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, we’re talking about a topic we’ve not really discussed yet on the podcast, and that’s well-being in bilingual families and how this relates to how much and how well children speak their heritage or home language. I also share with you our second Kletsheads Quick and Easy. Keep listening to find out more.

00:00:57
Sharon Unsworth: Children who grow up hearing two or more languages don’t always end up actively using all their languages as they get older. In such cases, it’s typically the heritage or minority home language which suffers at the expense of the school language. As we heard in the last episode of Kletsheads, when I spoke to my neighbour Kate, children may be perfectly capable of speaking the heritage language, but prefer to use the language or languages spoken at school. In some cases, though, they might not be able to speak the heritage language well enough in order to express themselves properly. This isn’t only a great source of frustration for parents who may feel disappointed and in some cases rejected by their child’s inability or unwillingness to use their native language. But it can also make communication quite difficult. And parents may sometimes switch to speak in the school language in order to be able to communicate with their child, even though in some cases they themselves may not be very proficient in that language. All of this can have a negative impact on the relationship between parent and child and on children’s well-being. This is the topic we’re talking about in this episode of Kletsheads. What is the impacts of children’s use and knowledge of the heritage language on family well-being? To answer this question, I’m joined by two researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK, dr. Elspeth Wilson and Professor Napoleon Katsos. I started by asking Elspeth what we mean when we’re talking about well-being.

00:02:42
Elspeth Wilson: Generally, people talk about it in two ways. Objective well-being or objective measures of well-being and subjective. And now objective measures of well-being are things like measures of physical health, psychological health, kind of security, job opportunities, education, things like that. And they’re obviously factors that contribute to well-being. And subjective well-being is people’s perceived life satisfaction. And that’s what we’re kind of interested in and what we mean you’re going to be talking about today.

00:03:16
Sharon Unsworth: In Dutch we have this really nice phrase for that, you say “lekker in je vel“, so you’re feeling comfy in your skin.

00:03:24
Elspeth Wilson: Exactly. The PISA study, which listeners may have heard of, it’s a kind of big international survey of children and their education. They asked a few years ago, in 2015, about well-being, and they basically asked two students to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of nought to ten, where nought means they’ve got the worst possible life and ten means the best possible life. And so that’s what we mean. Of course, you can go into different aspects of that and people do. And it’s also worth mentioning it’s not the same as mental health. So well-being and mental health are separate things. Actually, they don’t necessarily correlate very strongly and they do seem to be different factors that can feed into each one and so yesterday when we’re talking about growing up with more than one language and well-being, we’re very much talking about life satisfaction, kind of happiness rather than the mental health.

00:04:25
Sharon Unsworth: Okay, that’s good to know because I think intuitively you might think the two are associated with each other. So it’s interesting to know that they’re not. So when it comes then to communication between children and parents or just within the family more generally, what what is the role of communication in well-being and why is this particularly relevant then to bilingual families?

00:04:46
Elspeth Wilson: Yeah, well communication is massive for well-being. So various surveys, I’ve already mentioned PISA, there’s the children as well survey, we have something in the UK called the Good Childhood Report that comes out every year. They’ve identified like the main factors that help people have a high level of well-being, or particularly children. And three of the factors that the Good Childhood report has identified are the self, learning and relationships. Now I think as multilingual people and families, if we hear self, learning and relationships, we can probably immediately begin to think of ways that connect with learning more than one language or using more than one language. Obviously, self all to do with identity and in speaking more than one language or having two or more cultures or heritages. The opportunity to learn more than one language is a unique learning opportunity. And then there’s relationships. That’s where the communication comes in. So better peer relationships, better, particularly child-parent relationships leads to better well-being. Again, PISA found that those young people who just sat and had a meal every day or most days with their parents and had that opportunity to talk, had higher levels of well-being. So communication really is key. Well, how does this connect to growing up bilingually? In a bilingual context, it’s not just the communication, but how you communicate that’s at stake. Yeah, not just the kind of quality and the content of, you know, what you’re saying, how you’re communicating, but it’s actually which language you choose to communicate in.

00:06:31
Sharon Unsworth: Right. So if you if you’re sitting around the table having your meal, then there’s an extra element then, if you’re bilingual family, what language you use to talk about what happened during the day.

