Long overdue post

V is a big girl now! She is just a few months shy of 5 years now. As would be expected, her language skills are pretty high--normal for a child her age.

She talks a lot in every language! For the last couple of summers, we have spent a month in the United States. This has been really good for her aptitude in English, and we are fortunate that we have been able to make the trips. People in the U.S. keep telling me that V has a foreign accent, but of course I can't hear it. To me, she sounds just like any other American kid. When we come back from the States, especially last summer, her other languages have been heavily influenced by English--even more so than usual. This seems to last for a couple of weeks, until she gets her head back into Nordic mode again.

Whew, that was close!
V's Finnish language skills have suffered during our trips to the States. Last summer was especially harrowing; while we were away, she developed really strong attitudes against Finnish. When we got back last summer, V didn't want to speak Finnish, she didn't want to hear it, and, furthermore, she didn't even want to talk about it! This is clearly a problem, as we happen to live in Finland ...

Our solution to this problem was to do heavy marketing for Finnish. V's dad and I really talked up Finnish--Mummu (V's Finnish grandmother), her aunties, her sister, Muumi, Santa Claus --they all speak Finnish. Isn't Finnish a beautiful language? Isn't it great to be able to speak Finnish? We bolstered Finnish like crazy. We had her sit and watch Finnish kids' programs, even though she didn't want to. It was tough work, but in the end it paid off. She was teetering on the brink there for a while, but eventually she came back around to thinking of Finnish as an acceptable language. Last fall and winter, we tried to further encourage her interest in Finnish by having her participate in fun activities in Finnish, such as a crafts class, a ballet class, a singing group, and I tried to arrange play times for her with Finnish-speaking children. Each time she started one of the classes, I explained to the teacher that we speak English and Swedish at home, but that V has Finnish skills and that she needs the practice--so in other words, to please not think they were doing V a "favor" by speaking English with her. This seemed to work out OK. The end result is that V is basically able to participate in these classes, although you might characterize her involvement as somewhat "spacey." I am not sure how much of this is a language issue and how much of it is just her personality. Most likely, it's not an either/or thing. I do think that a lot of what is said in Finnish goes over her head, so she kind of naturally tunes out and is in her own little world (I am familiar with this myself: as a foreigner, I have learned to tune out Finnish. On the other hand, when I hear English, my initial reaction is always that someone is talking to ME.). In her dance class, for example, on the one day parents were allowed to observe, we noticed that she was continuously about four steps behind the other children. But you know what? She was happy. She was very clearly enjoying her dance class--in Finnish--like crazy. Furthermore, the dance teacher confirmed that V's skills in Finnish had developed a lot during the course, to the point where V would answer her in Finnish. Hurray, mission accomplished! Imagine the teacher's disappointment when I had to tell her that, well, actually, V knew Finnish before the dance class, so it wasn't actually the teacher who had taught her how to speak ...

We didn't notice so much of a dip in the Finnish skills after this year's trip to the USA. I think it helped this year that we paid a visit to V's Finnish speaking aunties almost immediately after our return to Finland. In general, you could say that V is quite unwilling to speak Finnish. It depends on whom she is with. With Finnish speaking children, for example, or in everyday Finnish language situations, V is incredibly shy and insecure--and understandably so. With her aunties and her grandmother, however, because of the love and comfort she has with them, Finnish is the default language. She is able to communicate with them in Finnish, but her speech is quite faltering (lots of "um ... um ... um ...") and filled with grammatical inconsistencies (for example, using a third person verb with the Finnish word for "I," so, "Minä on ..."). However, it is still there, rudimentary as it is, and sometimes she lets guard down and really tries. She has the basic grammar, she has quite a large vocabulary, and she is basically able to communicate. I can say from firsthand experience that it is a really intimidating experience to try and express yourself in a language you don't have mastery of, so I am really impressed with her bravery.

