Alice

Jabberlingual

The Speckled Band: Or Learning English with Sherlock Holmes

by Alice
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By Alice Lapuerta Originally appeared at the Bilingual/Bicultural Family Network in July 2006 Photo credit: Alterego “It was the band! The speckled band!!!” my mother read with dramatic intonation. My brothers and I huddled against her. I didn’t understand a word she said, but fidgeted around with excitement nevertheless. “Was ist das, ‘speckled band’?” we [...]

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Jabberlingual

The Diga-Diga Syndrome. Or: Confessions of a Worrisome Trilingual Parent

by Alice
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By Alice Lapuerta Originally appeared in April 2006 on the Bilingual/Bicultural Family Network. Photo Credit: gazzaPax As if parenthood doesn’t give us enough to worry about as it is, with bilingual children we worry just a tad bit more. One particular pet-worry is our children’s speech development. Counting and analyzing our children’s words as they [...]

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Jabberlingual

The Torn Bilingual Soul?

by Alice
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By Alice Lapuerta Let’s talk about “Bilingual Identity.” The split bilingual soul. The fragmented personality, the eternal half, the uprooted Third Culture Kid eternally searching for home. It is interesting that whenever I read something on the “Bilingual identity,” I do so with complete detachment. It takes a while for it to sink in: they [...]

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Jabberlingual

Things in the Attic: Of Cassette Tapes, Memories and Forgotten Languages

by Alice
The author

By Alice Lapuerta The things one finds when one rummages through the attic. An old shoe box with dusty cassette tapes, for instance.   The sweet voice of a little girl babbling away, telling stories, singing songs. That was me, when I was 5 years old. How surreal, listening to one’s childhood self. What totally [...]

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Jabberlingual

The Evil Majority Language

by Alice
Time for the community language

By Alice Lapuerta The majority language = the bad language. This has somehow firmly embedded itself in my mind. It’s the language that you should avoid speaking at all costs. It will, ever so deviously, take over if you don’t watch out. So you better make sure it’s safely caged and stays where it belongs: [...]

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Jabberlingual

Monolingual Envy

by Alice
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By Alice Lapuerta There are times when I wish we were just like the ordinary monolingual family next door. Let’s call them the Schmidts – The Schmidts just speak the majority language German all the time. They don’t wake up every morning wondering what language to speak. They don’t need to worry about whether OPOL [...]

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Jabberlingual

The Little Magical Computer Will Make My Kids Bilingual

by Alice
Dominik using his new Spanish-speaking toy.

By Alice Lapuerta I have decided that my kids are going to be fluent Spanish speakers after all. My kids are going to be balanced trilinguals! Hooray! We’ve been saved… …by a toy.

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