00:06:41
Elspeth Wilson: Exactly. And this can be a kind of source of positive well-being and it can benefit people’s well-being. It can aid those relationships and feed into life satisfaction. Or it can also say that we’ll talk about it later, be a source of tension in the family and actually take away from that that feeling of well-being. It’s worth mentioning, a kind of term that Anita Howard has coined for this kind of phenomenon. She talks about harmonious bilingualism, basically what she means by that is the experience of well-being in a language context situation. When children are growing up learning more than one language. but how many is bilingualism kind of encapsulates that idea that how you use language can positively feed into your well-being.

00:07:36
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So we can definitely see then and I’m sure listeners will recognize that there’s going to be some potential role for the languages that that you and your child use when it comes to your your child’s well-being and the relationship that you have with your child. I mentioned in the introduction just then that when children’s proficiency in the minority or heritage language, when that remains limited and they essentially switch to the school language, which we know many children do, that this can have a negative effect on the relationship with their children. Is that actually right? What, what does the research available on that topic say, Napoleon? What effects do we see?

00:08:19
Napoleon Katsos: Yeah, we did a scoping review with this question in the back of our mind. The review was done by a number of researchers Lisa Marie Mueller, Katie Howard, Jenny Gibson, Elspeth and I looked at the research that has been done up to 2020, and we found 17 studies that had looked at the relationship between language use in bilingual families and the families well-being. Now, out of these 17 studies, ten of them were concerned with bilingual families in the USA and the rest took place in countries such as Australia, Israel, Finland and the UK. So to be honest, relatively speaking, given how much attention bilingualism has attracted as a field, one can see that there isn’t a great volume of research on the topic yet. And also the majority of this research is very much on Western contexts.

00:09:16
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah.

00:09:17
Napoleon Katsos: But given these limitations, still, there were some very clear and very robust findings. Maintaining the minority language and learning the society’s dominant language together are positively associated with good family relationships and with child well-being. And specifically, as regards the children’s knowledge of the minority language, higher proficiency in it is associated with improved family cohesion, with less emotional stress in children and parents, and with psychosocial balance and harmony.

00:09:52
Sharon Unsworth: Can I just ask, what does psychosocial balance and harmony mean? What do we mean by that?

00:09:56
Napoleon Katsos: Psychosocial means less experience of negative emotions and better interpersonal relations. Now, I have to say, you know, there’s a lot of heterogeneity in this research. Different studies use different ways of measuring what is well-being. Some focus more on the emotional aspect of it. Some focus more on the interpersonal relations. So we are using these terms quite broadly, to be honest. But let me give you a specific example, right? Because this gives you a sense of the findings out there. thinking fooling started 620 children and adolescents with an East-Asian, Filipino or Latin American background living in the USA. So all of them are in the same kind of context. They’re speaking broadly in the USA, but they come from very different backgrounds. Now, children, adolescents who spoke their parents’ native language and used it to communicate with the parents, reported higher levels of family cohesion and less emotional distance between themselves and the parents than did adolescents who only spoke English. And those who spoke in different languages with the parents so that the cases where the children would speak in English and the parents would speak in the minority language. They reported less cohesion and actually also less discussion, less quantity of discussion with the parents than the peers who spoke the same language with the parents. So we’ve got these positive associations between knowing and using the minority language and family relationships and something that comes out from this study and the other ones we’ve looked at, that these positive relations exist regardless of the family’s ethnic and demographic backgrounds, this relationship seems to be general across all kinds of bilingual experience.

00:11:45
Sharon Unsworth: So so it doesn’t doesn’t matter which language you talk in which particular community, community that you belong to? You know, your cultural heritage, as it were, or where you live, seems to be the case that as long as if the kids speak both languages.

00:12:01
Napoleon Katsos: Yes.

00:12:01
Sharon Unsworth: Speak both languages as well.

00:12:03
Napoleon Katsos: Yes.

00:12:04
Sharon Unsworth: Can I say that speak both languages well or just, if there’s communication going on in those languages? Is that the key?

00:12:11
Napoleon Katsos: That’s a great, that’s a great question. Can I just say one more thing? I’ll come right to this Sharon, but I want to say..

00:12:18
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah.

00:12:20
Napoleon Katsos: We can’t yet sort of like say which what is causing what you know, what is driving this relationship. Right. Because we’ve just sort of said that the report clearly shows that maintaining the and using the minority language is associated with better relations between the family and associated with feelings of mutual respect amongst family members. Less tension, less stress. But it could be that maintaining the family language leads to better relations with the family. But it could also be that families with better interpersonal relations foster the right kind of environment for the children to maintain the family language.