Most people, of course, wouldn't be able to understand her Finnish, and monolingual Finnish children do make fun of her because of her inability to express herself ("What's the matter with you? Why can't you talk?"). Not only is the grammar imperfect, but she also tends to substitute Swedish words when she can't come up with the Finnish equivalent. For a Swedish (and English) speaking child, though, she is doing OK. The reality for a lot of Swedish speaking children in Finland is that they really don't speak the dominant language (i.e., Finnish), until they start learning it in school. If Swedish is spoken as a home language, then there is simply not the opportunity to hear Finnish. This is a common topic of conversation among parents at V's Swedish-speaking day care. No one wants their child to be at a disadvantage, but it's not like this is a new situation in Finland. There have been Swedish speakers in Finland for a long time, and somehow they manage to get along.

But that's a much bigger issue. Back to V's languages.

On grammar

At this point, V's Swedish and English skills are probably about equal. There is a fair amount of mixing between them, but that is perfectly normal and does not alarm us in the slightest. An example of Swedish influence on her English is found in the words that are similar between the languages. For example, in Swedish, the word helikopter is clearly similar to English helicopter, it's mostly just an issue of which syllable is stressed. So when V uses the word in English, she says "heliCOPter" rather than "HELicopter." She does the same thing with the word telephone--she tends to pronounce it "telePHONE" in English. She continues to anglicize Swedish words such as trappor 'stairs' into "traps" in English. This is, of course, mildly problematic when we visit the States ... one of the best examples from last summer was with a great-aunt who has a slightly dirty mind. Imagine her surprise when Vera informed her that she was drawing "pricks" on her piece of paper. Prickar means 'polka dots' in Swedish. I am still trying to convince V that she should call them "spots" or "dots" in English.

When she speaks Swedish, it's pretty common to hear V say things like, "Har du beena i Stockholm?" Here, she has substituted the English verb been rather than using the Swedish verb varit. She also tends to say things like "Kan hon talkar i Svenska?" Here, she has used the English verb talk and given it a Swedish verb ending.

Now for some specifics about her English language development. I would say her English phonology is more or less in place. She can say the /r/ sound without any trouble, regardless of word position, although occasionally it might still alternate with the [w] sound. The same goes for /l/. The other day, for example, she did a stunning rendition of the word pterodactyl, but the last sound came out as "w" instead of "l." The most stubborn sound is the "th" sound, or in other words /θ/ and /ð/. The books say, though, that these--along with certain consonant clusters--are among the last sounds mastered, somewhere between ages 4 and 6, so we are still on target. In terms of consonant clusters, she has some pretty interesting features. She can say words like squirrel with no problem, even with the rather hefty [skw] combination there. More interesting is her pronunciation of words like after, which for some reason she pronounced like "actor" for a very long time -- that is, with a [k.t] sequence rather than a [f.t] sequence. And she is just now starting to pronounce the word only with a [n.l] sequence. For the longest time, she has pronounced only as "omly," and sometimes even as "ombly," with an intrusive [b]--very weird, but also very interesting. I guess she has some kind of bilabial trend going on there.

One of the things that has been cracking me about V's language is her use of the word otherwise. Of all the adverbs, how did she get on this one? She uses it pretty much grammatically, but it’s the frequency of it that amuses me. You could definitely say it's her favorite adverb. "Otherwise, you won't be able to hear me." "Otherwise, Sally won't wake up in time." "Otherwise, we have to tell Pappa that he doesn't get any."

Lately, however, it's another adverb, filler, discourse marker--whatever you want to call it--that has crept into her language. At the tender age of 4 plus some, my child has developed the use of like. Don't ask me how or why, but there it is. She has started to use like both as a discourse marker and a quotative. Here is an example of like as a discourse marker: "It's, like, as tall as Sally." Here is an example of like as a quotative: "She's like, 'I'm not going to eat cheese.'

