Most of the time, I grumble (occasionally to my husband, often to myself) about the shallowness of online interactions, the onerousness of regular posting to social media. Every once in a while, though, the digital landscape surprises me: it holds out the tantalizing possibility of a deeper interpersonal connection than, say, IRL small talk with another parent at a frenzied kid’s-birthday party.
This latter experience has been the case with Alice Gray, the author of the essay you’re about to read. Despite both being long-time Austinites (Gray born and raised), we’ve yet to meet in person. But in the months since we were e-introduced by a mutual friend, we’ve shared book and podcast recommendations, workshopped ideas along with essay drafts.
Gray’s parenting story has been unfolding in geographical proximity and in many ways in parallel to my own. I’m grateful that she has invited me—and now us—into her world.
On her blog, Gray writes about raising her now 4-year-old daughter in non-native Spanish. In this first post of a two-part essay, Gray offers a snapshot of the early years of her language experiment. She also excavates its ‘prehistory,’ scrutinizing the formative experiences of pre-motherhood that have shaped her choices as a parent. As she observes on her site, “This is (my daughter’s) story, but it is irretrievably tangled up with my own and that of my parents.”
Thanks again, Alice, for allowing me to share your writing on this site! For more of Gray’s work, please click over to Bilingual Baby.
…
In the Pines
October 6, 2012. It’s my wedding day. A cold front has swept over the outdoor dinner, and guests start to pull on wraps and coats, keeping their heads tilted upward, wine-glazed eyes fixed on my father who is standing on a stump, champagne glass raised. “Alice’s love of languages,” he explains to everyone, “started very young.” As I listen to my father’s words, gushing with affection, admiration, and sheer joy at the union before him, I start to realize where he’s headed. He gives me a look with a sparkle in his eye, and I glare at him helplessly, then cover my hot-cheeked face with my hands. How embarrassing.
He goes on to tell everyone I’ve ever known about Pine Land and its language, Pine Language.
Alice’s dad toasting at wedding (photo credit: Bill Mccullough)
When I was very small, everyone knew about my trips to Pine Land, a place I supposedly visited in my dreams. I was completely fluent in Pine Language, and sometimes I would speak it to my older brother, who made it his life’s work to disprove that Pine Land or its language existed. He would test me on certain words, “How do you say ‘chair’?” And then he would test me on the same word later, “How do you say chair again?” “See! It changed! You’re just making it up!” “I’m not making it up; one of the rules of the language is that the words change.” Duh.
I desperately wanted to be fluent in a language other than English. As the youngest, I felt left out in a family where my parents, having studied and traveled in Mexico, and my brother, old enough to take a language in school, spoke some Spanish. At my Northeast Austin elementary school, I can remember my classmates and I overhearing kids on the playground speak Spanish, and I can trace my initial linguistic yearning back to those days. But none of us had classes with them because English language learners were set apart in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. We walked by their tables in the cafeteria at lunch, and saw their teacher giving them instructions in the hallway, not understanding a word.
Spanish was an elusive linguistic mystery I wanted in on.
…
When I was twelve, I took my first Spanish lessons at the Instituto Falcon in Guanajuato, Mexico. While my family was there, I was struck to find that many of the Europeans at the school, studying Spanish like us, were on their third or fourth language. It had never occurred to me that you could learn more than one extra language. This blew my mind. I doubled down. Back in the hotel, when no one was around, I spoke to myself out loud in Spanish. I couldn’t say a lot, but what was important to me was how it felt rolling off my tongue. So I repeated the same sentences over and over until they became comfortable, until I could say them quickly, until, at least in my own company, I could pretend I was fluent.
But I wanted to be fluent, and I knew there was only one way to get there. I swapped my senior year at Austin High for a year in Spain where I lived with a single mother and her five-year-old daughter, Helena. The experience was as immersive as they come: I attended the local high school, continued with ballet classes, and somehow made friends. My social survival depended on my learning the language, and one of my best teachers was my spunky little host sister. She taught me songs and we watched Disney movies together; I read books to her and got her ready for school in the mornings. She was constantly correcting my Spanish, loving her new teacher role. Toward the end of my year there, my host mother and I got into an argument. And as my anger came pouring out of my mouth, I felt for the very first time, what it really was like to speak fluently in another language. This was it. I wasn’t thinking about how to say what was in my head, it was just materializing. When the fight was over, even she pointed out how good my Spanish had gotten. I agreed and we hugged. I could argue in another language. I had made it.
