Even if I have an accent, I am still happy.
Last summer we traveled back to my home country Ukraine. After two weeks of adjustment my children (age 7, 4 and almost 1 in that time) felt very comfortable with their language skills. Often people were surprised to hear that Russian is their second language.
But.
There were moments when my son would receive long stares and the following statement: “you have an accent!” It did not seem to bother him, but the question arose for me:
Why my child who is bilingual from his birth, is having an accent?
Should we strive for our kids to be accent-free in both of their languages, or not worry about it?
After long researching and diving to bilingual theory, I answered for myself a question:
What to do when my child speaks with an accent? And I want to share this steps with you.
Start out by remembering that having an accent is normal for bilingual people. Individuals who have no accents in both of their languages are very rare. This could happens when the person is raised with two languages from early childhood, and has almost equal exposure to both of them. But even in this case there is still a possibility for child’s weaker language to be influenced by the stronger language.
Now, when your child has an accent in his minority language, it is usually not an issue for him or her. It is much more stressful for a child to have an accent in his or her majority language vs minority. It’s very important for children to feel that they fit in, and if their accent makes them look like an “outsider” it can be traumatic.
So what we can do to help our children with their accent ? Here are five things you can do:
1. Wait. If your child is still young, it’s often simply the matter of time before he or she will lose the the accent. Researches do not agree on age after which loosing an accent is difficult, but 6-8 years is generally thought to be the window. That said, there are people who can learn new languages without accents in adulthood, so it may vary widely from person to person.
2. Enroll your child in activities where she is forced to communicate a lot. For improving majority language you can use extracurricular activities at school. For minority language – involve your child into more talking with the provider of that language. Working on child’s language fluency and language use is going to have high return – if he or she speaks more often and uses expanded vocabulary, the language skills will improve and accent will not be the cause of poor communication.
3. Reading, reading, reading! Sometimes it is not the sounds that a child says wrong, but more grammatical mistakes – wrong position of the worlds, use of tenses etc. Reading (again!) is just such an awesome way to gently show your child correct ways of speaking.
4. Get help from the speech therapist (one who is qualified for the language you are seeking help in). Some of the sounds that your child says could be just the result of habit. When we went back to Ukraine last summer, my seven year old son was taking literacy class in local school. The teacher also worked with him on the sounds’ pronunciation, and over the summer he lost roughly 50 % of his accent!
5. Stress out to your child that having an accent is not always a bad thing. It is hard for them to understand that in a young age, but when they grow older they will learn to appreciate their cultural identity!
