Christine in Spain

Hi everyone!

I am from the United States (Wisconsin) and my native language is English. My husband is from Spain (Bilbao) and his native language is Spanish.

We lived in the United States for 6 years, allowing my husband to become bilingual in Spanish and English. When we lived there, we only spoke English to each other since I didn’t know Spanish. For the last 12 years we’ve been living in Spain. The first year we moved here we decided to only speak Spanish to each other so that I could learn Spanish. With this effort I was able to learn Spanish fluently and can now consider myself bilingual in English and Spanish. After that first year of only speaking in Spanish to each other, for my sake of learning, we decided to go back to speaking English to each other since I was speaking Spanish during the day with co-workers, friends, etc. and my husband didn’t want to "lose" his English. So, since then, we speak to each other in English and only when we are having conversations that include others, we speak to each other in Spanish.

We now have a 2 year old daughter and from the beginning we knew that we wanted to raise her bilingually, English and Spanish, both for the benefit of being able to speak 2 languages when she is older and for the necessity of speaking with different family members who are monolingual.

When we decided that we wanted to raise our daughter with 2 languages, we decided that all interactions among the 3 of us, whether within the home or outside of it, would be in the minority language (English). We considered the "minority language at home" method would work best for us, since we were already doing it between ourselves and that our daughter would have more than enough opportunities to learn the majority language at daycare, interacting with friends, etc. We also felt that we would need to be "strict" about it and not mix languages among ourselves or with our daughter when talking to her.

In these 2 years, things have been going well. We are following through with our "minority language within the family unit" method (through speaking, reading, singing, ...). Our daughter’s first words were in English (the minority language), and we see how she understands this language well. When she first started talking, most of the words were in English. However as time progresses, we see that she’s getting more and more vocabulary in Spanish (the majority language), as she goes to daycare where they speak in Spanish and on the playground everyone speaks to her in Spanish.

This Monday she’s going to start in the 2 year class at the grade school. Because we live in Vizcaya, Spain (the Basque Country) and because of the school we chose, her schooling is going to be taught mainly in the Basque language with some Spanish. So, now there’s going to be a 3rd language added into the mix (niether my husband nor myself know Basque).

My main concern right now is her mixing Spanish and English in the same sentence and to see if and how Basque is going to affect her language learning process, especially the minority language (English).

I enjoy reading all of these posts and getting hints and tips from everyone’s experiences and similar situations.