00:12:56
Sharon Unsworth: Right. Right.

00:12:57
Napoleon Katsos: Frankly Sharon, though, I don’t have the evidence. It could be a bit of both, really.

00:13:03
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s, that’s something that we simply don’t know from the research. Right, right now. So there’s plenty of scope for for more research. Yeah. I was wondering as well, is it is it, you know, is it really about the heritage language? The kids using the heritage language, or is it just about the fact that they need to have a language that the parents and children speak equally well and so they can have the have a good relationship?

00:13:26
Napoleon Katsos: Yeah. Yeah, Sharon, that’s that’s a great question. And both can be important. And I’ll.. on the one hand, having a common language, whichever that language is, is definitely key because that enables meaningful communications and interactions of the sort that Elspeth talked that lead to well-being. But on top of that, for many families, it has particular value if the children can speak the minority language well. And of course, this has also got wider implications for well-being, because the minority language specifically opens up the communication with the extended family and we understand cultural heritage, etc.. You know, having acknowledged that, for some families it’s really important to use the minority language at home. Something that I’d like to say is that sometimes being flexible, flexibly using the minority language and the dominant language in different conversations is a great way forward. Now, something that I find fascinating is that there’s even evidence in research that depending on the topic that is being discussed, it may be better to use a different language for different kinds of discussions within the family. So Chan and colleagues report that some bilingual parents use different languages with their children when discussing issues related to emotion and for emotionally loaded topics using the society’s dominant language may lead to more open discussions of sensitive and contentious issues. And this is because the researchers hypothesize the society’s dominant language is less emotionally loaded for the parents compared to the first language. So we know from research into emotion that the first language is really, really important because this is the language through which you conceptualise in your experience, the emotions in the early years. But having a very emotionally loaded and difficult conversation in the other language, in the society’s dominant language, might actually lead to more open discussions.

00:15:26
Sharon Unsworth: Hm that’s really interesting.

00:15:29
Napoleon Katsos: I find this fascinating insight because it suggests that you could be flexible about which language to use in the family.

00:15:37
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it’s also, I think many parents appreciate and I know I do, too, this idea that there aren’t these hard and fast rules necessarily, right? So there are these guidelines. And sometimes you do indeed need to be flexible. And what about, do do we know then, so going back to the relationship between children’s language use and particularly of the heritage language and the relationship with their parents and the well-being more generally, is it, is it really the use of the language or is it the ability to be able to speak it, the proficiency? Do we know if there’s a difference between the two? Because, you know, people, kids can they know how to use it, but they just don’t.

00:16:21
Napoleon Katsos: Yes. Yeah, yeah. That’s a great question, Sharon. And that it’s not easy to tell from the current research that we reviewed, which is the most important factor here.

00:16:31
Sharon Unsworth: Right, yeah.

00:16:32
Napoleon Katsos: There is one interesting study by Owen Fellini who found that it wasn’t so much the active use of a home language, but rather the children’s knowledge of it. So the proficiency which was important. That is, you know, knowing the language was more important for positive parent-child relationships than actually using that language all the time, which is really interesting. And makes you think, this could be because the knowledge of the language leads to greater acceptance of their parents’ values or understanding of the heritage culture or understanding of the identity which then contributes to good family relationships. Even if the children are not using that language all the time when they communicate.

00:17:20
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah, but that’s one study, right. And so I think it’s fair to say we don’t entirely know the answer to that question. Right. And what about the child’s age then? Does that matter? Because I know quite a few of the studies are with younger kids, but there are also a few with adolescents, which we know as kids are developing in many different ways. And that can be times where they do or don’t feel so happy or not about themselves. Elspeth, do we know anything about that?

