A common question Marina and I are asked, as a Spanish-British couple, is ‘What language do you speak to each other?’
The answer is that we absolutely interchangeably speak English, Spanish, and rubbish.
Let me explain: We are both very good at each other’s language, so we can easily talk to each other in English, or Spanish, and communicate perfectly. I would say we speak a touch more Spanish, but it really depends on factors like how tired one of us is (I always defaults to my own language when I’m tired)…
The problem is that our easy interchange between English and Spanish doesn’t just happen on a daily basis. It doesn’t just happen on an hourly basis…
It often happens on a sentence to sentence basis, or worse, a word to word basis!
For example:
Marina to Ben: You look exhausted, qué te pasa love?
Ben to Marina: Nothing, I’m just feeling a bit agobiado…
Oh dear. You see the thing is, in sentences like this we’ll change languages when a single word or phrase works better in one language than another. Qué te pasa just works better than ‘what’s going on’ for Marina in the above example, and in the case of my reply, I use the word agobiado becuase it does a one-word job that English doesn’t have to explain a general feeling of stress/anxiety/over-work/too much on my shoulders.
And Marina understands what I mean perfectly, just as I understood her! Why speak in one language at a time, after all, when we have all the wonderful lexical tools of two at our disposal? We have a reached perfect, hybrid-bilingual communication at a sentence to sentence, word to word level.
Here´s the problem. Well two problems really.
Problem one, things get worse. Our hybrid-bilingual model quickly gets out of control. Let’s take my sentence from the above example again, and look at another version, that is almost more likely to be used these days:
Ben to Marina: Nothing, I’m just feeling a bit agobiated…
AgobIATED! Spanglish at it’s best! Yet it just sounds right, and I know that Marina knows exactly what I’m talking about, even if I am effectivily speaking the third language of rubbish!
But here’s the biggest problem of all: We are trying to bring up our baby to be bilingual. What chance has he got with words like ‘agobiated’ flying around the house?
Time to ditch the private language I think, and stick to those good old staples of English and Spanish, and preferably just one at a time!
To my daughter
Maria you are castigated tonight.
Totally agree and we are all English but have lived here for twenty years
Graham
16 Jun 09 at 9:24 am
I have several friends who are raising bilingual and trilingual kids, and from their experience the children do take slightly longer in their language development in the early years- ie they might rate as below average in vocabulary and literacy in any one language until around age 7, when it suddenly all comes together and explodes in multilingual articulateness!
Even if you include the rubbish, I am sure you are giving your son the most fantastic linguistic advantage by speaking both languages around him from day one. He will never be in the position I am, struggling as an adult to learn a second language, with the brain development window long since closed behind me!
Daisy
16 Jun 09 at 10:33 am
Amongst my circle of friends in Ronda (most of us are polyglots) we tend to mix and match between English, Spanish, German, French, and even Dutch. Most of us get the drift, and as you say, why use the awkward constructs of a single language when you can borrow a word or two from another. Several of us have joked that we’re creating a new Rondeño form of Esperanto
Andy from Ronda
16 Jun 09 at 10:33 am
I imagine that since Leo will grow up in a Spanish speaking environment, it might be more important for Ben to speak English the whole time, and be quite strict about it. I know a couple in a similar situation in the UK, with a 10 year old son who does not speak Spanish. The (Spanish) mother did not force the child to speak Spanish enough, the child rejected the language and now she can’t talk to her son in her native language.
bill (Legazpi)
16 Jun 09 at 11:03 am
My wife and I have a little inside joke: Whenever anyone asks us which language we use at home, or which we prefer, we answer…
¡Los both!
RayTibbitts
16 Jun 09 at 11:45 am
Ben, one golden advise: be consistent, i.e. each parent should speak always the same language to your kid(s). Preferably you ALWAYS English, and your wife ALWAYS Spanish. If not, they will become “lazy” with the languages and will never learn both languages perfectly. After a while they might even refuse to speak your language.
