Guest Blog: Growing Up Bilingual in Italian and English

One Family, Two Languages

Una famiglia, due lingue

by Rebecca Winke

I fell in love with the bel paese during a high school foreign exchange summer in Umbria in 1986, when I met my future husband and began tripping through my first words in Italian. In 1993, after college, I moved to Italy from Chicago and opened an agriturismo in my husband’s renovated family farmhouse at the foot of Mount Subasio near Assisi. I spend my time taking care of guests at Brigolante and of our two sons -- Nicolò, nine, and Leonardo, “five going on six.”  

Raising bilingual and/or bicultural kids crystalizes the poignant truth about how much children belong to you and how much — how excruciatingly, heart-breakingly, humblingly much — they do not. We use OPOL (One Person One Language) in our house, which is a rather inelegant way of saying that I speak English to our sons and my husband speaks Italian.

Conventional wisdom holds that bilingual children speak later than monolingual children and that boys generally speak later than girls. My two bilingual sons spoke so precociously that I often found myself wistfully yearning that this were true.

Almost simultaneously with putting together their first phrases, my children understood grammar. They would often say “I raccont-ed (Italian for told) a story” or “they sposa themselves” (get married). From these linguistic mash-ups, I realized that toddlers—yes, toddlers--already understand the concept of adding a suffix to a verb in English to communicate the past tense and how a reflexive verb works in Italian.

Young children also understand the concept of language as a meta experience. When my older son was just learning his first words, I instructed him in English to say thank you to the butcher. He turned and said, “Grazie!” He already understood that two distinct languages with separate vocabularies needed to be spoken appropriately to two distinct groups of people.

As a parent I’ve come to realize how much of conversation is not a two-way street, even if you are speaking directly to a second person. For example, when I ask my son -- in Italian -- in front of his aunt if he has thanked her for the birthday gift, I’m not so much prompting him as communicating to her, “Listen, if he hasn’t said thank you, it’s not because I’m a bad parent who doesn’t know how to teach manners!” If I announce -- in Italian -- during a play date, “If you don’t keep it down, there will be no ice cream!” I am getting it across to all present that ice cream is on the line, even if you’re not my kid so I can’t scold you directly.

Every family has a private language, laced with inside jokes and references, invented words, and lots of baggage. A bilingual family’s patois is more intricate and exclusive. I end my children’s names in the endearment mou, which is a relic from my Greek heritage. My husband calls them boccia, a word in the disappearing Umbrian dialect for young boy — how he himself was addressed growing up.

We all slip an Italian word into an English sentence or an English word into an Italian sentence for expediency or comprehension (or habit). My sons say they’re nervous when they mean stressed-out (nervoso in Italian), annoyed when they mean bored (annoiato), and uneducated when they mean rude (maleducato). They use taste, smell, and feel indiscriminately (because it’s all the same verb sentire in Italian).

As they grow, my sons’ two languages will fully form and separate, and our little private island with its crazy patchwork of words stitched together with the threads of history and family and culture will slowly vanish. But right now we speak one common language in our house -- the language of love. And we all capisce (understand) ourselves, as my sons would say.

Rebecca blogs about the lovely region she calls home at Rebecca’s Ruminations and wonders what strange winds blew an urban vegetarian to a pig farm in Umbria.

Dianne Hales is the author of LA BELLA LINGUA: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. 

Comments

[Opatija apartman]

I think there's only 1 or 2 alphabets difference italy and English language.... right?

[dianne]

Dear Leslie, I'm not the bilingual mom. Rebecca Winke is. You can reach her at her blog: http://www.brigolante.com/en/blog/ And I agree that she is impressive in every way. Thanks for the comment. DH

[Leslie L.]

Hello!
I read your blog and I am extremely impressed with how you decided to raise your family. I can't imagine what that would be like! My brother is considering raising his family (once he has one) with two languages as well: English and Spanish. I am sure that your children will be excellent in English as they grow up; I wish I was bilingual! My family has our own language as well and I think it's refreshing to see another person write about that.