00:17:47
Elspeth Wilson: Yeah. Age is a really important factor, of course. And the family language policy say what you do with your languages in your family and why is a dynamic thing changes over time. And one obvious fact I know you’ve talked about on this podcast before is you starting nursery or starting school and suddenly the children using the society language or the school language much more forming these important peer relationships with friends. So yeah, age really feeds into how languages are being used. And then, you know, we assume that this is happening in the family in terms of those relationships, in terms of their well-being. Last year actually, we did a study during lockdown, the first phase of the pandemic and when everyone was really staying at home, homeschooling, homeworking, etc.. So this study was lead by Ludovica Serratrice at the University of Reading along with colleagues from various universities across UK and Ireland. We found generally that actually well-being associated with with home language use was generally quite high and tension was generally quite low in the families that responded. There was there was this one interesting thing that there was some association of like higher levels of tension in the family regarding the use of the home language when the parents or parents of primary school age children compared to pre-schoolers and secondary school aged children.

00:19:24
Sharon Unsworth: And do you have any idea why that is?

00:19:27
Elspeth Wilson: I would think that is a really key age where, you know, your language identity is being kind of formed and where children are having to use the school language, you know, kind of full time for the first time. But then, of course, they are being home schooled at home. And they were, they used to probably at that stage talking in a home language, minority language with their parents. So immediately that’s a kind of situation of tension, isn’t it, because they’ve got these two kind of language worlds colliding of the school and the home- the school language and home. And then when you put the two together in your home schooling, that could be one of the reasons your parents are having to think about, this was something else that came out of the interview, that which language to you, the homeschooling, for example. Sometimes it’s easier to use the language that work comes home in, but sometimes you want to use your home language because you know, you feel more comfortable in that. That’s the language that you learnt in school, for example. So this was a kind of big new thing that families are having to negotiate. And I guess how well they did that with is then fed into, you know, how they were able to kind of flourish as a multilingual family during that time.

00:20:50
Sharon Unsworth: We still have plans for a special episode where we discuss research on the impacts of the lockdown on bilingual families, including the project Elspeth just mentioned. So you should hear more about that soon. We’re going to leave Elspeth and Napoleon now for our second Kletsheads Quick and Easy. A concrete tip that you can put to use straight away to make a success of the bilingualism in your family, class or clinic.

00:21:18

Kletsheads Quick and Easy

Sharon Unsworth: In Kletsheads, we talk a lot about how important it is for children to have as rich a language exposure as possible. Being exposed to enough input and to different kinds of input is especially important for the heritage language or languages. So the languages that are not used at school or in the wider community. It’s also important that children find themselves in situations where they have to use their heritage language. If you want them to become active users of that language. This can sometimes be tricky if you as a parent also understand the majority language in the country where you live. The Kletsheads Quick and Easy this time then is for parents, and it’s to find one new source of language input in the heritage language. Maybe you know another family in the neighbourhood who speaks the same language. Get in touch with them and arrange a play date. If you’d like your child to learn to read in your language, find out if there’s a heritage language school in your area and contact them or even sign your child up already. If you have friends in your home country who also have children, why not ask them if their son or daughter would like a pen friend? Writing letters is, of course, rather old fashioned and not really necessary. But who doesn’t like to receive post dropping through the letterbox? You can see if your local library house has any books in your language, or if you want to read to your child, look for picture books where you can tell the story yourself in any language. Or find out if there are podcasts for children in your language. In short, the Kletsheads Quick and Easy for this episode is to do one thing, to find a new source of input in the language that your child needs most.

00:23:12
Sharon Unsworth: So the language that you choose to use as a child or as an adult for that matter, can also say something about how comfortable you feel with the culture associated with that language, right. Whether you identify with the speakers of that language and parents raising their children bilingually. Especially, I think in a context where there’s a predominant language and culture. Often common on how their children are more American than they are Korean or more Dutch than they are Turkish or more French than they are Moroccan. And so for some parents, that’s that’s just the way it is. And they’re fine with it. But for others, it’s it can be a real source of tension and frustration. So we often call this acculturation, right? So that you become and you become part of the dominant culture. Can these differences between parents and children, can they impact on the well-being as, do we see that? And is it related to language use?

