It’s the accent!

As a non-native speaker of French, an incident in France this summer confirmed that yes, you can teach your kids to speak a second language as a non-native, and hearing a non-native accent won’t necessarily affect theirs.

If you have been reading past posts, you know that we took our boys to France this past summer for their (French) linguistic, family and cultural development.

When we were checking into our apartment rental in Paris, I was discussing, in French, the details of our stay with the woman who was there to hand us the key. After a few minutes, my then-4 year old chimed in and asked me a question, in French. The woman stopped short and was flustered. She asked me how it was that my son had “no” accent in French (meaning, he had a perfect accent!), but I had a pretty obvious one (I haven’t lived there in 18 years, so that’s the way it goes!). It kind of freaked her out. She was very interested to know how we’d accomplished that, since we live in the US.

Yes, my husband is French (“no” accent in French), but the kids only go to France every other year. This anecdote shows that if you give your children a wide variety of high-quality inputs while they are learning a second language (including audio, video and some native speakers), it doesn’t matter if you are not a native speaker or if they don’t visit that often. If they get good grammatical and pronunciation input from somewhere, they can parse it in their brain. Having one (or two!) non-native speakers teaching them their second (or third!) language is still a good thing. So, non-native speakers unite and keep up the good work at bring up your kids bilingually!