00:00:15
Sharon Unsworth: Welcome to Kletsheads, the podcast about bilingual children. My name is Sharon Unsworth, linguist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and mother of two bilingual children. In this episode of Kletsheads kletsen we over language mixing. Why do bilingual children sometimes mix their two languages? Is it normal? And if we do it as parents, what impact does it have on our children’s language development? And we’re off to Canada. In Let’s Klets! I speak to a Dutch mom about her hopes and worries for a bilingual toddler and our Kletshead of the Week is the thirtysomething Christi, who tells us how she has a different personality when she speaks her three languages, Spanish, German and English. Keep listening to find out more. My children are bilingual. They can choose to speak either Dutch or English. My husband and I are also bilingual, so we can also choose to speak either Dutch or English. Which language we choose depends on who we’re with, where we are, and what we’re talking about. Usually we choose one of the two, so either English or Dutch, but sometimes we mix the two languages up. For example, if we speak English, we occasionally throw in a Dutch word. My son talks about his “pandaknuffel,” not his “panda soft toy,” and both kids have “afspraakjes,” not “playdates.” What can also happen is that one of us starts a conversation in English and the other continues in Dutch. Now, this happens most often when the kids have been playing with a friend, a Dutch-speaking friend. I’ll say something in English and they’ll answer in Dutch. For someone who only speaks one language all day, it might sound weird or even not quite right. But for bilinguals, mixing the two languages is actually pretty normal. Nevertheless, as a parent, you sometimes wonder if all this mixing is okay. Are bilingual children really supposed to mix? Could it perhaps be a sign that they can’t keep their two languages apart? And what happens to your child’s language development if you mix the two languages yourself? Can you better avoid mixing altogether? In this episode of Kletsheads, we answer these questions with the help of Elma Bloom, professor at Utrecht University. We’re both in the Netherlands, but of course, because of the pandemic, our conversation took place online. I started by asking Elma why bilingual children sometimes mix their two languages.
00:02:43
Elma Blom: I think, and this is also supported by research, of course, because there has been quite a bit of research into language-mixing by children, but they mix for several reasons. They mix, for instance, because they don’t know a word in the language, the language they’re speaking, and then they use or they borrow a word from the other languages. So that’s a form of mixing.
00:03:06
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, yeah. I can see that with my kids. Sometimes they either don’t know a word in one of their two languages or they just use it more often in one. So we know right now we’re in the middle of lockdown and we’re doing homeschooling and then we never really talk about doing maths, right. It’s always, “Come on, let’s do your rekenen,” right, which is the Dutch word for maths. And even, you know, my youngest even told me, “Don’t call it maths. It’s not called maths. It’s called rekenen.”
00:03:41
Elma Blom: Yeah. They also mix because their parents mix for instance, so if it’s really normal in the household to mix the languages and then the children will do the same as the parents do, of course. It might also be the case, that’s the thing that we don’t know that much about, but that we expect that it’s also causing the mixing by children, that some children might not be able to handle plus one language. So if you really need to speak in one language and it’s a one language situation, then you have to suppress the other language, and some children might not be able to do so, so that might also be a reason why they mix in a situation where they’re not supposed to mix.
00:04:27
Sharon Unsworth: So they are in a situation where they were, you know, one of the two languages is not relevant. So I can imagine school would be the classic case for this, right, where they shouldn’t use their other language. But some kids might have a harder time ignoring their other language, I guess. Is that what you mean by suppressing?
00:04:47
Elma Blom: Yes, true, that’s what I mean. So it’s something that we do expect, but there hasn’t been that much research into this aspect.
00:04:56
Sharon Unsworth: So I suppose the question that all parents really have is whether you should worry about this. What do you think?
00:05:04
Elma Blom: No, in general, I would say you shouldn’t worry about it because in a way it’s pretty normal that bilingual children mix. And it’s also not a sign that they’re confused or so, we know that even though they mix, mixing languages, they know very well which language to speak in what situation. If they really need to separate their languages they can do so. We know that, for instance, from studies that have been looking at whether children have different mixing behaviour when speaking to one parent compared to the other parent. There was a famous study from a Norwegian-English-speaking girl whose father mixes quite a bit and her mother doesn’t, but if you look at her child’s mixing behaviour, she doesn’t mix that much when she speaks with her mother, and she speaks with her father, she mixes much more. So that indicates that she knows very well how to use her languages and whether or not to mix. And that was a two-year-old girl, so they know this from a very early age onwards.
