Ozlem and I have been asking parents we run into about their experiences raising kids with different languages, to get an idea of what we'll do ourselves. I'm now poking around on the Net a bit to see what's out there on the subject.

One of the more common situations we hear from parents who have different native languages is that it's important that each parent consistently use their own language with the child. An article by Marsha Rosenberg Raising Bilingual Children expands on this a bit, according to her the importance is consistency of situation. So it's not that the parent has to only and always speak the same language, but that they have consistent boundaries about the speaking of each language.

This fits with some people we've met recently, who both speak Portugese fluently (although the mother is not a native speaker) and speak it consistently with their daughter at home, but use English when outside. Rosenberg also suggests parents might alternate based on the day of the week, but that seems weird to me. The important thing, though, is that parents don't mix languages in a single conversation, otherwise the children will tend to learn it as a hybrid language - they won't easily distinguish the two lanuages.

Parents we've met who both speak the same language, but a different one than the community they live in, don't seem worried about speaking the local language at home. Certainly by the time the kids start school they will pick up the local language, and end up speaking it, possibly better than the parents' language. I do know one person raised in England by Greek-speaking parents, whose parents decided that one of them would use English with him, but it doesn't sound like that's strictly necessary.

One useful not from Rosenberg is that children should be exposed to the non-local language "in a variety of situations and with a variety of speakers. Rich language experiences in both languages are essential for good bilingual development." So for us, if the kid only speaks Turkish at home with Ozlem, over time (especially after starting school) their Turkish won't develop as well. I have a friend raised in Germany whose father speaks Danish with him, but he tells me when he visits Denmark people think he's retarded. I think we'll have an easy time of it since we know plenty of Turkish speakers in London, and hopefully we'll also get fairly frequent visits to Turkey to spend time with family.

One thing I haven't yet found any comments on, but is a concern of ours, is how we communicate with each other. Ozlem and I speak English to each other, because my Turkish sucks (and that phrase can also be turned the other way around - my Turkish sucks because I don't use it). Will this confuse the kid? Maybe not, but when Ozlem says something to the both of us, she'll want to use Turkish, which I may not understand, rather than English, which will dilute her use of it with the kid. The answer will probably be for me to raise my game. I should be able to improve my Turkish along with our kid!

More links:

• the bilingual families web page, is maintained by Cindy Kandolf, apparently in conjunction with a mailing list, looks to have useful resources.

Necla Bal sent me a pointer to a Turkish language site called Online Turkish, which has some downloadable course material. Might be worth a look. While we're talking about Turkish language sites, I'd be remiss not to mention Learning Practical Turkish which, while not as polished as Online Turkish, has a ton o' info.

For Russell and anyone else into languages, I strongly recommend checking out the Power of Babel. John H. McWhorter is a linguist who wrote this book for the layman, all about how language evolves.

Fascinating stuff, he tears down a lot of the bogus beliefs that we have about language, for instance, that there languages have a "pure" version and then dialects. What we call a language is a actually a collection of dialects, and the "pure" language is arbitrarily chosen, sometimes based on the dialect in use by the dominant political group (France), sometimes randomly chosen (England), or artificially created (Sweden). Even the dividing lines between languages is artificial, much like the lines we draw between ethnic groups and in geography.

McWhorter backs up these concepts with many examples from languages and their evolution. He mentions a Roman scholar in the early centuries AD decrying the corruption of Latin in parts of the area, those corruptions later evolving directly into the French language. Lots of interesting tidbits come out, such as the fact that the rule against double-negatives, which is somewhat unusual to English (most languages, including Turkish, actually require the double-negative), was a peculiarity of an obscure dialect of English that got entombed into the language by an early grammar book.

Linguists examine grammatical constructs across many languages and come up with some interesting conclusions. Most languages acquire unnecessary baggage of one kind or another, features which other languages do just fine without. An example that Russ has mentioned about Spanish is the gender of nouns; when learning Spanish vocabulary, you must memorize whether each noun is masculine or feminine. It serves no practical purpose, plenty of languages do just fine without it, but if you don't learn it you won't be speaking Spanish.

English has these features, including articles, "a" and "the". Sure, they are useful to distinguish whether you are talking about a specific thing, but many languages don't have them, and people are able to communicate just fine. Turkish has an equivalent to "a", namely "bir", but no "the". What it does have is an entire verb tense to indicate something happened that you didn't directly witness, "-mis", sometimes called the "journalistic tense". It can be useful, but we don't have it in English, and we get along just fine.

Another thing McWhorter talks about is how languages change over time. Parts of the language fall off, for instance we no longer say "thou" for the second person singular, having allowed the plural "you" to grow to cover singular as well. Of course where I come from, "ya'll" has been added to replace the plural "you". This phenomenon explains why spelling in some languages, including both English and French, is such a pain in the ass for foreigners to learn. The spoken language evolves, but the written doesn't, so words aren't pronounced the way they are written. Languages such as Turkish which have had their written component totally overhauled recently (less than 100 years ago the Arabic alphabet was tossed out in favor of a new Latin-based one), spelling and pronounciation are the same, which is a relief for learners. I'm not sure why Spanish is consistent, it's as old as French, isn't it?

This is just a smattering of what I remember from reading the book 3 months ago. If you're into languages, have a read, it's cool stuff.