I’m living in a Japanese city with my bilingual wife and toddler, who we’re raising using multiple languages (my native language when it’s the two of us; English when it’s all three of us; and Japanese with my wife and when she’s at daycare, etc.).
Recently, we’ve encountered several pushes from different directions against using multiple languages, instead telling us to only focus on drilling them Japanese for now. One of these is an internationally oriented community, with basically a lot of mixed babies, and this surprised me. They cited only Japanese research, including those mentioned in the post I am including below, which basically says you should focus on mastering one language until your teenage years before starting on the next. It’s a bit shocking to me that many of the other moms (including non-Japanese) seem to endorse this. For the Japanese moms, I suppose it makes it easier for them, not needing to invest in the other language themselves. Still, I can’t help but feel sorry for the other children not learning other languages for free, not being able to communicate with certain members of their family, and I feel a bit conflicted if I should call these Japanese-only advocates out during public lectures where they teach this kind of stuff, because they are otherwise knowledgeable and friendly people.
Moreover, I was surprised when one of our pediatricians said something similar, warning us against using different languages too much, citing research on “semilingualism”. Therefore, since most/all of the other mixed children in our environment only seem to be using Japanese, I am now starting to worry if I am doing something wrong. The post below thankfully helped debunk some of this, but living in Japan, it’s hard to ignore the social pressure from people around you. So, I am wondering if people have similar experiences, and how they dealt with this.
Thank you!
This is the post that inspired this from a different sub-reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/yngqjs/is\_there\_evidence\_to\_prove\_that\_early\_bilingual/](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/yngqjs/is_there_evidence_to_prove_that_early_bilingual/)
POST-EDIT:
Thanks for everyone chiming in; really helpful!! Thank you also for sharing some research; I will be ready when it happens again 🙂
It’s been really interesting to see that many people recognize this kind of thinking/pressure in Japan, while nearly just as many seem to never encounter this. Possibly region-specific? Just a thought. I wonder what kinds of circles / regions encounter this, and which ones are “safe”.
by JoopFOX