Hi Leo!

About your concerns on the future language of your children, I tell you how my husband and I did with ours.

I am Italian and my husband is Dutch. We lived abroad in various countries for 11 years. My daughter was born in Wichita Falls, TX and my son was born in Lisbon, Portugal.

As we always belonged to international communities, we privileged English as social and school language. At home, I always spoke to them in Italian and my husband in Dutch. In the years, my kids were in contact with German and Portuguese and, in school, they followed a few years of Chinese.

Today, we are living in Italy, but they are in an international IB School to preserve and develop their English. By living in Italy, of course, they’re fluent in Italian, though Dutch, on the other hand, is hanging there… still, they can understand and speak it, though their vocabulary is not so rich; to help them to keep up with it, we send them to their grandparents in the Netherlands during summer.

The actual situation is that, at 15 and almost 18, they are equally fluent and well literary prepared in English and Italian; Dutch is a bit lagging behind, but as they will attend next schools in the Netherlands, they will pick it up out of necessity and full immersion. Chinese and German will remain at a scholastic level, unless they will decide to improve them for some reason.

Besides this situation, my daughter, who loves Jap anime and culture and Korean pop groups, is learning by herself those languages. Instead, my son, who spends hours online with friends from all around the world, developed an interest for Spanish and he’s learning it in exchange of Italian lessons with another Mexican 17 years old.

I have several friends from the international background, whose kids had similar approaches to other languages. What we all had in common was the fact that we all talked to our kids in our native language; in school and in int’l social situations, they had to speak English along with their parents, knowing that speaking with somebody (even to your parents) in another language is considered highly impolite towards the others who can’t understand what you are talking about. Of course, it’s excused if you don’t know English well enough to express yourself.

What’s making the trick to have children learning multiple languages is that you need to keep those languages and cultures contained and limited like they were in sealed boxes. Kids must take the habit that Mummy speaks Italian, Daddy only Dutch, school only English, international friends and travels to countries, where we don’t know the language is going to be only English speaking. Grandparents are called in their own languages: in Italian, they are nonno and nonna and in Dutch, opa and oma.

Keeping languages linked to a fixed habit/setting, which relates to a strong motivator (parents, school, friends, travels, etc), will support your kids to learn and form different mind schemes not interfering with each others, although flexible to change from one to another, if required.