My wife and I are both multilingual, she is German but at home we speak Italian my native language. English has been always spoken in our house since we  lived in Florence Italy and I speak almost fluently Mandarin (passed HSK4), our kids are exposed daily to four languages. As you can see our two children are raised in a very multilingual and multicultural environment; they grow in a third-culture country compared to dad and mom and they fall into the so-called third-culture kids’ category (TCK). Additionally, their parents are from two different cultures, this makes things much more interesting. Below is how it works in practice in our home.

Our older son Giulio Rocco started speaking just after he turned two, the first words were in Chinese and German, he is exposed daily to Chinese mainly in the  kindergarten and from the baomu or ayi Chinese words for the nanny at home. We never worried about his late beginning really as we knew it was a confusing environment for him. He is now a toddler of three and half years and can speak all four languages we speak in the house with obvious differences in fluency and of course the limitations of his age; English is the latest addition to the bucket, but he is picking up fast and strange enough he is using English with his twenty-two months old brother.

We never really pushed him with one or the other languages, there was, of course, some competition at the beginning between me and Miriam my wife, she would say something in German and I would repeat it in Italian fearing Giulio would leave the second language behind, but now it seems all coming naturally together. He turns to me in Italian and then back to his mother in German and to the ayi in Chinese following the same topic of discussion. He loves chatting away in Chinese with strangers, the gardener, the delivery guy or anyone he meets in the elevator. When he is watching cartoons on the iPad he switches easily from one to the other of the four languages without apparent preferences, he loves Peppa Pig and watches the same episode in the four languages one after the other !

The other funny part of the story is to watch Elia the younger following all this and starting to develop his own language. He seems to have a lot of hurry to talk much earlier than his elder brother and his first word again was Chinese followed by German. He is a great repeater, he repeats words easily in any of the four languages we speak to him.

Raising multi-language children is such an amazing experience for a parent, I have read a lot about this topic and I find it so fascinating. For those who think kids’ brain cannot keep up with so many languages, just consider the amount of things they have to learn in their first years of life, then language is only a small part of it; I believe the real limitation of the possibility for my children to learn different languages is how much exposure the environment can offer them and how much we can nurture and let their language develop. Leaving in China under these conditions fully exposes them to four languages in a natural way not modifiable by us at present. It is also proved that for kids learning more languages simultaneously is not counter effective but actually advantageous.

Besides the obvious advantages of speaking different languages, multilingualism and multiculturalism are so rewarding in many aspects like flexibility, adaptability, broaden views on things, an innate acceptance of cultural differences and of course self-esteem and self-confidence. Studies have also proved that they help children to develop superior writing, reading,  analytical, social, and academic skills.

In conclusion we hope our children will continue to be exposed to more rich, diverse and unique experiences like this one in China and like us they can see the world as a much smaller place than it is, hopefully a better place for them to live, explore and practice their multi-language proficiency.

Belonging to multiple cultures doesn’t come without some outs, the sociologist David Pollock is the most influential researcher on TCK. For more information about TCK and related culture loss debates, below are some interesting references:

• Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken
• Mixed Blessings: A Guide to Multicultural and Multi-ethnic Relationships, Harriet Cannon, Rhoda Berlin.
• Bilingual: Life and Reality by Francois Grosjean
• There are plenty of resources on the web, one very interesting is http://www.multilingualchildren.org/

I would like to end this reflection with the following quote:

 “He who knows no foreign language does not know his own.” Goethe