Mishmash

Here's another general update about V's languages.

First of all, she is pretty comfortable in all language settings, especially Finnish and English. I have noticed a couple of times that when we are around Swedish speaking kids that she doesn't know, she doesn't try to talk to them. It seems like she is trying to figure out, "Hmmm. I am not quite sure what to say to these people." And yet she watches them with distinct interest, and she clearly understands what they are saying. Sometimes I feel like her use of languages impedes her willingness to get in and mix with other kids, because she is standing back, trying to relate to what she hears going on around her. For example, the other day I took her to a gymnastics class for toddlers, and she spent most of the time going around listening to what the other kids were saying, rather than playing, jumping and shouting the way they all did. There were Finnish, English and Swedish speaking kids there, and it seemed to kind of throw her off. Of course, this could just be her personality: she has always been a "thinker" rather than being the first kid to jump in and start doing stuff.

I never really hear her speak Swedish outside the context of our home, however, which I find interesting. It's as if she hasn't quite figured out that this language transfers to other situations, as well--like English and Finnish do. This will surely change: we recently made the (very difficult) decision to send V to Swedish speaking nursery school here in Helsinki, followed by education in Swedish, so I fully suspect that Swedish will eventually be her dominant language.

The amount of vocabulary that comes out in all her languages is really something. She mentions words and names of people that she has encountered only once, and sometimes many weeks previously. Where do kids this age store all this information? It amazes me. This is kind of a weird example, but the other day I pulled something out of the fridge (can't remember what it was) and said, smelled it, and said, "Oh, this looks like it got old." V looked at it and said, "It's oldy." I didn't understand what she meant. "Do you mean it's old?" I asked. I could see the wheels turning in her head for a second, then she said, "It's moldy. Moldy." She had been searching for that word and couldn't find it, but then she accessed it and used it in exactly the right circumstances. A couple of points worth mentioning here: I don't know when I had ever used the word moldy around her, but clearly I had at some point, and second, I would like to defend my housekeeping skills and say that she was actually wrong--the food was not moldy!

The sounds are coming out quite on target in all her languages. I think the sound that gives her the hardest time is the Finnish/Swedish r, which is rolled like it would be in Spanish or Italian. Depending on the word, she says this sound either as an [l] or a [d]. In English, however, she says the r sound perfectly.

The other sound that seems to give her a hard time is s, if it comes at the beginning of a word before another consonant. She leaves the s sound out, so that, for example, "stinky" is tinky and "Steve" is teve. We've been practicing this lately, though, and she can produce the s sound if we really focus on it: "ssssssssssstinky."

I have noted previously that her grammar had lacked target-like negation and use of first and second person pronouns. This has changed. Only once in a while does she produce a non-target negative statement. The other day, for example, she came up with an interesting one. Our friend who helps us with the cleaning was here, and V likes to follow her around the house saying, "She's so busy. She's so busy." This particular day, she came to me and said many times, "Mamma not so busy." OK, this is quite an embarrassing observation for me, but what I want to point out is that it's still pretty close to the target: She is just missing the copula -s.

V can count to 8 in English, but not in other languages.

It's interesting that she knows her letters of the alphabet in Swedish, but not in English. She spends quite a bit of time with her dad looking at her alphabet magnets and also books in Swedish. This is one domain in which she transfers labels from one language to the other: she hasn't yet figured out, it seems, that the letters have different names in her languages. In Swedish, for example, the letter "i" is called ee, like the English letter "e." You can see where this would be potentially confusing, but I'm sure she'll work it out eventually.

One thing that amazed a visitor we had here recently was how V has different animal sounds for each language. I guess I had already gotten used to that fact, but it blew him away! Speaking of this friend, he happened to be travelling with a banjo (you have to love someone who comes from New York carrying a banjo!), and, naturally, V was blown away by that. She got her very first banjo lesson, and then, after a few minutes, she left the room, saying, "I have a banjo, too." Well, we were all very curious to see what she considered "her" banjo to be.

She soon came back into the room blowing into her little toy clarinet. It's easy to see the logic she was using: "A banjo is something that plays music, so this thing must be a banjo, too."

"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.

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.")

Not quite bilingual ... not quite monolingual

I've been thinking about myself as a bilingual for the past couple of days. Many people would not consider me to be bilingual -- in fact, I myself do not -- but by the most liberal definitions of bilingualism, I actually qualify.

I've lived in Finland now on a permanent basis for six+ years. All things considered, I rarely speak Finnish, as I work in an English-speaking environment at a university, and I speak English at home with my family. I would venture, then, that Finnish constitutes no more than 5-10 percent of my total linguistic output. In other words, I probably speak English 90-95 percent of the time. My spoken Finnish is limited to encounters with people in customer service positions and a few people who don't speak any English, such as my mother-in-law.*

So here I am, a native speaker of English in a relatively small country like Finland. This is interesting for a lot of reasons. First, my mother tongue is the most learned foreign language in the world. Current figures put the total number of English speakers in the world at something like 750 million, and the vast majority of them are not native speakers.** My second language is Finnish, which, it's safe to say, is not very commonly learned as a foreign language. This creates quite a juxtaposition, wouldn't you say?