You should oblige them to reply in your own language. If they don’t, just pretend you don’t understand what they said (even if you do).
I have seen many cases of friends where the kids in the end chose one of both languages, and just learn the other passively, and all of this because the parents were not consistent from the beginning.
(I can tell, myself I’m Belgian, speak Flemmish to the kids, my wife speaks Spanish to the kids, and between us we regularly speak English as well, as we were living in the UK for many years.)
Saludos
Marc
Marc
16 Jun 09 at 12:14 pm
One day, Leo will be correcting both of you in your respective languages.
ValenciaSon
16 Jun 09 at 12:48 pm
I’m pretty much sure that the kid will be totally bilingual in the end, no matter who speaks what, even if “rubish” is thrown into the vocabulary. He’ll get both languages as mother tongue.
Of course this is a personal opinion, with not scientific proof, and I suppone there is literature out there setting strict rules on bilingual upbringing.
I wouldn´t worry too much, though, if your home environment is bilingual, he will pick them both and, as VS previously said, pretty soon he’ll be correcting you in two different languages. Lucky Leo will speak perfect English and Spanish with no effort put on his side.
Parubin
16 Jun 09 at 2:09 pm
My Spanish husband and I use the word “agobiated” too! It really should be an English word, it sounds like one. “Jose! Don’t agobiate me!”
We use both languages also, but I really try to stick to one or the other at a time, because my Spanish begins to suffer if I switch too much.
One more thing: my husband sometimes “makes up” words in English, hoping that they exist. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. For example the other day he said, “Are we ubicated?”
Sara
16 Jun 09 at 3:31 pm
I agree with Bill. I am french, married to an English and w raised our 2 daughter in England speaking french from the beginning since we knew they would have to learn English at school and from the environment (friends, family, television). Within 3 months of going to school, they were perfectly bilingual and have remained it.
M-Claude
16 Jun 09 at 3:33 pm
The exact same thing is happening in my house at the moment. Mi esposa and I are pretty good about not making it all the way to your rubbish language, but the mixture like the first example happens all the time.
And we, like you, have a baby in the house and we’re concerned about her ability to distinguish between the two languages if there’s so much mixture. I suspect that ten years from now it will be obvious that our concerns were unfounded and our kids will speak perfect English and Spanish and know rubbish when they hear it.
Erik R.
16 Jun 09 at 4:05 pm
My brother is American: he lives in Tokyo with a Japanese wife and two kids. His oldest, Zackary, age 4, was looking at an advertisement in Kanji with my brother the other day and said, “That’s too advanced for you, Daddy!” My brother is self-taught in Japanese (he works in an English speaking office) but still his son’s comment floored him, especially coming from a 4 year-old! Zack makes a grammar mistake every now and then, mixing up a verb tense here or there, but it’s amazing how well and adapted he is already, with the mother and father speaking strictly Japanese and English, respectively. Quite beautiful to watch Zack switch gears; try to get what he wants in not one but two languages.
Hollis
16 Jun 09 at 4:30 pm
We are also raising our kids bilingual. Even though we live in Germany, their English is much more advanced because of their attending an all day international school with a curriculum taught in English. Their free time is mostly spent with other international friends…
We as parents speak to them in our native languages, German and English, respectively. And from a book we bought on the topic, we also learned we should pick a “house language” = language spoken between parents in front of the children. The deciding factor is to choose the language spoken more correctly. If Marina’s English were better than your Spanish, it would be English, and vice versa.
I try to speak only German to my kids, but occasionally I slip, e.g. when my daughter addresses me in English, I sometimes respond in English or when I need to remind one of them for the umpteenth time to do something – then my last resort is English. Then he/she knows I am serious….:)
Maria S.
16 Jun 09 at 7:13 pm
I agree most with Marc – I have lots of friends in bilingual marriages over here who’ve gone through the same with their children. The kids DON’T pick both languages up by osmosis, even if both parents are strictly speaking to the kids in their own respective languages. The kids have to be made to speak both languages as well, otherwise they’ll end up tongue-tied in English, albeit with an excellent passive knowledge by their teens. The only couple I know with truly bilingual kids made them have English classes too, and put them through the Cambridge exam system.
