English-speaking parent speaks English with kid; Spanish-speaking parent speaks Spanish: kid is bilingual and lives happily ever after. That's the myth. In A Minority of One several families talked about the reality of bringing up a child with two languages (or three, in some of Spain's autonomous communities). Even with one child, the web of relationships and language patterns - who speaks what to whom, when and where - is complex enough, so what happens when siblings arrive?

British Jane Lewis reports: 'Obviously with each child, the proportion of mother-tongue English speakers (me) gets smaller.' She and her Catalan husband met in India and have always spoken English together: Jane learned Spanish and Catalan when she came to Barcelona 20 years ago. When their first child was born, English was the majority language in the home. By the time their third child (now seven) was small, all the children were speaking Catalan together and with their father, and to Jane as well. 'I still speak English (usually), but English is the minority language.' Similarly, Scottish Kathy Murphy's three grown-up children all speak Spanish together. 'In fact, when we went over to England when they were small, their English cousins picked up Spanish!' she says.

Siblings usually choose the majority language to talk between themselves if this is their dominant language, which is usually the case with school age children. Can you - or should you - fight it? In their book Growing Up With Two Languages, Una Cunningham Andersson and Staffan Andersson, a British-Swedish couple with four children, affirm that what language children choose to speak together is 'not really any of the parents' business.'

Parental Steering

American Susan Rodrigo disagrees. 'Even when my children are alone together and I overhear them speaking Spanish, I think it is my business to steer them towards English.' Like Jane, she and her Spanish husband speak English together, and also use it as a family language with their two small daughters, who go to a Spanish school. 'A few times that I heard them start talking Spanish between them. I took the elder aside and explained - very confidentially - that we really needed to speak English with her baby sister if we wanted to take her to the US with us to see grandma and grandpa.'

Whether Susan intervenes, however, depends on other factors. If a major language injection in the form of a trip to the US is on the horizon, she 'lets it slip a bit.' She mostly makes a huge proactive effort with their English, with lots of fun activities like Disney videos, songs and so on. Jane, on the other hand, thinks it's perfectly normal for her kids to speak Catalan together. 'After all, they were born and brought up here. Of course you have to encourage their English, make it fun, not impose it like eating vegetables, but for goodness sake do not interfere in what they speak to each other.'

Power Struggle

But situations change as kids get older, make new friends, begin to develop their own activities and rebel against parental obligations or expectations. The issue that makes us uptight seems to be that as well as making communication possible with monolingual relatives back home, English is such an important, essential language to know. But that doesn't mean that everyone will jump at the chance to use it with a live-in native speaker. When teacher Jim Simmons moved in with near-native-fluent-in-English Carmen, her 15-year-old son, who was doing (and failing) English at school, flatly refused to speak English with him. 'He understood it well enough,'says Jim. 'But to have used English would have been to accept me and he did not want to accept me.'

And we can hardly expect them to talk privately to each other in English if they won't even speak it to us, which is also par for the course. Consensus is: don't make a big deal. In the Hollands-Cerdà family, Dolors speaks Catalan and Alan English to their two sons of 21 and 19. The boys always answer their father in Catalan and Alan keeps on with English. 'I don't think it was ever a sort of planned language policy,'Dolors says wryly. 'It was just less trouble for him than learning Spanish and Catalan!'

Peer Pressure

Dolors also makes the point, which comes up again and again, that her sons didn't want to speak English with their father because 'they felt it singled them out, made them feel different.' And we know that children love to conform to their peer group. All Jane's children have asked her to speak to them in Catalan in public, especially in and around their school, because they feel embarrassed at the attention it attracts or at feeling different.

'I've never insisted that they speak English to me, because I thought it would put a strain on them, on us and our communication,'she says. 'I think it's good to look at places that have been bilingual for centuries. Thousands of families in Catalunya speak two languages quite naturally at home with no pressure over who has to speak what.' The key is simply to give as much input as you can. 'Even if they don't practice it, it's there passively and they can understand it,'says Jane. 'Six months in England would bring them up to scratch.'

Divorce Complications

The difficulties of guaranteeing English input are obviously compounded by divorce. When Barcelona-based Steve separated 13 years ago from their Spanish-speaking mother, his sons were five and six, and he hired a good feminist lawyer to arrange for extra visitation time from the beginning,. 'I always spoke to my children in English. My children speak Spanish to each other and speak Spanish to me.'

Susan Rodrigo refuses to 'just accept that they will probably end up speaking mostly Spanish and degenerating into a sort of rusty English.'But the news from the more laid-back parents is encouraging. 'I am always amazed when my mother will telephone and one of them answers and will chat away in English when they haven't used it for months,'says Jane, while Steve reports that his sons are discovering that speaking English is useful and helps them to find work. The elder worked as a waiter on the Costa Brava last summer and found that English 'makes it easier to chat up tourists. My younger son has taken note of both aspects.'

Long-term Results

Bringing up a bilingual brood is 'not a bowl of cherries,'says old-timer Kathy. 'Keeping up English really requires discipline. If you can have this discipline, you're doing the kids an enormous favour. It's essential to be patient, even if you don't see immediate results.'Another factor is how supportive of English the Spanish-speaking partner and in-laws are. Kathy tells younger parents to take heart: her third child didn't speak English till he was four or five. 'Wouldn't or couldn't - unless he was with someone who didn't know any Spanish at all.' But now, in his twenties, he always speaks English with his mother. Kathy can't quite remember when the turnaround came. 'He's astounded when I tell him about when he was little. He can't ever remember not speaking English. None of them can.'All her children, 'she says, 'can speak English more or less well, for which they are unanimously grateful, and want their own children to learn it.' Her advice? 'You do your best.'

And so we do our best. But we have to accept that as they grow up, what our children make of our gift of English is up to them. Most of them make the most of it. But the choice is ultimately theirs and theirs alone.

Resources

*Growing Up With Two Languages. A Practical Guide, Una Cunningham Andersson and Staffan Andersson, Routledge. 1999. Essential reading. Buy the book here
*Bilingual Families Web Page
*Bilingual Parenting and Early Language Learning Link Page
*The Bilingual Pages