Paradigm Shift: Speak (Mostly) French to My Daughters

Paradigm Shift

Although I’ve been pleased with Jubilee’s French language learning, I’ve been rethinking my bilingual goal for her. So on this, my 100th blog post, I’ve got some big news to share: I’m choosing to speak (mostly) French with my daughters! 

I’d always been hesitant to make the leap to speaking exclusively French. Some of my hesitations were:

• English is my native language and feels the most natural to speak to my girls, so they can truly know me at a heart level
• I’m a non-native French speaker and so don’t always know the words or still make grammatical mistakes
• Living in West Africa is a unique context and I worried about where my girls would learn English if not from me
• Because I didn’t start from birth Jubilee doesn’t always understand French and I didn’t want to switch to it when we’re still working on obedience (which is going slower than I’d like)

But the more I continued to find French resources and read about bilingualism, the more excited I got. I reconsidered the importance of my bilingual goal and the fact that regular spoken input is the most important way to achieve it (thanks Adam Beck!). 

So although speaking mostly French is quite a paradigm shift for me, I realized there were answers to my hesitations:

• Heart Language: my caveat is speaking “mostly” French because there are still times I’ll use English 
• Non-Native Speaker: I can continue to improve my own French 
• West Africa: we do have teammates & other sources for English exposure here and we visit the US for 6 months every 2.5 years
• Obedience: especially during this transition phase I can say some things in both English & French to ensure comprehension

So wish me well as I embark on this new phase of our bilingual journey!