00:06:16
Sharon Unsworth: Yes. So kids tend to know, right, if it’s even an option to mix. Right. I speak Dutch, so my kids know that they can throw in Dutch words if they want to know.
00:06:27
Sharon Unsworth: When bilinguals mix the two languages, they don’t do this willy-nilly. There’s plenty of research showing that sentences with words from two different languages follow rules. It’s not just some multilingual mishmash. The ways in which bilinguals mix can also be pretty creative. I’m sure many parents who are listening can think of examples of how their children use their two languages in interesting and sometimes quite amusing ways. My favourite example is from my daughter when she was 18 months old. We’d just come back from a three-month stay in the US, where she’d barely heard any Dutch. She was speaking, but not much, and mostly in English. She clearly knew, though, that when she was speaking to oma and opa, her Dutch-speaking grandparents, that she needed to speak Dutch. And I remember her saying to oma, “Kijk” – look – “a monkeytje.” So, what she’d done is to take the English word monkey and stick on some Dutch morphologies or bit of a Dutch word, the “the” part, to make it sound more Dutch, to make a Dutch word out of it. She didn’t know the Dutch word at the time, aap, so the Dutch word for monkey, but she’d managed in a very creative way to mix the two languages so that she could make the words sound more Dutch for oma. We’ll hear more about this very productive part of Dutch later in Let’s Klets.
00:07:49
Sharon Unsworth: What about at school? Because I know sometimes I know also from personal experience that bilingual children can use words from the home language at school. Now, of course, in our case, my kids speak English. The teacher understands, more or less understands, what our children are saying if they throw in English words, and one of them certainly used to. But for many languages, that won’t be the case. And I wonder, you know, should you do something about that as a teacher if you have bilingual children who are using the home language at school?
00:08:21
Elma Blom: Yeah, I think if it really fits with the conversation, if you’re a teacher, we are not able to understand the child and it hinders the interaction and also possibly the relationship you have with a child, you have to do something about it and try to understand what the child is saying. That’s, of course, very difficult if it’s a language that you’re not familiar with and that is a very different from the language you know. But what you could do in those cases is ask for help from parents because they will know the words the child is saying and they can make translations for you so you are better able to understand the child and also help the child with learning the word in other words, in the language of schooling.
00:09:10
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So, in fact, these are suggestions made by Mari Varsányi in the last episode of Kletsheads, where she talked about five simple steps to make space for bilingualism in the classroom. So if there are listeners who are interested in that, teachers maybe, then maybe go back to that episode and you’ll be able to find out more there. Okay, so I think we’re now going to hear from our Kletshead of the Week.
00:09:40
Kletshead of the Week
Sharon Unsworth: In every episode of Kletsheads, we speak to a bilingual child about what it’s like to grow up with more than one language. In this episode were speaking to someone who grew up bilingual but who is by now no longer a child. In fact, as you’ll hear, she now has her own child.
Christi: I’m Christi. I’m in my mid-thirties and I currently live in Guelph, Canada and I grew up speaking German and Spanish, and speak now English, German and Spanish fluently.
Sharon Unsworth: So you were raised bilingual, but where did you learn those two languages? German and Spanish.
Christi: Sure. So my dad is Austrian and I talked to him in German and to my brother in German as well. And my mother would always talk to us in Spanish, basically. And obviously, I grew up in Vienna, so we would talk in German to our friends in school, so, yeah.
Sharon Unsworth: And how was that growing up bilingually with Spanish as one of your home languages?
Christi: That’s a good question. It was interesting. It was good. But it was also strange because at the time Vienna was not very multicultural. So it very often didn’t feel like an advantage at the time, at least culturally and socially. But speaking two languages, it had benefits. It attuned me to learning other languages very easily, but it also came with its confusions. So, you know, if you grow up speaking two languages, you might kind of constantly, like, change words and kind of replace words. You kind of talk German and then, like, use the Spanish word. So, yeah.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. That’s pretty normal, I think. Yeah, yeah. Monolinguals can’t do that, right. How did you learn English?
Christi: Well I started learning English when I was 15 in high school, but I had made up my mind that I wanted to do my higher education in North America. So when I was 18 I moved to North America.
