In Quarantine, Kids Pick Up Parents’ Mother Tongues

A few days into the lockdown here in London, I noticed a surprising side-effect of the pandemic: My 3-year-old son was speaking more German.

German is my mother tongue, and I have used it with him since he was born, but because everyone around us speaks English, including my British husband, we settled into a pattern typical of mixed families. I spoke to my son in German, and he replied in English. Then Covid-19 reshuffled our linguistic deck. As all of us quarantined at home, my son embraced German with unprecedented enthusiasm. Now, almost six months on, it has become his preferred language. In a complete reversal, he even replies to my husband in German.

My experience is far from unique. All over the world, Covid-19 has forced children to stay inside. In some homes where different languages coexist, this is changing how they speak. With schools and day cares closed, previously dominant languages — such as English in Britain and the United States — are no longer as overpowering. Instead, children are hearing more of their parents’ mother tongues.

“They’re put into this little hothouse of less English, more other languages,” said Ludovica Serratrice, Ph.D., a professor specializing in multilingualism at the University of Reading in Britain.

Together with researchers at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, University College London and other institutions, Dr. Serratrice surveyed the language habits of over 700 multilingual families in Britain and Ireland from April to the beginning of July, when the countries were mostly shut down. And researchers in Norway carried out an adapted version of the same survey, collecting responses from almost 200 families.

The parents in these families spoke more than 40 different mother tongues, including French, Polish, Spanish, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Kirundi and Zulu. Before the lockdown, the children tended to use the dominant languages: English in Britain and Ireland, and Norwegian in Norway (plus English, thanks to television, computer games and other media).

Now, preliminary data suggests children were using the parents’ languages more during the lockdown, especially among younger kids.

“When you think about living in a different country and raising your child in your native language, some people think, ‘Oh, it’s the most natural thing and it’s easy,’ because it’s your native language. And that couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Elisabet García González, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo who led the Norwegian survey.

Instead, “the language of the home becomes less and less important,” she said, as children start school and make friends in the country’s dominant language. Unless parents take extra measures, the ancestral sound may fade. School plays a crucial role with this; in a study of 200 Korean-American families, the portion of firstborn children who spoke Korean to their parents went from almost 80 percent to 34 percent after starting school. Younger siblings spoke even less.

For parents, that sudden rejection of the mother tongue can be bewildering and even painful. My son’s first words were in German. He preferred it as long as I was on maternity leave and we were both at home. When he started day care, he switched to English, even in our own conversations, and it was as if someone had snatched away our common language.

The pandemic appears to have stopped that slide, at least for some.

Dr. Elizabeth Lanza, a professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo, who supervised the Norwegian survey, observed the shift in her own family. Lanza is American, but has lived in Norway for decades. Her daughter also lives in Norway and speaks English to her young toddler, while her partner speaks Norwegian. Before Covid-19, one of the boy’s favorite words was the Norwegian “mer!”, echoing the language he heard at his day care. About a week into the lockdown, he switched to the English equivalent: “more!”

Dr. Lanza cautioned that not all respondents saw their native tongue strengthen. Some even said it was suffering because they were home-schooling the children in Norwegian.

But where the languages did blossom, it made the parents happy. In the midst of an incredibly stressful time, the fact that the children were speaking these second languages brought parents joy. This echoes research suggesting that passing on one’s language can create better communication between generations and a shared identity and heritage.

In the United States, researchers interested in language have launched an app called KidTalk to gather recordings made before and during Covid-19. Yi Ting Huang, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland, and Joshua Hartshorne, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, have recruited more than 300 families, about a third of which are multilingual, for the project.

Dr. Hartshorne said it’s a good opportunity to study how children learn languages, including multiple languages. “I don’t know that we’ve had recent historical precedent for a child’s world to be shrunk down to just the immediate family for months at a time,” he wrote in an email.

Dr. Huang plans to use speech-recognition software to analyze the recordings; for example, identifying the number of speakers and languages in each conversation, and tracking any changes. This could help us understand how multilingual children deploy their different languages as learning tools, such as using their knowledge of one to acquire the next.

In the past, Dr. Huang said, many researchers and policymakers viewed a child as a water glass that could only hold so much liquid. “So we’re just trying to cram as much of one language as opposed to another language,” she said. This led to some parents and teachers using only English with children, and suppressing second languages. Now most experts say children use languages flexibly, changing them for the situation.

Dr. Huang experienced this herself. When she was 5 years old, she moved to the United States from Taiwan, where she’d spoken Mandarin to her mother. But in the U.S., she began replying in English. It was only as an adult that she realized how much Mandarin meant to her. Now she uses it again with her mother.

“I find a lot of comfort in Mandarin,” she said. “It reminds me of my mom and home.” In an email, she described language as a “living marker of history and cultural identity,” linking immigrant families to their place of origin.

Dr. Huang said that my son’s radical switch to German might be similar. Amid the upheaval of Covid-19, he might be turning to a reassuring language that he associates with me: “We’re all reaching for some things that feel familiar.”

Earlier this year, Dr. Huang’s mother joined her to help with child care, and within only a week or so, Huang noticed her 6-year-old daughter engaging more with Mandarin.

Dr. Hartshorne and his partner are also raising their daughter in English and Mandarin, but they have seen the opposite effect. “Initially, we were full of energy and actually speaking more Mandarin to our daughter, and her Mandarin actually started to improve relative to her English,” he wrote. “As the weeks have worn on, we’ve worn down.” English has become the family’s default language, though the daughter still understands Mandarin.

For some parents, the school closures are an opportunity to challenge bigger linguistic hierarchies. Medadi Ssentanda, Ph.D., is a lecturer in African languages at Makerere University in Uganda, and a specialist in mother tongue education. More than 42 Indigenous languages are spoken in Uganda, but formal education is delivered in English, a legacy of colonialism. Dr. Ssentanda has observed that the local language — Luganda — in his own neighborhood has gained strength during lockdown.

Children are spending more time with their families, and are also seeing the language used in ways they hadn’t considered before. When his 12-year-old daughter asked him to judge a debate with other children in English, Dr. Ssentanda agreed — but only if they held it in Luganda.

“She was surprised!” he wrote in an email. “There is a belief that academic issues must necessarily be discussed in the English language.”

Will all these languages continue to blossom after Covid-19? It’s hard to say. Some researchers expected children to revert to the dominant language once life returns to normal. Others saw the possibility of a virtuous cycle, with children growing more confident in their second language and using it more in the long run.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to simply enjoy my son’s new love of German. Perhaps it will continue as our shared language this time. But even if it doesn’t, I’ll always remember that when the whole world was in turmoil, my mother tongue was there to provide warmth, laughter and a feeling of safety.

Sophie Hardach is a journalist and author living in London. She is working on a book about the joy of languages and linguistic diversity.