03 February 2011

Raising gringos

It's been 7 months since I last posted here - what a shame. But a lot happened during this time, so I don't feel too bad. The biggest change in life is that now I'm a mother of 2 trilingual babies. Nicholas, our cute little bug, arrived on the 2nd of December. And a quick note here – I totally share Sarah’s relief about having a second child immersed in a bi/trilingual environment. Nicholas was already born into this adventure! So, I don't need to make a huge effort again to understand how it is going to be; what the hell OPOL means; which challenges we will face; which resources are/aren’t available; how creative and persistent we need to be.

On our trilingual baby #1 – I’m happy to say it seems Julia has turned the corner and is now a more active Portuguese speaker! As I mentioned before, although she understands everything in Portuguese, she had chosen English no matter who she was speaking to. However, my mother and aunt visited us in December and: (a) we were 3 people speaking Portuguese all day long; (b) they were more demanding with her to speak in Portuguese. The result is that all of a sudden she became really interested in her Portuguese DVDs, CDs, in learning nursery rhymes (not only listening but learning to sing along), etc. Even after their departure, she kept this way and is in fact communicating with me in Portuguese more often (probably 70% of the time). I’m really proud of her. We can see this is an effort, but she keeps trying. The most fascinating aspect is that she is clearly an English speaker speaking Portuguese.

The most obvious thing is for example of pragmatics, where the order of words appears the other way round:
• Where is my brown bear? / Cadê meu marrom urso? (In Portuguese, should be “urso marrom”, as generally adjectives come after nouns)
• It is not raining. / Está não chovendo. (should be “Não está chovendo”)

She also gets confused with verb conjugation (but probably native speakers do as well?). For example, she says “Eu te ama” (I love you – should be Eu te amo), mixing different conjugations (amo/ama) for different persons (I/she). Since I tell her both sentences: “Eu te amo” (I love you) and “Mamãe te ama” (Mummy loves you), she naturally gets confused. Likewise, she says “meu bolsa” (my bag), when it should be “minha bolsa” (minha is the feminine form of ‘mine’ and meu is the masculine form), and bag… for some reason… is feminine. I suppose this is a normal mistake for Portuguese speakers as well, to learn the gender of words, but of course if you are not a native speaker this is a more significant challenge. In her case, I hear Julia’s Portuguese acquisition as if she were in a point in between. She is not 100% immersed in a Portuguese environment, but has been exposed to the language since birth. The result is that she speaks totally as a gringa (a foreigner), as we would say in Brazil…

And then here comes my train of thoughts…
So she speaks as a gringa…
but she is not a gringa…
or is she?
How will it be when we move to Brazil, will she be considered Brazilian?
Will her friends tease her saying she is a gringa?
Surely she will overcome the grammar challenges. But if you think of bi/tri/multilingual kids as being not only exposed to more than one language but more than one culture...
Oh my!
Who could imagine that I would ever be a mother of 2 gringos?!
Me… an extremely proud Brazilian… mother of 2 gringos.

Life is definitely full of surprises!

2 comments:

Michael Dodson said...

May I ask, what makes a person a gringo or gringa?

Sarah @ Baby Bilingual said...

And you should be very proud indeed! Congratulations again on the arrival of Nicholas.

I'm glad you're blogging again--looking forward to hearing more about the kiddos and their languages!