Your experience in Italy must have been amazing! I've only been there once when I was in fifth grade. What's an agriturismo? The word looks like agriculture but I would be interested to know more specifically from your experience.

This is a wonderfully written blog!

[Vicky]

What a wonderful thing to be raised with two languages. I wish I had that luck... honestly, people don't realize how knowing more languages will help you in life...

[Rebecca Winke]

Hello, everyone, and thanks so much for your comments and feedback on this post!
@Melissa...that's so funny! When I do those silly mom endearments, my kids look at me suspicious and ask, "Is that really a word, or did you just inventa it?"
@Jodina...I will be very nostalgic for our funny little family speak when it's gone, just like so many things that disappear as your kids grow. But I'm enjoying it now.
@Celia...I agree. In fact, in the unedited post I said "My sons still tend to get muddled when meeting other bilingual people; they are more sure of themselves when they know exactly which language they need to pull off the shelf." They are not very good translator/interpreters yet, though I think that will come as they grow. About 90% of our books and movies are in English, for vocabulary and culture as you say.
@LindyLou...thanks for stopping by!
@Kim...the English language instruction in school is so teacher-dependent. I have had extraordinary luck here in Assisi...the preschool teacher who taught English was Swiss and her English was excellent, and the primary school English teachers are both very proficient, innovative, and enthusiastic (and, importantly, very open to having bilingual kids in class and happy to have their errors corrected. I have a friend whose son was reprimanded for correcting the teacher's English, though he was a mother tongue.) I think it's a crap shoot with English instruction---just like it is with math, science, and Italian. If you are lucky, you get a wonderful teacher...otherwise, you spend a lot of time in the principal's office complaining. :(

[Kim]

It is the same way in my house. My children even at the very young age were able to separate the two and at the same time combine them. Something I am jealous of, since my Italian is horrible. But what my main concern now is the the teaching of English in the Public schools. What are your thoughts on this? Here is my post on the topic.
http://firenzemom.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/learning-english-by-cd/

[LindyLouMac]

What a lovely guest post, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and having never come across Rebecca and her blog before am off to visit straight away.

[Celia]

I think that brains work in different ways. My daughter learnt the two languages in parallel but there would be a pause when asked to translate sentences until she was about 6 or seven. I think this is because in her case the brain worked as a native in both languages therefore it took awhile to adjust to translating an expression where sometimes to gain the same meaning the words has to be adjusted. Reading in both languages is the most important point so that vocabulary and culture grow with the children.

[Jodina]

That is a lovely blog post. Grazie.
Mi ricorda la parte italiana of my life when basically most people populating my world were bilingual inglese/italiano to some extent, and we had the choice of which word to use to express which concetti... sometimes it was italiano and sometimes english... depending on which language did it meglio. Sometimes, jokingly, we called our 'patois' whoplish (definitley not pc, but neither is la cultura italiana). When i moved to the u.s. it was a hard adjustement to revert to speaking only one language all the time to be understood. Mi manca il mash-up! :))
Jodina of www.ItalianoWithJodina.com

[Melissa Muldoon]

Molto bello Rebecca! I tuoi ragazzi sono adorabili! It is so true how families have their own unique languages. Of course we speak English in our home, with a smattering of Italian that I interject here and there (which, by the way, never goes over very well with my kids). But, the boys also tease me that I have created my own interesting language which my youngest calls "Melissa-rumphf" (?) which is a concoction of my own bag of odd made-up-fantasy-words and odd-suffixes that I add, that express things in my own unique "Melissaey" way. Sometimes my youngest, if he hasn't heard the word I am using before, even if it is a valid English word, pauses and asks...is that a real word or is that Melissa-rumphf. Whatever it is, it is a language of endearment and they get that! Complimenti di nuovo!