00:24:03
Elspeth Wilson: Yes, definitely. Exactly as you say, acculturation is this kind of process, the extent to which someone identifies with the majority culture, the society culture. And when you think about acculturation, obviously the language you use and your kind of identity connected to that language played a massive part. So it’s very much connected to what we’ve been talking about already, especially, you know, what Nap was talking about earlier. So as you might expect by now, it does seem that acculturation and language use and language knowledge patterns together feed into well-being. So I’ll just give you another example of that, really, is that the study by Choi and colleagues. Again, this is in the US and they looked at Korean-American teenagers and they found that a positive attitude towards their home culture or the minority culture, so the Korean culture in that case, was associated with enhanced well-being. So there you’ve got the kind of not just positive attitudes towards the language and use the language but actually towards the culture led to enhanced well-being as well. But so that was really interesting in that study with the fact that where parents were actually more active in teaching about the home culture. So maybe just talking about Korean cultural values or going to community school and the young people’s English proficiency was actually better as well. And again, this is just association is not causal of course, it could be all sorts of reasons for this, but it does seem to suggest that, you know, passing on that cultural heritage is not necessarily at the expense of learning the society’s language, the school language and its culture. Like the two things can go together and actually, you know, can help each other as the child grows.

00:26:02
Sharon Unsworth: Right. So it doesn’t have to be one or the other. You don’t have to be American or Korean or Dutch or Turkish or whatever. It is perfectly possible to grow up feeling as though you’re both. I’m hoping we’ll have a separate episode on identity at some point. What should parents take away from our discussion today? So, what concrete tips do you have for them when it comes to ensuring their child’s well-being as they grow up bilingually?

00:26:28
Napoleon Katsos: Looking at the bigger picture, we know that well-being in the family is related to relationships within the family members, to communication. And this is something we can all work on. There’s always scope for improving for and for you know, and helping improve well-being is not something that’s set in stone once and you can’t work on it. We’ve seen how, you know, having a common language that every member of the family can use to communicate is important. We’ve seen that children having at least some proficiency in the minority language is related to better communication, better relationships, respect, acceptance, and less tensions. So, you know, we’re given ways forward for having a better quality of life. Overall, I would say the main message to parents, to myself that I take out of the review and many others might want to take, is to to talk about talking, to communicate in the family about how each member feels about the languages that they have and how they use them. And we should really be mindful of that, that, you know, having a family language policy isn’t something that happens necessarily by itself, it really talks, it takes some effort and conscious effort to communicate and discuss. And then once, you know, set a certain, you have your expectations and they’re mutually shared. One needs to review them regularly. And to be realistic, I think here on the Kletsheads series, this is a question that, you know, it’s a great resource for questions like this. I know in the first episode of the Kletsheads series, with you and Crisfield. We had a discussion in our group in Cambridge, Elspeth and colleagues and I, we too have developed an online resource which gives tips on how parents can talk about this and how they can set expectations about how to use their languages even before the baby arrives. Because we also work with expecting families and antenatal teachers and we wanted to sort of get out there this idea that bilingualism might not happen by itself. You need to talk and consider and plan for it. Parents who, listeners who want to, you know, find more about is they can google we speak multi. Our website is wespeakmulti.com and it has information for parents but also for teachers of bilingual students, for antenatal practitioners and other professionals who work with bilinguals.

00:29:06
Sharon Unsworth: Okay, we’ll put the link to that in the shownotes so that people, people can can find it. So basically talk about why the heritage language is important and talk about how, how, how you how you’re going to give it a place in your family, I suppose, would be maybe be a good way of talking about it.

00:29:29
Napoleon Katsos: Absolutely. And then always to create that common ground and that mutual, those mutual expectations, because your expectations and your desires might not be 100% aligned to those of the other members. And that’s a very dynamic process. You know, you have to construct your family policy, so to speak. I think different families will find their own ways to navigate this. In my family, we’re looking for creating natural, natural situations where naturally you’d have to use the home language. Talk to grandparents who use Greek, in my case. We try to listen to some great music. If we can find a movie that the kids like, we can we can put it on through different media can actually give you the movie in in Greek. We use Greek in a way that’s not imposing and doesn’t feel very, very school like. We also I mean, we also have a weekly fight when it comes to actually doing a little bit of formal education in Greek. And that’s something that, you know, my wife and I really want to monitor. We we can see how it could become too pushing for hours for our nine year old. And we just need to monitor it and make sure that we don’t lose completely the fun of it. We wouldn’t want to get it backwards.

00:30:57
Sharon Unsworth: But that’s, you know, in a sense, it’s also like many other things, right? You know, practicing your piano or going to football. You know, they’re all, there’s always that fine line as a parent between pushing enough because, you know, you just have to learn, you need to practice and do stuff, but not doing it so much that the kids don’t like it anymore. But I guess there’s also that extra dimension when it comes to your own cultural heritage that you don’t have when it’s playing the piano or football. And so we talked a bit there about tips for for parents. What about teachers Elspeth? Do you have any tips for teachers for how they should approach bilingual children and their parents, given the issues that we’ve talked about today about well-being?