Sharon Unsworth: So three languages. How much do you use each of those languages now?
Christi: Well, that’s a really good question, because I predominantly use English because it’s been such a huge part of my life academically and my relationships are predominantly in English. So that has kind of become my dominant language at this point. And I speak to my mom on the phone occasionally, always in Spanish, but it’s not like we talk every day for hours. And then German has kind of been on the back burner, mostly. My father and I don’t have the greatest relationship, so we don’t talk very often. My brother and I don’t really talk much either. But I had a baby a year ago and I decided to talk to her in German. So that’s kind of like I’m speaking more German now since I’ve become her mother, but it’s a very basic German.
Sharon Unsworth: So I find that really interesting. And so what made you choose to speak German rather than, say, Spanish?
Christi: Because I went to school in Austria and I feel like I’m just grammatically better equipped to teach her the language. And because Spanish was like my second language, but it never came with a very thorough education that you get when you learn a language in like primary school and high school, like where all the kind of the foundations are set. Since I didn’t have that with Spanish, I decided that German was the way I had to go.
Sharon Unsworth: What does it mean to you though, now? That you are still trilingual. What does that mean to you?
Christi: Maybe this is not the best answer, but it means to me that I have three types of personality.
Sharon Unsworth: Oh, that is a great answer, tell me more!
Christi: I think that with each language has come a different type of universe, of relating, and being. So I think like when I think of German, I think of a certain version of myself and a certain kind of personality might be more introverted, more kind of cautious, more timid. But then when I think of Spanish, it has come with more kind of, like, more kind of joyful, more open, more kind of like, just kind of extroverted. And then English has come with kind of a mix between the two, kind of the type of personality that I invented myself, that was not there was not imposed to some extent. So it’s more kind of like, a remaking or redoing of Christi on her own terms, I would say, yeah.
Sharon Unsworth: That’s super interesting. I also feel slightly different in English than in Dutch. So I’m a fluent speaker of Dutch. I don’t really know any research about that, by the way. But what about, like, your identity? How do you describe yourself when somebody says, oh, where are you from?
Christi: God, my identity. That’s really hard. So like in Austria, I was never quite a typical Austrian because I grew up with, like, a Spanish-speaking mother who kind of also had made it her profession to teach Spanish. So our entire life was surrounded, on her side, kind of by people talking in Spanish to us by her work being dominated by the language and then also traveling every summer to Ecuador. So it made me very different, culturally. But then again, being in South America was also strange because I was very much European and obviously had spoken German as a… had spoken it predominantly. So it was always like never really fitting in I think, like, the languages have given me an access to the world. That is pretty broad because I feel like you’ve become attuned to other people more easily, to other languages, to other cultures. But at the same time, it also makes you a little bit rootless. I would say, like, identity is very hard to pinpoint.
Sharon Unsworth: Going back to your language, so you said you’re speaking German to your child, a little girl or little boy?
Christi: Little girl.
Sharon Unsworth: Little girl. And what other languages does she hear?
Christi: Well, she hears English. My husband speaks to her in English and our babysitter speaks to her in English. So, yeah, she’s turning 15 months. Yeah. She says more German words at this point. Yeah. Yay for me.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, I was gonna say how does that make you feel then?
Christi: It is strange. It is strange. I hope my German will keep improving as she gets older. It’s kind of like relearning the language again. It’s really strange because I’ve spoken English for so long now that I feel like at times German has become very passive. But I found myself kind of like accessing more vocabulary again as she ages. So it’s kind of weird how memory starts kicking in.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. Have you got a favourite German or Spanish?
Christi: It’s probably swearword.
Sharon Unsworth: Well, we can’t have that on the podcast.
Christi: I know.
Sharon Unsworth: One last question then. So looking back, you know, the fact that you were raised bilingually, can you tell us what the best thing and the worst thing has been about that?
Christi: Well, the best thing is that you have something that a lot of people don’t have. It’s almost kind of like an access not just to language, but to so many other things that come with the language. And the worst thing is that I think sometimes people can also feel intimidated. Maybe that’s not the right word, but taken aback by you kind of having this kind of multifaceted personality. It can be confusing to others.
Sharon Unsworth: Right, very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us and sharing your thoughts on what it’s like to have grown up bilingually.
Christi: Thanks for all the questions.
