Jeremy will be 3 years old next March. It’s hard to comment on how well his speech development is progressing. We don’t know any families who use three languages at home, just ours. When he was around 6 months old, we decided that we would only speak to him in our own first languages of Vietnamese (me) and French (husband). We speak English to each other and live in Australia.
We’ve encouraged Jeremy’s social network to speak to him in the language they are comfortable with, for example, his maternal grandparents speak to him in Vietnames and his paternal grandparents speak to him in French. We’ve found that innitially, both sets of grandparents were unsure as to which language to speak to him in and would try and use all three or at least two.
I’ve noticed that his Vietnamese has been progressing equally as well as his French even though his exposure to French is very much limited to that with his Papa.
Jeremy mixes up his languages and has not been able to associate a language to a person yet. I often get calls from my parents who babysit him while I am work as to what he’s saying. Usually, the conversation starts with, “Jeremy keeps saying (French word). What does it mean?”. I will then say “He means (Vietnamese word) in French, can you teach him that word in Vietnamese otherwise he’ll keep saying it in French to you?” By this time, my parents will take it upon themselves to not only teach him something in Vietnamese but in their accented Vietnamese, teach him that word in French and English too. So he’ll come home sometimes to say something to his dad in French with a Vietnames twist! (Mental note: I must ask my parents not to teach him any languages other than Vietnamese.)
Watching In The Night Garden has taught him all sorts of phrases like “Oopsy Daisy and Oh No”. It’s rather cute seeing him pick up these words. His exposure to English is very much from the television, hearing his parents talk to each other, socialising with his cousins and playmates.
We are excited about Jeremy being accepted into the only French kindergarten in the state. We hope that this will give him a more equal exposure to French and Vietnamese (we have no French relatives here, only Vietnamese). It will also hopefully expose him to other children who speak French or have French speaking parent/s. Perhaps we’ll finally meet another set of parents who are also raising a tri-lingual boy.
