The second Bilingual Baby?

Hello. In case you missed it, we now have two kids, and that means one more datapoint.

Bilingual parents know that raising younger kids bilingual is wayyy harder than with your oldest, because no matter how much the parents try to speak the target language at home, the older sibling will probably speak some English to the younger. In our case, with our son Ro, we had a Chinese nanny until he was 15 months, and our house was predominantly Chinese-speaking. Our daughter Em, however, has been going to English-speaking daycare since she was about 6 months.¹ One benefit Em has – after having a non-English speaker live with us for a year, my husband and I are more in the habit of speaking Chinese at home.

Em is now 14 months and starting to say a few words. Other than dual language words like mama, baba, bye bye, hi, she mostly speaks English: no, mo(re),² done-done,³ ball, bear, baby. Recently, though, she picked up her first Chinese word: 掉.⁴ She mostly uses it in this Chinglish phrase: “Uh-oh, 掉!”, which ostensibly means “oh no, it fell!” but really means “look, I threw it on the floor!” X’D

^{1 Yes, having two kids in daycare is still cheaper than a nanny. ↩}

^{2 I’m still hungry! ↩}

^{3 Get me off this high chair! ↩}

^{4 to fall ↩}