00:18:25
Sharon Unsworth: I’m sat here today, well not literally sat here because, of course, we’re at the other side of a computer screen, but I’m here with Elma Blom from Utrecht University and we’re talking about language mixing. So far, we’ve spoken about mixing by children. But now I want to talk about mixing by adults or rather by the parents. So parents, like I said in the introduction, often mix their two languages and often worry about the fact that they do this. Should they be worried?
00:18:56
Elma Blom: Based on what we know from the scientific literature, I think we shouldn’t be too worried. So there have been a few studies that have been looking into the effects of parental mixing parents. If parents mix a lot of it, whether that’s kind of detrimental for the development of the children. There have been three studies that have been really addressing this question. One study has shown a slight negative effect of mixing. So the more parents mix, the smaller the vocabularies were of children in English, in one of their languages. But this was only a small effect at the age of one and a half, I think, and at the age of two had disappeared again.
00:19:32
Sharon Unsworth: Not too worrisome then.
00:19:34
Elma Blom: Not too worrisome, I would say, also in a light of the other studies. So there was another study that hasn’t shown any effect, either a positive or negative effect. And there was a study that has shown positive effect, actually, in the sense that the more the parents mixed within a sentence, the larger the total, so the combined, vocabulary of children of both the languages was.
00:20:01
Sharon Unsworth: Okay, so the more parents mixed when speaking to the kids, the more words the kids knew overall when you take both their languages together. Okay. I think that might feel quite counterintuitive to some people. What was their explanation for that then?
00:20:16
Elma Blom: Yeah, yeah. I think the authors also felt it was kind of counterintuitive. So they really thought about how to explain this. And their suggestion was that maybe what parents do is that they start to mix a little bit more when the children are linguistically a little bit more mature. So when they’re kind of more developed that the parents kind of are behaving a little bit more loosely in terms of how they control the language, that they start to mix a little bit more. So that was their suggestion.
00:20:47
Sharon Unsworth: So it’s like parents realize, well, my kids can handle it, so it doesn’t matter if I chuck in a few words from the other language.
00:20:55
Elma Blom: Maybe, and we are not sure if it is really a conscious thing, like really realizing it, but that’s what the researchers suggested.
00:21:02
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, okay.
00:21:07
Let’s Klets
Sharon Unsworth: Every episode I speak to a parent or teacher about their experiences with bilingual children. In this episode I speak to someone who is from the Netherlands but now lives in Canada, where she’s raising her own child bilingually.
Liz: My name is Liz and I live in Guelph, Ontario. That’s in Canada. And I speak Dutch with my son Otis.
Sharon Unsworth: And what other languages does a hear and from whom?
Liz: So he hears Dutch mainly from me. Before the pandemic, we had a neighbour who was Dutch and she would sometimes babysit him, I remember now. And so he would see her too. But otherwise he hears mainly English from my husband. He is Egyptian and he grew up with both Arabic and English as a child, and he has decided, to my discontent, to speak English to our son. But sometimes he hears some Arabic words as well. And when he speaks with his grandparents over FaceTime, he hears some Arabic through that as well. And the environment he lives in, Ontario is mainly English. So everyone around him speaks English. And at home, my husband and I speak English, too. So, yeah, it’s very English, with me as a strong Dutch component for him.
Sharon Unsworth: Then how is it going then with his bilingualism?
Liz: Actually, the past few weeks started using a lot of words and I was always worried, you know, in this English environment. So I made a list of the words that he knows and I started counting and actually most of the words that he produces are Dutch. So in that sense, I’m really happy with that. I’m also very happy with the fact that my husband is picking up Dutch pretty well, too. And he uses Dutch in some of his sentences. And he’s very creative with Dutch as well. Like it. He attaches the Dutch diminutive like a “the” or “je” to a lot of English nouns.
Sharon Unsworth: Right. So far for the listeners who don’t know any Dutch. So if you had a biscuit so in British English at least, you turn it into a bickie, kind of a diminutive and then Dutch is very, very productive in this way. And you can turn and Dutch speakers do turn pretty much anything and everything into a diminutive by adding “je” to the end of something. So he does that too in English?
Liz: Yeah. He says things like, “Where’s your cartje?” And he uses Dutch words in his English sentences as well. He says things like, “I want to go lekker eten,” which means you want to go have yummy food. So the words that he does, knowing that he actually uses them in his English, which is quite cute.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. And so, you know, I can imagine there are people listening and thinking, “Oh is that okay?” You sound like that makes you feel very happy. Is that the case or do you sometimes worry?