I took that as a sign that it was time to start in on French. Three semesters of college French later, I found a job as a live-in au pair in Brussels, where I cared for two little boys, Bijhan and Errol. My personal goal was to improve my French, but I’d been hired to teach the boys English, and I became fascinated by how they learned language, keeping notes on the new words they learned each week and comparing the differences between them. I would later write my honor’s thesis on the methods, games, and songs I used to teach them English. Helena, Bijhan and Errol showed me how easy it was to love and care for children, no matter the language.
I didn’t need Pine Land or its language anymore. But I would never admit to my brother that it didn’t exist.
An Open Field
“There is labor itself—birth as original a masterpiece as death. There is the delicate overlapping flower of another human personality forming before your eyes, and you, blessed and frightened to be part of it.”
–Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood
In 2015 I had a baby—a squishy, beautiful, blank slate of a baby. An open, uncultivated field. In the first few days I decided I would try to give her something I had always wanted as a child, fluency in two languages at once. I’d thought about doing this when I was pregnant with her. But before committing, I needed to meet her. When we first stepped out of the hospital and I felt the weight of that momentous occasion, of her brand new skin feeling the hot, gusty swirls of July for the first time, I whispered to her in English, “That’s the Texas wind.” And it felt right. Speaking my native language to her was so natural, so warm, so close and easy.
I knew that the only way to gift fluency in another language to my daughter was to speak it to her. We don’t sit our babies and children down for an hour each day and give them lessons on grammar and pronunciation. We simply talk to them. To do this right, everything I said to my baby would have to be in Spanish. I would have to read to her, sing to her, comfort her, and discipline her in Spanish. It did not come naturally. I had to force myself. It’s hard enough as a new parent to know what to say to a newborn. Isn’t it somewhat embarrassing to talk to a thing that can’t talk back to you? I was a mother who felt perfectly comfortable sitting in silence with my baby. But I knew what the experts said about healthy language development: talk as much as possible. If talking to your baby doesn’t come naturally, they said, describe what you are doing. But when I went to describe the things we did together, I realized I didn’t know the words in Spanish for diaper, bottle, pacifier, nurse, crib, rock, drool...Why did I think I could do this?
Cultivation
“The physical dexterity and coordination alone that are necessary for [language learning] are well beyond the powers of someone who still has trouble pouring juice.”
–Dr. Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child
We all marvel at how children are “little sponges” and just “soak language up.” The sponge might seem like the best metaphor, but take a look at what’s actually going on in the brain and you won’t exactly find a porous organ soaking up our liquid language mess—it’s even more fascinating and magical.
Infant brains are more like little science labs, observing, hypothesizing, testing, adjusting, and repeating the process, over and over until they get it right. It’s incredibly organized and scientific, with a little bit of fairy dust thrown in.
Babies’ brains, says Dr. Barbara Zurer Person, in her book Raising a Bilingual Child, are programmed to hear sounds from any language from the time they’re first born. For example, you could speak any language to a baby under six months, and that baby wouldn’t show any preference for the sounds from any particular language. But in the time between six months and one year, when babies start listening only for their own language, all of a sudden they do react if you expose them to other languages. They recognize that you’re speaking to them in a language that is “foreign” or different than what’s spoken in their family. It’s this early ability to distinguish between so many different sounds that gives them the enviable ability to speak in perfect little accents in multiple languages.
Without realizing what I was doing, I had tested this in my niece when she was about nine months old, before I was even pregnant with my daughter and before reading anything about babies’ language development. I had been bouncing her lightly in my arms, talking to her softly in an attempt to get her sleepy. And then, out of the blue, I began to speak to her in French. Right away she turned her head to me, wide-eyed, and studied my face, at one point looking right at my mouth, the source of the strange sounds, her body still and listening. I kept going. She kept listening.