Denise
16 Jun 09 at 9:52 pm
I really wouldn’t worry too much about this, Ben. I grew up in a bilingual home where my mother and I spoke primarily Spanish and my father and I spoke primarily English. When we all got together, it was a load of rubbish and we loved it because the rubbish helped us understand how words from both languages relate to each other! The great thing about this is that it allowed me, living in an environment where Spanish was hardly used outisde of the home, to keep my Spanish strong. I never studied it formally and so I am weak when it comes to certain points (mostly grammar in writing) but had I not grown up like this, I wouldn’t be able to speak Spanish at all!
I would try to avoid things like “agobiated” though, just to be safe, lol.
xoanwahn
17 Jun 09 at 9:20 am
@all_ thanks for all the comments. One thing it’s made me realise is that we will really have to work on the bilingual thing, and not just take it for granted!
Ben
17 Jun 09 at 10:53 am
Ben, you and Marina are intelligent, aware people so as Leo’s parents, you will be imprinting on Leo your penchant for curiosity and a need to expand awareness ever more. Genetically, Leo is no slouch either. So with the two, I believe the bilingual arrangement in Leo will be sorted out.
ValenciaSon
17 Jun 09 at 4:45 pm
Hola Ben!
My American husband and I (Spanish) live in the US and have three kids 3 years old and under. We’ve never successfully been strictly OPOL, though we have “Spanish-only hours” and “Spanish-only environments.”
When they were smaller, we tried to be very hard-core, like the books recommend, and for us it was a recipe for total agobiacion!
We had to decide that we’d rather have our kids be exposed to two languages as best as possible, let their proficiencies be supplemented over the years, but put the majority of focus into being more laid back (it’s an effort with so many little ones) and keeping the stress and the stressful (for us) OPOL structure to a minimum.
It’s a journey. I’ve wrote a whole series of columns on the issues of our young multilingual, multi-culti family.
I’m sure you’ll find what works for you, just give it a little time!
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza
17 Jun 09 at 7:40 pm
What you and Marina are doing is a linguistic tactic called code-switching. It used to be thought to be a sub-standard use of a language, but it is now thought to be a sign of high fluency in two languages. There are even studies that show how the brain seeks the shortest most succinct way to say something and thus mixes words even in the same sentence. It happens between me and my Spanish-speaking friends frequently.
Here is a Wikipedia article on code switching:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
That said, that third, jumbly language has got to go.
It is just horrible when Russian creeps into the Spanish-English thing I have going on. 
Donna
Espanglish
17 Jun 09 at 8:52 pm
Thanks again for new comments.
@Espanglish – great, I’m glad there is a name for it!
Ben
18 Jun 09 at 12:43 pm
Thats interesting..
Not too different from the way we do things in India, where almost everyone necessarily speaks at least 3 languages, sometimes more. English words generously seep into other languages and manipulations are common. It is almost a new breed of English now..!
Arun
19 Jun 09 at 4:29 am
Being from Gibraltar I was brought up mixing English and Spanish. Everyone in Gib speaks like this. The funniest one for me is the word “molestar” and when my brother said to an English friend that we always liked coming to Spain because no one would molest us here!!
Justin in Spain
21 Jun 09 at 6:35 pm
If we grownups learn our second language as best we can (in class, from friends, in the street, from books, Tv, etc, or a mix)why should the children be expected to follow formula. I think this is more of what they call in the states “helicopter parenting” – always hovering and worrying. It’s especially amusing to me because so many of us English-speaking foreigners are English teachers, and we should be aware of the fact that whatever we do as teachers, each person will have his/her learning style.
SarahHeartburn
21 Jun 09 at 9:23 pm
a variant on bilingual rubbish is mid bilingual sentence spoonerisms (cucharismos?) which agobiates you no fin.
paul gailey alburquerque
22 Jun 09 at 1:07 am