Liz: So when he uses the Dutch incorrectly, I correct him because I’m like, “Don’t give my son input that’s incorrect.” But because I’m not so worried about it affecting his English, especially because he hears so much English around him. So I think adding Dutch to his English is cute because he’s going to be so English dominant. But I’m very hesitant and careful with using English in my Dutch because I want to give him proper and consistent Dutch input just because it’s the minority language. Yeah. Most are all bilingual kids go through stages where they mix languages. So I know this is going to happen, that it’s going to be a phase. And at some point he’s going to be better at separating. And I think also a lot of the language becomes like some kind of like home lingo where you would assert certain words that are always used in our house in one language or in the other.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we have that, too, right. So the we never say “cuddly toy” or “soft toy.” We always say “knuffeltje.” So you said your husband grew up himself bilingually, Arabic and English. He’s made the decision to speak English to his kids and am curious about that. What led him to make that decision, if you don’t mind me asking?
Liz: I have asked him several times to why this is the case, and he always says that it’s so hard for him to switch. And I also think it has to do with the fact that he has been outside of Egypt for so long. He’s been in Canada for almost 10 years. This is the language of him that he uses. Like, I have a lot of contact with friends and family in the Netherlands, while he speaks with his parents but doesn’t have as much contact. So for him, it’s I think it’s become more natural to speak English. And for me, English is still very much a second language, even though I’m fluent in it, while for him I think it’s very much like a mother tongue, he started speaking when he moved with his parents to England when he was six years old. So he has a different, I think, a different emotional feeling with English than I have. So when he says to our son, “Well done, my love,” I can hear in the voice it expresses so much love, the term, “my love.” When I say “my love,” it doesn’t sound real. When I use the word like “lieverdje,” that sounds much more natural and sincere to me.
Sharon Unsworth: So for him then it’s really a choice of what language feels most natural to him as a parent to use when talking to his child.
Liz: We had arguments when Otis was very young, when he was eight months old and Achmed hadn’t spoken enough in Arabic to him. He always says he tries and he tries when he’s on the phone with the family. But I don’t think Otis will ever be effluence speaker of Arabic unless he decides himself at a later age. But I’m happy if he understand a bit of what his grandparents are telling him.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. Yeah. You live in the English-speaking part of Canada. How do the people around you react to the fact that you’re raising a child bilingually?
Liz: I think most people are very positive. Sometimes they just stand and look and listen. But Ontario has a large population of people from Dutch descent. So a lot of people recognize the language. Most people are from second or third generation and, you’ll know this as well that back in the days when people emigrated, they were more pushed towards speaking the language of the country instead of maintaining their heritage language. So most of these people understand some words but don’t really speak it so they’re very positive hearing that Otis speaks it.
Sharon Unsworth: It’s this kind of nostalgia, then.
Liz: Yeah, and there’s a Dutch store in our town that sells Dutch food products. And whenever there with Otis a lot of people come to us to talk. “What is that? I hear that, I know they’re speaking Dutch.” Also because we’re in the Dutch store because, you know, who else wants to buy hagelslag?
Sharon Unsworth: That’s the chocolate sprinkles that Dutch people put on their sandwiches, which even after 20 years, still seems rather strange. So, pretty positive. What do you think’s the biggest challenge then for you as the parent who speaks the minority language?
Liz: I think the biggest challenge is to for Otis to continue speaking to me in Dutch, even when he realizes that I understand English and that English may be easier for him through schooling and his environment.
Sharon Unsworth: I can imagine there are parents who are listening to this who just like you have got a young child or maybe are about to start the journey with a child that they want to raise bilingually. Do you have a tip for those parents?
Liz: I would say to speak the language that comes most naturally. So you sometimes I hear someone say, “Oh, yeah, I lived in Spain for two years. Maybe I should speak Spanish to my children.” But I think unless you really feel the language, you know how to express everything in that language, express your emotions, it may not come as natural. So I would always speak the language that comes the most natural. And in the beginning, I was a little bit afraid that I would be excluding my partner in conversations I had with my son because he didn’t speak Dutch. So another tip would be to just try, because I noticed that my husband picks up a lot of Dutch from me speaking to him. So it’s positive not only for my child, but also for him and for us as a family. So, yeah, just give it a try.
