A Polish citizen married to a Finn, I moved to Central Finland less than twelve years ago. As my husband happens to speak flawless Polish, my settlement in Finland was made easier. For the first year or so, while at home, I had the comfort of communicating exclusively in my mother tongue Polish. The birth of our two children (Helena in 2006 and Jan in 2009) proved a turning point in our family life and created, apart from other challenges, a veritable revolution in the way we communicate at home.

From the moment we became parents, we tried to adopt the OPOL (= One Parent, One Language) rule when addressing our two children. Meaning to say, I communicate with them in Polish only, while my husband tries to stick to his mother tongue Finnish. In an ideal world we would probably be able to avoid confusing the two language, reality however proved far different from our idealistic assumptions. Often times, when witnessing a discussion held in Finnish between my children and their father, I get involved speaking Finnish, either on my own initiative or in reply to a question put forward in that language. It feels perfectly natural to reply to a given question in the same language, in which it is formulated. This results in the violation of the initially adopted OPOL rule. Needless to say, the same goes for my husband, who frequently gets “carried away” and replies to a Polish question posed by one of the children in the same language it is asked in, i.e. in Polish (foreign to him).

It is hardly surprising then that being exposed to both languages spoken by both parents (sometimes as mother tongues, i.e. correct, and sometimes as foreign languages, i.e. incorrect) our offspring tend to get confused when switching from one language to another. The other day our 7-year old son made us burst with laughter when creating yet another perfect neologism. By associating the past tense form of the Polish verb zdążyć [to make in on time] and its Finnish equivalent ehtiä, Jan spontaneously coined a typical linguistic fusion, by exclaiming: – Nie ehditowałem! [which combines the Polish – Nie zdążyłem with the Finnish form – En ehtinyt, i.e. – I didn’t make it on time]. Similar examples are plentiful in his daily linguistic repertoire.

Here is an online article I read recently, which so faithfully reflects our bilingual family struggles and joys:

Ni ma water”, or how I raised a bilingual child by Andrzej Michalik, a translator and interpreter (English and Polish) and a highly motivated father who decided (and managed!) to raise his son Patrick bilingual in a monolingual community.

The article proves that “when there is a will, there is a way” and that it is definitely worth putting extra effort into your child’s bilingual upbringing, as at the end of the day the benefits will outnumber the hardships. Why bother at all? Well, let us hear the opinion of Patrick himself:

Hello, I’m Patrick. I have been bilingual since I was born. I think it’s great. There are so many advantages to that. Like: I can communicate with virtually anyone wherever I go. [...] And I don’t have to learn during English classes. [...] The next nice thing about being bilingual are the books and movies. There are so many books in English. All the movies are great too. Finding information on the Internet must be really hard for someone who only speaks Polish. [...] I also understand most of the songs playing on the radio and I’ve met many nice people from England or the USA.

http://interpretersoapbox.com/how-i-raised-a-bilingual-child-polish-english/

Studying the text felt like seeing a mirror reflection of my own family. There are so many parallels between the examples quoted by the writer and our own everyday linguistic experience!