Pasta in the polder

Codeswitching is common with multilingual people. I also see my bilingual child use a lot of loanwords, which I find interesting.

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Quando capisci di essere bilingue?

“La mia esperienza di nonna di bambini bilingue è entusiasmante. Vedere i progressi di Julia mi riempie di orgoglio. Fino a poco meno di un anno fa, lei non riusciva a comprendere che con i nonni e zii doveva parlare in Italiano e quindi, spesso dovevamo ricordarglielo. Adesso sa perfettamente come esprimersi e passa con naturalezza […]

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One magic word

Yesterday, my son (1,5) said ‘sì’ for the first time. Finally! It’s probably no surprise he already said ‘no‘ and ‘nee‘ for a while. We also managed to get him to say ‘ja’ with a lot of applause. So, now we’re complete. Still, he has a huge preference for any variation of the word ‘no’. […]

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From one language to the other

“Mama, are there any ‘zanzare’ here?”, my daughter asked when we were at the beach a couple of weeks ago. “No, there are no mosquitos here”, I said. “Oh, OK, but I see there are ‘formiche’”, she said – pointing at some ants marching across the sand. Code-switching: switching between two languages during a conversation […]

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