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, that’s a great tip because I think a lot of people do really worry about that, right, when they know that their partner doesn’t understand their language or they’re worried about what family conversations will look like. So, so far in your house, so good.
Liz: Yeah, it’s been great.
00:31:08
Sharon Unsworth: So there’s actually not being that much research on the effect of language mixing by parents on children’s language development. But what we do know then suggests there’s no real reason to think there’s a negative effect.
00:31:22
Elma Blom: But of course, much more research is needed to look more closely at this and also whether it is different for children who have a language disorder.
00:31:32
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, so I know that you’re about to embark on a large project for five years on the topic of language mixing, and maybe we can finish by you telling us a bit about what it is you’re going to do and what you hope to find.
00:31:45
Elma Blom: Yeah, of course. So it’s also the reason why I really want to do this research is because, well, we know there are quite some studies that have been looking at mixing by children, but many of them are case studies, so looking at a few children. I want to look at many more children, because what we know is that bilingualism is very heterogeneous and a child in one family is very different from a child in another family. And I also wanted to really find out more about the influence of parental mixing, because there are so few studies around, and I wanted to combine different methods. And I wanted to look and compare also children who have language disorder to children who are typically developing in this respect. So I want to know. So maybe mixing by parents doesn’t affect the language of who have a normal language development, but this might be different for children who really have trouble learning language.
00:32:41
Sharon Unsworth: I suppose we can come back to you in four, four or five years and find out the answer to that question. What methods are you going to use? How are you going to track the mixing patterns?
00:32:50
Elma Blom: That’s a challenge because mixing is very influenced by context. And also, if you really start to try to collect data experimentally you try to control everything and that can influence kind of naturalistic mixing behaviour. But what we’re going to do is make full-day recordings of parent-child interactions at home because I think to understand mixing, how parents mix, why children mix, all these kind of things, you really need to look into naturalistic data and also in different situations; during dinnertime, what happens during playing, during book reading? Something we would like to do is to ask children to name as many words as they can. Start with the letter F, the sound “f” and then they can go with one language or they can notice within both the languages. And then we want to see, for instance, if children have to do this in one language, there might be children who kind of still use words in the other language. It might also be the case that in a situation where children are allowed to use both languages to do this test, that they are able to name many more words with an ‘f’. So that could be an argument to say, okay, if they’re allowed to use both languages, they can perform much better.
00:34:19
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. So it’s to see both what the positive and the negative consequences can be of mixing or being allowed to mix. Well, we look forward to hearing the results. Good luck with all of that.
00:34:33
Sharon Unsworth: So when a child mixes their two languages, this isn’t a sign that they themselves are mixed up. Mixing is a natural part of being bilingual. Some bilinguals makes more than others. And we know from work on language mixing with adults that the extent to which bilinguals mix can depend on many things; who they’re talking to, what they’re talking about, and where they are. It’s likely that this will be the same for children. We’ll have to wait for the results from Elma’s project to find out more. What we do know is that children often mix because they don’t know the word in the other language, or at least they’re less familiar with it. So it’s a stage that many young bilingual children pass through. You can see it as them using all the knowledge that they have to communicate. The extent to which they continue to mix languages as they grow older will in part depend on how much mixing they hear around them. Most parents who speak more than one language themselves mix the two languages when speaking to the child. Some do it more than others, but there is research showing that even when parents say they don’t mix, if you actually go on record what they say they do. But as we heard in the episode, at least on the basis of the research available, there’s no reason to worry about this. There’s no reason to think that mixing as a parent will have a negative impact on your child’s language development. Now, I actually think that many of our fears as parents about language mixing stem from a perspective on the world where in many places, the Netherlands included, being monolingual is seen as the norm and being bilingual the exception. So maybe it’s time then to embrace bilingualism and all that this entails. That’s it for this episode. We’ll be back next month with a new episode on bilingual siblings. If you want to know more about Kletsheads, go to kletsheadspodcast.org. That’s where you’ll also find more information about this episode. And if you want to make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe to Kletsheads using your favourite podcast app. Make sure you select the English edition. And if you’ve enjoyed the show, why not share it with a friend? Thanks for listening. And as we say in Dutch, tot de volgende keer!
This transcript was generated using amberscript.com and was checked by Marieke van den Akker.