Language

I wonder when Little Girl’s Swedish will catch up to her English. She was just three when we moved here, and now, almost two years later, she’s finally gotten less shy about speaking Swedish, but her language skills are more par with a two-year-old. She has an American accent, a limited vocabulary, and makes a lot of non-native (not little kid-variety) grammar errors. People who don’t know her, or even who do, often don’t understand her when she speaks Swedish at all (I have no trouble except when she breaks out kid-type words she learned at playschool). Also, oddly, there are certain sounds she can pronounce easily in English (e.g. /v/) which she somehow can’t in Swedish. While she’s definitely improving, has even started talking to herself in Swedish when she plays, and has pretty much stopped speaking English entirely when at playschool, at least from what I’ve been told, Little Girl has been referred to a speech therapist to see what we can do to help her so she’ll be more prepared when she starts school next year. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her in terms of competence—her English is evidence of that—but if she can have some extra support, that would be great.

I do what I can for her Swedish, mostly in the form of reading library books and having her in playschool and in a few other activities in order to get more exposure to the language. A few months ago I also decided to make more of an effort to speak only Swedish with Swedish people, even if we’ve previously communicated only in English, even if they keep trying to talk to me in English, at least when Little Girl is around, with the idea that it would encourage Little Girl to feel more comfortable with the language and normalize its usage, and I think that’s really helped. Or maybe it was just seeing my attitude change (I’ve also been trying to integrate more and stop complaining about Sweden and Swedes in her earshot. Not that I have been super-successful with these goals.)

Husband still mostly speaks to her in English, as well as his parents (I have no idea why and I can’t get them to stop). I’m sure the speech therapist will have a thing or two to say about that. (They do speak Swedish to the baby, so maybe he’ll have an easier road.)

But my role is really to model English for her. Lately she’s starting making Swedish-sourced errors sometimes in her English, like calling all buildings “houses” or using Swedish words with English grammar or vice versa. I try to restate whatever she said in standard English. (I do that with her English errors too, of course). When she starts school we do plan to make use of Sweden’s school system’s offering instruction to immigrant children a few hours a week in their native language. And it’s harder for children to learn to read English than Swedish (what with English’s whackadoodle spelling) so we’ll probably do extra work on that at home if she ever gets interested in learning to read (so far that’s a big No.)

I hope–and I suppose there’s no reason to suppose this won’t happen—she will be fully fluent in all areas of communication in both Swedish and English and that she can go on to university and work and whatever else she will do in either the US or Sweden seeming just as much the native speaker in both. She’s had kind of a weirdly slow start with Swedish (to be honest my Swedish is significantly better than hers, and I don’t mean in an adult vs. kid kind of way) but there’s no reason she won’t catch up. If she does end up with an accent, it could actually be when she speaks English. That’s honestly what concerns me the most, my American-born daughter ending up not sounding like me at all!

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