Language is an issue I think all parents are in some way concerned with. Being that language acquisition is often the gateway to reduced crying, screeching, and general aural assault of the icepick to the brain variety, when will my baby acquire language is, of course, the big question for most.
You like my screeching. Why do you lie?
In our family, however, as in many families like ours, we have an additional question to deal with: what language will my baby acquire and who amongst us is going to be able to understand him when he does talk? Between his mulicultural family background and his father's adamant insistence that we capitalize on the opportunity to teach all the languages that come with it (and/or fry his little brain, whichever comes first) I fear what we have on our hands is a guessing game. Will his first words be in English? Spanish? Will he speak Farsi? Will a cat be a cat? A gatto? A gorbeh? Will I decide to teach him infant sign language and really screw him up?
What matters here most, is that you do what I say, not how I say it.
And what about me? How the hell am I supposed to keep things striaght with all three of these languages floating around in my head? Just the other day, I found myself trying to ask the baby if he wanted his bottle and in that one, singular sentence I somehow managed to start in Spanish and end in Farsi while speaking to a person who basically only understands fart noises and the sound a bottle of formula makes while being shook.
Hehe...fart noises.
Regardless of my problems, however, and despite the baby's total inability to understand even the simplest of phrases (like, go fix mama a sammich) his father still pushes us all to speak to him in a multitude of languages. And, ultimately, I do understand how helpful it can be to get a start at least developing an ear for all of these languages from an early age. So, I suppose, when the day finally comes when my poor child looks up to me with that sweet little face and asks, que are we having para cena emshab mama? I will simply have to answer, go ask your father.
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