As native speakers of English, especially for those of us who work in education or have traveled a lot or lived abroad, it's perfectly normal to hear nonnative speakers of English using English (or "abusing" it, as some of the less tolerant would say). We are used to hearing people speak English with foreign accents. And furthermore, many people are so successful at using English that their status as a nonnative speaker is a non issue.

The same points are not true for Finnish, or at least not for the most part. Just yesterday, I was reading in a Finnish teachers' magazine about how Finns don't have the "ear" for hearing foreigners speak Finnish. More often than not, people working at stores and whatnot treat me with an amused or even resigned politeness when I speak Finnish to them. Sometimes, they simply switch to English, which I am sure they think is helpful. In other situations, for example with monolingual Finns, and, it seems, especially older monolingual Finns like my mother-in-law, there are real challenges in communicating what I want to express.

Many Americans are monolingual, so it perhaps difficult to relate to the challenges of expressing oneself in a foreign language. Can you imagine being constrained in what you want to say by not knowing the right grammatical constructions or the right words--at all? Our intelligence, personality, humor -- pretty much every aspect of our identity is best expressed through language, and if that tool is taken away, what are you left with?

Having personally experienced this type of frustration many times makes me sympathetic towards other foreigners, nonnative speakers of English, and, strangely enough, even the hearing impaired: I, too, know what it's like to sit through dinner parties and other gatherings, straining to keep up with conversation, trying to figure out how to contribute, only to find out that the topic has long since moved on ...

Unfortunately, it seems to be human nature to judge people not on what they say, but the way they say it. For example, a student of mine recently conducted a test in which she asked people to listen to recordings of members of the European Union Parliament speaking English. She found that -- surprise -- those speakers who were native speakers of English were judged as being more competent politicians, as well as more intelligent. This is only one example of many in what is best described "linguistic profiling."

Facing these challenges myself is no doubt why it is so important for me that my daughter feels like an insider here in my adopted country -- both linguistically and otherwise. Lucky for her if she doesn't have to struggle to express her intelligence, humor, or everyday desires. As for me, it's an uphill battle, but I am sure it will, someday, get easier. In the meantime, I, like other foreigners, am forced to retain my humility, self-deprecation, sense of humor, and wits.


*I have to admit that these thoughts that have been going through my head are largely inspired by a rather frustrating exchange with my mother-in-law. We can all relate -- right? In my case, added to this already traditionally fraught relationship is the language barrier. Recently, after a rather long and difficult phone conversation with her (any foreigner knows that phones are the worst mode of communication for us, right?), she called my husband to clarify the details, saying that she couldn't understand what I had been trying to explain over the phone. I pretty much went through the ceiling when I heard that ...
***This figure is arguable, having mostly to do with what it means to "speak" English. In addition, the term "native speaker" is hard to define. But I'll leave those points aside for now.

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.

Socks of a different color

Here's a conversation I just had with V, right before bed.

Me: "Let's put these socks on, so your feet don't get cold while you are sleeping."
V: "No. Andra sockies. Not these." (Note: andra is Swedish for 'other.' Oddly enough, this is the only word she continuously merges in both English and Swedish, even though she is perfectly capable of saying other. I still haven't figured out why she does this.)
Me: "But these socks have little bunnies and hearts. They're really nice night-time sockies!"
V: "No. Andra sockies."
Me: "What other sockies do you want?"
V (thinking): "Pink socks."
Now this is interesting, because I am not totally convinced that she could pick pink socks out of line-up. And at this point I'm curious.
Me: "Let's go to your sock drawer. Show me the socks you want."
And that's what we did. Guess what happened then? V pulled out a pair of pink socks, proclaiming,
V: "Pink sockies."
Ta-da!

There are a lot of opinions going on at our house. And, hand-in-hand with this, there are a lot of attempts at using negation. It is really fascinating. I haven't had time to do a blog entry here for a long time, but I have been making notes and will try to catch up soon, just to keep this a complete record (mostly for myself, and maybe the one other person who might read it :-))

But this I just have to mention: V is a little parrot, and she speaks American English. Hooray! One of her favorite ways to exert an opinion is to shake her head and say, "Nope." This is so American; I just love it.
Another nice Americanism is the use of pet names. She calls me "sweetheart" on a regular basis. If she wants more milk, for example, she'll hand me her bottle and say, "More milk, sweetheart?"
Kills me.

Salt of the earth

When V falls asleep at night, she likes to talk about the people she knows and loves. We have little conversations about these people. When we talk about Emily, we talk about how Emily likes to say, "Yeah!" Tonight, V came up with the Emily sentence (if you can call it that) on her own. She said, "Emily," and then she laughed--chuckled, I guess, would be a more accurate description. Then she said, "Emily, yeah." She repeated this a few times, laughing and smiling each time. V knows what the word say means, but she has never used it in a sentence. I guess this is as close it she comes for now. I suppose I am struck not just by the quasi-sentence she made, but also by the idea that she is able to talk about something that is so abstract; Emily moved back to the States about four months ago. I guess V misses her. Actually, so do I!

V has already learned an important lesson: good friends are the salt of the earth.