A few more details about V's grammar: she doesn't seem to have the dative pronouns yet, or at least not in the first person singular. Here is an example. The other day--I can't remember what we were talking about--she said, "You're going to lock I up when I'm a teenager." OK, this is a highly incriminating sentence she said, but, meaning aside, it's a great example of her use of dative pronouns. She routinely says things like, "Give it to I," "It's for I," etc.

Finally, I want to mention the use of past tense in English. Everyone knows that in English we have certain verbs that we call "irregular" in the past tense. These include go --> went, be --> was, and, in terms of pronunciation, even verbs like sleep --> slept and say --> said. The typical thing to do is to "regularize" these verbs, and that is exactly what V does. For her, the past tense of go is "goed," sleep is "sleeped," and the past tense of be is "were." For example, "I were at JoAnn's house yesterday." She also regularizes the pronunciation of other verbs, for example do can come out as "duuz."

Time management

For the longest time -- maybe two years or more -- V has indicated something that happened in the past by saying "yesterday." It doesn't matter when the event in question actually occurred -- could be last week, last year, yesterday, or in the morning of the same day -- but the way to indicate that it was situated in the past was to say "Yesterday we went to Grandma's house" (or whatever).

Last week came the first ever instance of the use of the phrase "the other day." V said, "We got an ice cream the other day." Not yesterday; the OTHER day. Wow, well done, V! Let's see if she continues to use this construction.

Her use of the verb "to be" is also changing. In the first person singular (ie, "I"), she used to say pretty much exclusively "I are." Now, most of the time she says, "I'm are." So in other words, there are actually two copula, but I am pretty sure that she doesn't recognize "I'm" as a subject pronoun + copula, but only as a subject pronoun. This is what the books on language acquisition pretty much seem to say, too.

The other day one of V's daycare teachers asked me if I think her English or her Swedish is strongest. That's a tough question, because it depends very much on what she is doing and what she is talking about. From what I understand, this is really typical of bilingual children. It's hard to say which of their languages is "better," because they might use them for different things. The reason the daycare teacher asked, anyway, was because she said that sometimes V doesn't seem to understand what they are saying in Swedish, so they switch to English, and it seems to help. I don't  necessarily think that means her English is stronger, though, because she actually uses quite a bit of Swedish words in her English these days, too.

One more thing: we spent the weekend in an almost entirely Finnish-speaking environment. V is able to follow the conversation, and she speaks Finnish, but it's not grammatically perfect. Her vocabulary and pronunciation seem pretty good, but it's the word endings that trip her up.

In Id-a-wee

V and I were just visiting friends in Italy. Or, as she says it, "Id-a-wee." This was one of the first times she has been in a situation where she hears an unknown language all around her. She has had similar experiences in France and Germany, but that's been some time ago, now, and I doubt she remembers.

It was loads of fun to be there for lots of reasons, mostly because we were visiting our wonderful friends, but also because it was warm (!) and because the people there talk and talk and talk. Everywhere we went, total strangers were exclaiming over V's blonde hair and telling her "Que bella! Bellissima!" It's a totally different communication style from what we experience in Finland, and V did really well and went with the flow. It was only a couple of times that she turned to me and said, "What is that lady saying to me?" She was, for the most part, very open to their communication.

Over the course of a few days, she picked up a few words in Italian. Kids this age are just amazing.

But what interested me more than anything was her language choice with the people we were visiting. With our friend Valentina it was no problem -- V spoke English with her. With Marco, however, V kept speaking Swedish. Over and over again, she spoke Swedish, even though we kept telling her, "Marco doesn't understand Swedish. He speaks English."

I am really puzzled by this. V speaks Swedish with her dad, so I am wondering if there is something genderized about her language choice. In other words, man = speak Swedish. Somehow I am not very satisfied with that answer, however, because V knows at least a few men with whom she speaks English. I am wondering if it was because Marco played with her in a really wonderful physical and child-like manner.The reason for speaking Swedish to someone who engages in this type of intereaction is simple: V plays each day with her friends, speaking Swedish. So I am thinking it was more the activity than the person that prompted her use of Swedish. And I suppose it's kind of a compliment to Marco: Swedish = "you are my friend."

