We all know that maintaining our mother tongue/father tongue, mother language/father language, heritage language is important to transmit our children a sense of belonging through this language, and to the culture that is attached to it. What if we want to transmit a dialect or regional variant? Especially families who raise their children abroad tend to […]
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What part of our language are we passing on to our children when living abroad?
When our children grow up abroad, outside of the country where our home languages are spoken, many of us tend to focus on standard language. We want our children to learn the most standardized version of our language. This has several reasons: we want our children to be able to understand and be […]
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When cultural and linguistic stereotyping is fostered by media
Children love cartoons, movies, games and we all know that the villains, the “bad guys” are not only characterized by features that make them unpleasant, but also by foreign accents. Sociolinguist Calvin Gidney started to study language patterns in animated kid’s entertainment after noticing that Mufasa had an American accent, whereas Scar, the lion of the […]
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How to play the Category game across languages and age groups
The category game, known as Stadt–Land-Fluß in German, in Italiano si chiama nome, cose città en français c’est le jeu du baccalauréat, ou jeu du bac, ou petit bac – En español es el juego tutti frutti o también conocido como Stop, Alto el Lápiz, Chanton, Pare carrito, Autopencil, Bachillerato y Basta – y em […]
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Podcasts and audio material for multilingual children
Many of us are spending way more time on screen than necessary. We all would benefit from “off screen time” (funny that I share this in a post that you can only read… online). As I am discovering more and more audio resources (audiobooks, songs, stories, podcasts), I thought I’d to share some audio resources […]
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