But six months isn’t a hard cutoff for ideal language acquisition. The general sentiment is simply the earlier the better. “Children,” says Dr. Zurer Pearson, “remain able to learn new sound distinctions for a long time.” Bijhan, the four-year-old I took care of in Belgium, held onto his French pronunciation, while his two-year-old brother was able to copy my English words with a perfect American accent. The younger, the squishier.
The linguist Noam Chomsky promoted the concept that every baby is born with a Language Acquisition Device, which is the sum of the physiological elements that make infants incredible language learners. They are born with acute hearing (especially attuned to speech), and they have preferential vision for human faces, which helps associate words with meaning. Then there’s the extra blood flow and metabolic activity in their brains which are “...working twice as hard as adults’...working in overdrive to make new connections between neurons.” By the time we’re adults, we’re just not making new neural connections as rapidly, and that forces us to funnel sounds and syntax from a new language through established language connections.
Our grammatical errors give away how differently we learn. Adults try to fit new language into an established language’s grammatical rules. A Spanish speaker might say “close me the door” instead of “close the door for me.” But when children learn language they are more likely to make grammatical errors that show they know the rules of a language though they haven’t learned all the exceptions. I will never forget the first time my daughter said “rompido,” which would be the past participle of “broken” (romper) if you followed the grammatical rules, but the word is irregular and should actually be “roto.” I can clearly remember five-year-old Helena in Spain saying rompido. My daughter had made the same language mistake as a native Spanish speaker.
It became clear that my baby was picking up the main language that was being spoken to her. In those days I didn’t worry too much if I didn’t know a word or stumbled over a sentence in a book—she would never know. I just tried to sound confident. She might not know if I got a word wrong, but I was sure she could sense it if I hesitated or got frustrated with the language. In the meantime, I dove in—I read articles on Baby Center’s Spanish language site about how to execute “baby talk,” and while home alone nursing her, I consumed telenovelas like El Gran Hotel, replaying scenes where the nanny cooed in Spanish to the baby (the secretly illegitimate baby and somehow-switched-at-birth baby). I got help with language questions from my Spanish-speaking friends both in Texas and out of the country.
And after the first few months it started to feel normal. In fact, there came a time when it began to feel strange if I spoke to my baby in English. I spoke to her so much that I had that “study abroad” headache at the end of the day—the same one I got when I’d lived in other countries, when I’d pushed my brain to its language limits. At three months old she started at a Spanish immersion daycare, and by the time we left the baby classroom for the toddler one, my daughter was walking and saying her first words, which were all in Spanish: Agua, Más, Ven.
In the Weeds
At one year old, in response to Spanish, my daughter turned her head and comprehension lit her face, but sometimes, when people spoke to her in English, we could tell she wasn’t understanding. While it delighted me that she preferred Spanish, it alarmed my husband. He began feeling disconnected from her and worried about their bond. He had spent the first year and a half speaking to her in what Spanish he had: “Vamos a tomar un baño,” “Hora de comer” “Ven aquí.” Since he’s not fluent, what he couldn’t say in Spanish he said in English, but he had been 100% on board with raising our daughter bilingually and had done everything in his power to support that effort. Then, though he remained supportive in many ways, he jumped ship. He switched to speaking exclusively in English to her, and he began deepening her engagement in English through books, games, and songs. His academic Spanish from high school and college wasn’t enough to really foster the kind of bond they needed.
A year later my mother’s Spanish reached her limit as well. Her Spanish is pretty good from a lifetime of travel, classes, and interest in the language. And, supportive of our efforts, she had spoken as much Spanish to her granddaughter as she could. But as the months ticked by, I watched my mother start to get stuck. Sometimes the things she said didn’t make sense, and this confused my daughter. Worse was when I saw that my mother wanted to say something and couldn’t think of how to say it in Spanish so instead stayed silent.
One day, when my mother brought up feeling disconnected from her granddaughter, I delicately suggested she give herself permission to speak in English to her. I saw both defeat and relief on her face. And I saw a shift. A closeness that had been waiting in the wings crept in when my mother stopped allowing Spanish to freeze her up. She taught my daughter how to play Go Fish, told her long stories about her own mother who grew up in rural Texas, and my daughter looked to her as a source of knowledge, rather than someone who sometimes struggled to speak and had to ask her how to say a word.
