Learning the mother tongue, and the father's . . .

For multicultural families, raising children with both parents' languages can be very rewarding

ONE BABY sits on the floor playing with the scattered toys, another lies contentedly in the corner of the livingroom, while the toddlers head unerringly for the chocolate-covered Rice Krispie bars on a table in the middle. Their mothers chat away, sitting on the sofas or cross-legged on the pristine carpet, moving cups of coffee out of harm's way.

It's a typical mid-morning gathering of mothers with young children in a house in Bray, Co Wicklow. None of them is Irish, yet they have all had their children with Irish men.

The host is Mascha Holly, from Wiesbaden outside Frankfurt in Germany, who met her husband, Paul, while on holiday in Ireland seven years ago. She moved here in 2005 and they now have two children, 19-month-old Liam and three-month-old Emma, who they are raising bilingually. She has read up on the best way to parent when mum and dad speak different languages.

"The books suggest you have a rule of some sort," says Holly. That can mean the two parents consistently speaking their own mother tongue to the child, or using each language within a particular environment, such as the home or school.

"We started to speak German in the house and English outside. I didn't want to be speaking German among other people," she says. Although Paul has only a limited German vocabulary, he had enough to get by.

"We tried that for a year but it is too much conscious work, so we've gone back. I speak German to Liam, Paul speaks English to him and we speak English to each other. I don't mind speaking German now among other people."

Last year, Holly decided she wanted to get to know other multicultural families, to share experiences and advice.

"I put word out on the internet," she explains, inviting people to contact her. "We get new people all the time."

They have a regular core group of 10 families, with others occasionally coming to the get-togethers, which are generally held once a month on a Sunday.

"I found it nice to meet people with older children, to tell you what to expect and can swap information about schools," says Holly. "Liam is just starting to talk. He has a number of words, most of which only his parents could understand!

"He has a good mix of German and English. He chooses the easier ones: 'no' in English and 'yes' in German.

"At this stage, German is bigger than English for him because he spends so much time with me." However, he rarely hears his mother speaking her native language to other adults and she has noticed that, when he is exposed to more German, it makes a difference.

"We are just back from Germany and over there his babble changes, it sounds different."

French-speaker Sandy Beard from Corsica, the mother of seven-year-old Maya-Lou, six-year-old Lily-May and 10-month-old Clementine, agrees: "It is positive to go back home. Otherwise they are only picking up your version of French."

She, too, changed her approach to languages through trial and error. "I spoke English to my first daughter, but it was a mistake. She had more difficulty separating the languages than her younger sister. I talked French straight away to her."

Both girls started their primary education at the French school, Lycée Français d'Irlande, in Foxrock, Co Dublin, but then the family moved to Roundwood in Co Wicklow and they were enrolled in the local national school for a year.

"Maya-Lou really adapted and Lily-May hated it," says Beard. "After a year out of French school, their French has really dropped. They are still fluent but making grammatical mistakes. I thought if I spoke French to them it would not make a difference." So, after recently moving to Greystones, the girls will be going back to French school in September. "It is very good to have them in the second language school. They won't have group interaction, social expressions, unless they go to school in the second language."

Curiously, however, she says when the children at the French school are in the playground, they speak English. "I asked Maya why and she said, 'it's just easier'."

The inevitable immersion in English in the community means the non-Irish parent can struggle to keep the child communicating in the second language once the apron strings start to stretch.

"I try my best to speak German to Sophie [ aged four]," says Ramona Parkes, from Hamburg in Germany. "If it has to be quick, I have to speak English." She first made contact with her husband, Nigel, while researching online what to do in Dublin.

"It took a while for him to convince me to meet him. I was coming here to improve my English and I never went back."

That was eight years ago and now the couple live in Bray with Sophie, and a second baby is due next month.

On maternity leave from her full-time job with wine importer Febvre in Sandyford, Co Dublin, Parkes is hoping that having more time with Sophie, who goes to a local creche, will help with her German.

"She is at the stage where she says she doesn't want to speak German, but then she does it anyway. She calls it 'mummy's language', English is 'daddy's language'.

"It is harder work for her and harder work for me. I try to say it in simpler terms. I think I am trying to over-compensate. She understands when I talk to her.

"She sometimes asks how to say something in German, like 'what's my name'. You can say it in four different ways and I try to remember which one I told her before. I think it is my own weird thinking. She would pick it up if I didn't try to make it simpler."

In the past week, Sophie, who has both English and German books, has asked for her bedtime story in both languages. "I have to translate each page," says Parkes. "If it is an English book, I read it in English first and then German."

Or vice versa if Sophie chooses a German book.

"It is more a conscious learning than a natural learning which I hoped she would do," adds Parkes.

Margit Hofer, from Vienna in Austria, who speaks German to her two children, nine-year-old Felix and four-year-old Cecilia, says she got tired of translating whole pages and has found having the same story in both languages works well.

"It just happened, we got a present of The Very Hungry Caterpillarin German," she explains. They have two versions of Heidi, too. "She's really into in it. The pictures are different, but it's the same story."

Hofer has also found German TV series on DVD, which she started showing her children six months ago, a "really fantastic tool".

While Felix, who spent his first four years in Berlin, is fluent in German, Cecilia's first language is English. "Everybody else talks English to her, but she understands German. She talks more German now that we have German TV. Interestingly enough, that really made her put more German into her speech. I didn't expect that - it has been very motivating.

"Felix and Cecilia talk English to each other," she explains. "When I talk German to him, he still comes in with English.When they come home from school and I ask how they got on, it is always English.

"But if I ask the older one, he will swap over."

She says that when they go back to her family in Austria, Felix "talks a funny language - half German, half English. It takes a few days before he is fluent."

All the women agree that being raised bilingually makes learning more languages easier. "Lily-May is flying in Irish," says Beard, "and she has a friend with whom she interacts in Spanish."

Jana, a mother of two from the Czech Republic, has her three-year-old daughter in an Irish-speaking creche, so she is learning three languages simultaneously.

Her husband doesn't speak any Czech, but now speaks some Irish as well as English to his daughter in the home.

"She mixes some of the words. She will make a plural of a Czech word by adding an 's'. I let it go. But I have started correcting her pronunciation a little recently.

"She is sometimes a little bit lazy and will use only part of the word as long as she can get her point across."

Beard has found that, at seven, her eldest daughter has become aware of pronunciation and the wrong accent for the wrong language, as shown when she chose a French book for her father, John Joyce, to read to her.

"John picked it up and thought, 'I can read this'," Beard recalls. "He started to read it. After a minute, she went over and took it from him and said gently, 'it's okay'."