00:31:40
Elspeth Wilson: Yeah, I mean, really, it’s the same message of like talk about talking. So, you know, I’d say to teachers or other professionals, to ask the family or the caregivers what their family language plan is. Don’t necessarily use the words what’s your family language plan? But just ask questions like, Oh, you know, so what languages do you use at home? What would you like for your child? Especially if it’s a younger child, you know. Would you like them to to just understand the language, to speak the language, or maybe even learned to read and write in the language? If that’s appropriate for that situation. You know ask about whether the child is going to a kind of complementary school, a Saturday school for that language or some kind of other extracurricular activity, a club and kind of being supportive of that involvement. And so just, you know, showing an interest in a way that’s encouraging and supportive. And in doing that, just highlighting, you know, the benefits of those family languages and growing up with more than one language and the opportunity that for learning and passing on the family kind of culture and heritage. Of course, there’s more practical things that teachers can do as well. So if possible, you know, they could signpost to local resources for languages. I don’t know what it be like where you are, but certainly in the UK we have a growing number of kind of multilingual libraries or sections in libraries, multilingual clubs or groups. So, you know, if if teachers in schools can signpost of those extra resources, that sends a really strong message that this is something that’s worth doing. And also shows the parents is, tells the parents that actually fostering the home language doesn’t detract necessarily from learning the school language. And actually, as the parents grow the home language in their family and teach, read to the child in that language and talk about all sorts of different topics in that language that can actually have a positive impact on their school language as well. So they don’t necessarily have to switch. And so if the teachers can can just talk about that with the parents, I think that’s a really good start.

00:34:10
Sharon Unsworth: Yeah. So it’s helping the parents actually make that investment for the future, for their child’s for their child’s well-being.

00:34:18
Napoleon Katsos: Can I add to that? I think what’s really important is to simply not jumping to conclusions about what the family language policy will be, is important to encourage the parents to have it, but to be openminded. Let’s not have barriers that bilingualism is for these families. But the bilingualism is not for those families or it’s not for those children. Let’s just encourage people to have these discussions and considerations and come up with their own conclusions.

00:34:47
Sharon Unsworth: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today. It’s all been very interesting.

00:34:51
Elspeth Wilson: Thank you.

00:34:51
Napoleon Katsos: Thank you, Sharon.

00:34:56
Sharon Unsworth: In this episode of Kletsheads, we learned that communication is a key factor when it comes to family well-being. In bilingual families, there’s often a choice about which language can be used for communication. And whilst there’s not a vast amount of research on this topic. The research that is available shows that when children are able to use the heritage or minority language, this is associated with better well-being. There’s some research suggesting that it’s knowing the language rather than actively using it, which is key. But much more research is needed in order to confirm this. We also heard that when children have a positive attitude to home culture, this is also associated with better well-being. And this doesn’t come at the expense of learning the school language or culture. It can be both, not either or. All the more reason then to follow up on today’s Kletsheads Quick and Easy: Find one new source of heritage language input for your child. Give it a go and let us know how you get on. You can do that by the socials. Tag us @kletsheads or drop us a line via the website or send us an email at kletsheads@ru.nl. We’ll be back in two weeks with a new episode where in Hot off the Press, I tell you about recent research that asks what’s more important when it comes to learning two languages in childhood, starting earlier or hearing enough input? And we hear from our first Kletsheads from the continent of Africa when I speak to 13-year-old Rehoboth about growing up with three languages. If you haven’t done so already, hit subscribe in your podcast app or by following the links on the website. And the new episode will be ready and waiting for you in two weeks’ time. Until then.

00:37:06
Sharon Unsworth: If you want to know more about Kletsheads, go to our website at kletsheadspodcast.org. That’s where you’ll also find more information about this episode. If you want to make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe to Kletsheads using your favourite podcast app. If you know someone else who might enjoy the podcast, then I’d really appreciate it if you would share it with them. You can do this via the website or in your podcast app. And if you’re on social media, we’d love it if you followed us. Our handle is @kletsheads. Thanks for listening. And until the next time. Or as we say in Dutch: tot de volgende keer!

This transcript was generated using amberscript.com and was checked by Aniek Ebbinge.