The bumble-bee moment of a bilingual baby, or how Alex started to talk

Alex was a bit slow to start talking. Not so slow that we thought we had an issue on our hands, but slow enough that we brought it up with our pediatrician at the 18-month well-baby appointment. (And certainly slow enough that we were growing weary of his fall-back position of just pointing at the thing he wanted and yelling.) Our pediatrician (who is Norwegian, of all things, and wonderful) asked us if Alex used "Mama" and "Papa" (the Swiss say Papa or Papi but we actually use Dada) properly and if he can follow basic directions; if children are doing that before their second birthday he's not concerned but makes a note to follow up at the two-year well-baby appointment. And yes, at 18 months Alex was calling us Mama and Dada and he had a small handful of other words as well; not many, granted, but he was in command of a fistful of simple random nouns - water, ball, music, star, bus, moon. (It's no accident that all of those words are cognates - words that are the same [or remarkably similar] in English and German: water/Wasser, ball/Ball, music/Musik, star/Stern, bus/Bus, moon/Mond.)

A lot of parents of bilingual children will tell you that their children didn’t start talking until the end of their second year, but I’ve seen some literature that suggests that the delay for bilingual children relative to monolingual children is actually closer to the delay for boys relative to girls; that is, about four to six weeks rather than the much longer delay assumed by conventional wisdom. I can’t explain this discrepancy, and I tend to trust parents’ assessments of their own children, so when my friends with bilingual children tell me their children didn’t start speaking until quite late – compared to where they "should be" on a developmental assessment chart, anyway – I tend to believe them. And in light of the linguistic chaos Alex negotiates on any given day, we really tried to cut him some slack in the Onset of Speech Department.

Reto and I are raising Alex bi-lingually. We take a a one-parent/one-language approach - each parent speaks one and only one language with the child - and we're pretty strict about it. I speak English with Alex in private and in public, in mixed-language groups and when we're together with Reto's parents who do not understand English. Some of you have experienced speaking English with Reto only to have him turn his head and rattle off something incomprehensibly Swiss to Alex. It sounds straightforward, and for the most part it is, but consider the full language environment in which Alex operates: although I speak only English with Alex, I often speak German (not Swiss) in front of him - with my in-laws, in a store or restaurant, when we visit the Mütterberaterin, with some of the mothers in play group. He hears me switching back and forth, and that must be confusing on some level. It must be even more confusing when he watches Reto switch from Swiss with him to English with me, unless we’re at his parents’ in which case he speaks Swiss with Alex and German with me, unless his parents aren’t in the room and then he might address me in English or German, depending on mood and context and topic; but if the two of them are visiting his parents without me Reto stays in Swiss the whole time. I get confused just writing all of that so I can only imagine what Alex's mental map of the world must look like.

Whatever the professional literature says, I can honestly say that in Alex's case it was well past his second birthday when he hit that moment all the baby books refer to as the "word-a-day" stage. It was late April (so Alex was almost 27 months old) and Alex and I were taking a walk through a little triangular park between our apartment and the university. We were looking at the flowers and a big fat bumble-bee staggered, pollen-drunk, from one tulip to the next.

"Alex! Look!" I said. "A bumble-bee!"

"Bum-bum bee!" Alex said. "Bum-bum bee!"

And he's never looked back. The words piled on top of one another, one two three a day. There were ants! and ladybugs! and bees! and worms! Leaves! Dogs! Birdies! And not just words in English. Wa-wa became Wasser. He chose Baum over tree, Blumen over flowers, Auto over car, Zug over train. Nouns, nouns, nouns to name his world. He went from two word sentences to four word sentences like a colt tripping down hill. He's into double digits and I've stopped counting and can hardly remember those days when his method of asking for something to eat was to slap the palm of his hand against the refrigerator door. In fact, in the four months since our bumble-bee moment not only has Alex become a chatterbox, he has become a chatterbox with a clear langugage preference.

Are you ready for this?

Alex prefers speaking Swiss. He understands everything I say to him in English, but very clearly prefers to speak Swiss. I'll confess that this scenario never really occurred to me. I've always held in the back of my mind the very real possibility - the likelihood, really - that once he started attending school he wouldn't want to speak English in front of his friends, wouldn't want to stand out as different like that, but I always assumed that up until that point he'd show a preference for English. I'm a stay at home mother and I'm a motor-mouth, ergo Alex will have a bias for English, right? But Alex, Alex prefers Swiss. One of the many ways he reminds me every day how very much his own person he is. From the minute that boy was born he had personality pouring off him, he had his own ideas.

And for now he's expressing those ideas in Swiss.