of V's response to a book. (You can also see Cava, our dog, come to investigate what is going on.) It's not so easy to hold a recording device with one hand, a book with the other, and a wriggly kid on your lap! At any rate, I think it's interesting to hear how her phonology actually works, and there are lots of good examples in this short video. Many of the words, I am sure, would not be recognizable if I were not there to "translate." Enjoy!