Don't fall me!

Pretty much since she started acquiring language, V kept all her languages separate, which I think mostly has to do with the fact that each language is associated with the different people she knows. This is pretty cool in and of itself, because I think it demonstrates in a really cool way that language is, first and foremost, a communication and social tool; it's how we relate to others.

But now, as she is approaching 4 years old, it seems that language is becoming more of a cognitive rather than social process. I have to come clean here and admit that I don't know much of anything about cognitive linguistics, but I would venture that LANGUAGE (as a THING) is getting more solidified in her brain, and along with that, there's a lot more experimentation with the boundaries of each separate language. In other words (cut to the chase!), she is mixing a lot more than ever.

Swedish is now her strongest language, because it's what she speaks with her peers at the daycare, as well as at home with her big sister and her pappa. Her English is still absolutely native-like, but there are lots of words that she forgets. She often says something like, for example, "We have to be careful going doing the traps." Traps? Trappor is Swedish for stairs. So V uses a Swedish word as the base noun, but then she adds the English plural form, -s. She also sometimes refers to her leg as her ben, which is the Swedish word. There are lots of and lots of examples like this.

 It's a mixed bag, though: I also heard her say a sentence in Swedish that went like this: Har du beena i Stockholm? I think this sentence would sound hilarious to anyone who knows Swedish. You can see that she used the English verb been, but she's added an -a in an attempt to make it sound more "Swedish." Clever girl!

Ocassionally, she mixes in the odd Finnish word, too, although Finnish is by no means a dominant language at this point. She can still communicate in Finnish, and the sounds are still definitely there (including the geminates, which are a very important part of Finnish phonology). What's missing, of course, are many of the word endings.

V's pronunciation is developing pretty much according to what the books tell us. The hardest sound for her in Swedish and Finnish seems to be the trilled "r" sound they have. It usually comes out sounding something like the American flap (or something like a "d" sound), unless it's at the beginning of a word, in which case it might even sound like an "l." When she speaks English, the "r" sound usually comes out sounding more like a "w." Other difficult sounds include the English interdentals: the first sounds in words like those and think. These come out as "d" and "t," respectively.

 In terms of morphology and syntax, it's pretty much a textbook case. She uses regular verb forms even on irregular verbs, which is pretty typical. This means that, for example, she says, "It breaked" rather than "it broke" and "taked" rather then "took." The possessive pronouns are still coming. She doesn't really know those yet, so she uses the possessive -s to make a subject pronoun into possessive form. So, for example, she says, "The bear found she's bed," rather than "The bear found her bed." She doesn't seem to have dative pronouns yet, either -- or maybe they are just starting to come. She she says, for example, "Give it to I" rather than "Give it to me."

In general, there's lots and lots of creative stuff coming out in her language these days. She is definitely in the potty mouth stage, so there is lots of talk about poop and pee in every language. I'm looking forward for this stage to pass ... She sings a lot of songs and uses words from each language, sometimes within the same song. So what about the title of this blog post? I am not sure if it's a mixture of Swedish and English, or if it was just a funny thing to say in English. What I loved, though, was that I corrected her: "No, don't drop me," and then she corrected me. "No, mamma, not drop, don't fall me!"

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.

An interesting presentation about language acquisition

Here is a video link to a presentation by Professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington. I find a lot of what she says interesting, but especially that a) the sounds of a child's native language are already more or less in place by the age of 10 months, and b) children can't acquire a native language from listening to a recording or watching TV. They can only learn it from human interaction. A lot of people seem to think they can teach their babies languages, math, whatever, by plopping them in front of a TV. Here is a very smart woman who says otherwise.
Here is the link http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html