This left me the only one in the family putting Spanish first, and messages like this one from an interview with Dr. Melissa Baralt, a psycholinguistics professor at Florida International University shook my confidence:
When caregivers do not use their maternal language with their infants or young children, that language input to children, that rich, syntactic complexity that’s so critical for language growth is just not present. It’s a very simplified language, and we would see this reflected in these children’s language measures as well.
Ouch.
But I knew that she was getting rich, native-level English from her father. And while I looked for them, I never saw any signs that she might be preferring him over me, that she might feel less bonded to me because of the nonnative part of my fluency in Spanish. In my presence, she was a healthy mix of independent and clingy, adventurous and snuggly. While her Spanish remained dominant for the first two years of her life, she quickly and easily defaulted to speaking Spanish with me, and in the same breath, English with her father. One day, when she was two-and-a-half, she was scribbling on a piece of paper, pretending to write letters to us. She read the top scribbles to me, “Te quiero, Mama” and the bottom scribbles, she told me, said, “I love you, Dada.”
The Harvest
When my daughter was almost three years old, we spent the summer in Costa Rica. She integrated bravely and seamlessly into her school, which was in the next town over. She had many factors to adjust to, including a chartered bus ride with the other children, with no parents or seatbelts on board. But the most obvious factor, the language, was not an issue. She communicated perfectly with her teachers and classmates, and made friends quickly. The same happened with the kids in our neighborhood who followed me to the bus stop every afternoon to pick her up after school.
I knew that even if the kids hadn’t had a common language to communicate in, they would have been friends, and they would have found ways to play. But because they could understand each other, their play was deeper—they didn’t just stack blocks and draw pictures together, they engaged in complicated imaginary games with kings and queens, robbers and magical treasures. There were costumes. There were rehearsals. Our porch became a stage. The work it took to constantly improve my own Spanish, the discipline it took to keep myself from speaking English to my daughter all felt worth it. It was the first time my daughter could experience for herself how meaningful it was to know another language.
Friends in Costa Rica.
The degree to which bilingualism boosts executive function and gives a true cognitive advantage is up for debate, with different studies coming to different conclusions. But what’s indisputable is the effect bilingualism has on cultural sensitivity, acceptance that people do and say things differently, on empathy, and metalinguistic awareness, something that makes children better writers and more effective users of language. Besides making international friends, I could see the advantages of my daughter’s bilingualism manifest in other areas of her life too.
When she was two she gained a step cousin. This four-year-old girl tenderly sought out her place in our family, and that involved giving my husband’s mother her own grandma name. While my daughter had always called her grandma “Mimmy,” her new cousin decided to call her “Yummy.” One visit, early on, my daughter ran to the kitchen and called out “Mimmy! Can you come read to us?” Then she ran back to the living room to report to her cousin that “Yummy says she’ll come read a book to us.” The grownups in the room exchanged glances. The ease with which she had accepted that Mimmy could be Mimmy for her and also Yummy for her cousin, I believe, has to do with the metalinguistic awareness that bilingualism is proven to give children.
This ability to separate language from the things it describes, to understand that words are just symbols for the real thing, to take new perspectives, to think abstractly about language, comes easily to children who grow up understanding that the thing your parents read to you at night can be called a “book” or a “libro.”
…
Stay tuned for the second part of this essay, in which Gray looks at the challenges to keeping the Spanish language alive for her daughter as she gets older. In Part Two, Gray also broadens the lens: she considers the racial and socioeconomic factors that determine how we value young people’s bilingualism.
Alice and daughter in Mexico.
Bio: Alice Gray has written in her blog www.bilingualbaby.blog about early childhood language acquisition from the moment her daughter uttered her first words. You can listen to clips of her daughter speaking Spanish, read a more intimate depiction of her and her husband’s break down over how to function as a bilingual family, and see what creative ways she’s come up with to keep Spanish alive even as English creeps in. Alice is a writer and editor in Austin, Texas. She serves on the board of El Niño y El Cuento, a writing contest for children in Spanish, and works in operations at a Spanish and French immersion preschool.