The Bilingual Potential company motto is “Speaking parents’ language”.
Bilingual Potential is about explaining bilingual family life in such a way that parents can pick up the skills they need to help their children grow up speaking the parent’s language or languages.
My name is Soile Pietikäinen. I am a sociologist specialised in bilingual family interaction. Understanding what makes bilingual family life work is basically the meaning of my life.
With the word “bilingual” I refer to all people who live their lives in more than two languages. I live mine in three: Finnish, English and Italian. With the word “potential” I mean that not all people who could or would like to live with two languages do actually do so. They potentially could, but right now they can’t.
Many families go through a process where children do not learn a parental language. This is a normal and natural process. But it is also an avoidable process, because the opposite - two fluent languages - is just as natural. However, to achieve it, you need to know how to do it.
I have spent all my adult life figuring out how bilingual family life works, so that I could help lots of people to enjoy easier and more harmonious time while raising children and while growing up in bilingual families.
Why did I get obsessed with this? Because back in the early 1990’s, when I was young, I met several families where a parent was speaking their language to the children, but the children were not learning to speak the language at all. And I mean at all! Do-joing! I had not seen that coming. I had thought that if a parent spoke a different language to their child the children would quite automatically and effortlessly grow up speaking two native languages. Apparently not so!
I could not let it pass. Especially is it dawned on me 5 years later that I would marry a foreigner and our family could be in that situation. I knew that I could not put up with my children not growing up using the Finnish language. I knew that I could only truly be the best parent I can be, if the entire parent-child relationship was in Finnish.
I had to find out why languages are lost when parents try transfer them to the next generation. I had to find out how to prevent this from happening.
I began studying bilingualism research done in linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, neurology and education (it is an interdisciplinary field). I am a sociologist so I combined bilingualism knowledge with sociology, especially microsociology of everyday interactions and sociology of migration.
Languages are learned in the minute everyday interactions, whether you are monolingual or bilingual. The bilingual life experience is special to migrants and ethnic minorities. At least one parent in a bilingual family is either an immigrant or a member of a native linguistic minority, and hence a bilingual.
I have learned a lot by parenting two two trilingual children who are now teenagers. I have kept learning by designing community education and arts projects one after another. I kept learned by teaching advanced teachers how to work with bilingual pupils and by doing research of my own with bilingual families of children aged 5-15.
Over the years I learned to resolve quite a few bilingualism problems. The one thing I am particularly good at is Bilingual Speech Activation. This means bringing to life languages children have never began speaking or languages that children have stopped speaking.
Some things are right on moral grounds. That children should benefit from a loving and enriching relationship with their parent in the parent’s native language is such a thing. I am not alone in thinking so. This has been recognised not just as being right, but as being a right.
Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that every child has the right to “learn and use” the language of their parents. That wording sets the bar rather high. It does not say that parents have the right to speak their language to the children. No. It does not say that children have the right to hear their parent’s language. No.
It says something far more ambitious: that children have the right to learn and to use the language of their parents. Learning a language well enough to be able to independently use a language implies a high level bilingual competence.
When I work with families I aim for bilingualism so advanced, that the child enjoys using their parent’s language. I am all about the child. I am all about the joy that advanced bilingual language use brings.
If this is what you would wish for your child and you are prepared to work for it with an open heart and a long-term commitment, then make the most of my help.
Bilingual Potential page has three purposes: to share news, to ask for your views and to promote good work done by others. Topics covered here are relevant to parents of bilingual families. I do not post about early foreign language learning.
Welcome to follow Bilingual Potential.
Soile
NB: I also direct the Nordic London Festival that has been running since 2016. It has a separate page called “Nordic London Festival” and a YouTube channel called “NordicLondonFestival”.
