UGH have we messed everything up?

Hi Kristin! Welcome to the forum.

First: no, you haven't messed anything up. Children do their own thing and all we can do is try our best. What matters is that you know you want something to change and are willing to make this change happen.

I'm not surprised your daughter never spoke Swiss German. My daughter never spoke our ML until the age of 3 (when she realized she couldn't play with children her age in our ml), even though she began nursery school at age 1. Both me and my husband speak in the ml to the kids, but if you spend much more time with them than your husband, it doesn't surprise me at all; at that age they're more interested in communicating with mom and dad than anyone else and mom was more time around than dad.

My husband and I are switching to speaking in the ml to each other when the kids are around, and it's hard. What we did (we got this idea from Amy and Adam Beck ) was put flags around the house as a visual reminder of the language we should speak and encourage our 4yo daughter to not let us speak in the ML. You could create some kind of visual reminder that helps your husband remember to speak Swiss German with the children, and everyone else can remind him when/if he slips up.


That's great! If you want to go one step further, you may want to slowly switch everything, or at least most of what they can read or watch at home to Swiss German. We don't have any books, music, or talking toys in the ML at home. Our home is a ML free zone. I know it may seem a bit drastic, but it works. I'd just take it one step at a time and see how far I want to go.


I think it's up to you too: you're ordering books, games and audiobooks, aren't you? Again, if you want to take it further, you can try learning the language yourself. I don't know how much free time you have (free time? What's that? ) but if you can do it, your chances of making it work will improve. Another good option would be looking for native speakers in your area that could come to your place and speak with your children in the target language. You can look for groups of people who speak this language, or even travel to Switzerland at some point, so that they see how useful their ml can be... There are many things that can be done, the tricky part is whether we can realistically do them or not.

I don't have a number on how long it takes to get children to become active bilinguals; some make the switch very quickly (as you can read in some threads on this forum) and some others take years (like my daughter with the ML).

It seems specialists believe the magic number is around 1/3 of their time spent in the ml for children to become active bilinguals. It's good to keep this number in mind, but the reality is that every family and every child is different. Aim for a number as high as you can and you can't go wrong.

I hope this doesn't sound too overwhelming. It isn't an all or nothing deal; the more we do, the better the chances, but even if we can do very little, that little still matters and adds up over time.