Why we decided to start a bilingual family

Back when I was in college and working towards my masters in Language Acquisition and expecting our first child, I came across a book by George Saunders (see reference below). I was intrigued by the fact that Mr. Saunders raised his children German-speaking even though he was a native English-speaking American. The more I read, the more excited I got. I had never really considered raising my children German-speaking. It was a novel idea! And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, "I can do this." If George could pull it off as a dad who worked outside the home, then certainly I could do it as a stay-at-home mom. My German was far from perfect, but my pronunciation was pretty good. And speaking German to a baby wouldn't require super complex language structures. This was definitely something I could do.

The more I mulled the idea around in my head, the more obsessed I became with the whole idea. I started researching non-native bilingual parenting. It was 1990 and there just wasn't that much info available. Most of the research I came across discouraged what I was hoping to attempt. Most of the reasoning was that if you speak only your imperfect, non-native language to your child, that your child will not learn ANY language well. This was probably the biggest obstacle in my decision making process. I sure didn't want to harm my child's language ability and take away or hamper his future ability to express himself.

But the idea continued to grow despite the doubts. I did find some positive research that supported my intentions. I read about the many hearing parents raising children in (their non-native) ASL and vise versa: Deaf parents who "spoke" ASL to their hearing children. These children usually grew up to speak English just fine. My husband and I discussed my findings and decided that we would give it a try despite all the nay-sayers, mostly because of our gut feeling that we could pull this off.

Saunders, George. Bilingual Parenting: Guidance for the Family. Multilingual Matters, Ltd.: Clevedon, 1982.