Should I speak my native language to my child?
Yes. Speak the language you know best and feel most natural in. Rich, warm, fluent conversation builds vocabulary and thinking skills that carry over to the community language, which your child will also pick up at school and with friends. Swapping to a language you speak less well usually means less, and simpler, talk.
Yes, speak your native language to your child. The language you know best is the one in which you can tell stories, joke, comfort, explain and argue, and that richness is what builds a child's language and thinking skills. Children living in another country will learn the community language at nursery, at school and with friends. They are much less likely to learn yours unless you use it.
Won't it slow down their English (or the school language)?
Not in the way parents fear. Speech-language experts list "multilingualism causes language delays" and "multilingualism causes language confusion" among the common myths about multilingual children. A bilingual child may know fewer words in each separate language at first, because their vocabulary is split across two, and skills like storytelling, reasoning and early literacy carry across languages.
What can hold children back is less conversation overall. A parent switching to a language they speak hesitantly may talk less, use simpler sentences and read aloud less. Your fluent home language gives your child more.
Why it matters to keep it
- Family connection. Grandparents, cousins and your own childhood stories live in that language.
- Identity. Children who speak their family language often feel more connected to their heritage.
- A lifelong skill. Learning a language as a child is far easier than relearning it as a teenager or adult.
The real challenge: keeping it alive
Many children growing up with a home language and a different community language end up preferring the community language once school starts. In a study of about 1,900 bilingual families in Belgium, children were most likely to speak the home language when both parents used it at home (De Houwer, 2007). Where only one parent speaks it, you need to work harder to give it enough space.
Practical ways to keep your language strong
- Make it the default at home, especially at meals, bedtime and playtime.
- Read aloud in your language every day, even after your child can read the school language.
- Connect with other speakers: relatives on video calls, community groups, weekend schools, holidays.
- Use media in your language: songs, audiobooks and shows.
- Keep going if they answer in the other language. Respond warmly in yours. See My child understands but won't speak the language.
- Never shame mistakes. Praise any effort to speak it.
Where Askie can help
Askie's app interface is available in nine languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic and Russian, and children can also practise speaking languages such as Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic out loud with Askie. For a child whose home language is losing ground, a few minutes a day of chatting with Askie in that language, about the things they love, adds speaking practice between family conversations. You can read every conversation afterwards.
For families with two languages split between parents, see Does one parent, one language work?
Speaking practice, every day
Askie gives your child a patient conversation partner for practising a new language out loud, at their age and level.