Kids always grow up bilingual in a foreign country, don’t they?
One basic assumption that just about everyone emmigrating to a foreign country makes is that the children will pick up the language very quickly and be truly bilingual from pretty much as soon as they can speak if they’re under 5 when the family moves.
This isn’t what happens in practice though.
What you find is that, unless you are careful, your children will grow up being able to speak to you in perfect english but unable either to speak to or understand other english speakers. Sadly, you’ll not notice this until it’s too late to do anything about it as they’ll usually appear to be completely fluent when speaking to you but they’re fluent in the sense that your 2 year old is fluent: your brain makes all kinds of allowances for the errors that they make and it sounds like proper english, but it, of course, isn’t for your 2 year old.
If you keep an eye on the children of neighbours in areas where there are some, but not lots, of expats you’ll find this effect gets more and more evident for children of ages from 10 downwards. Above that, they’ll tend to pronounce english words with the foreign accent but are still understandable by others.
That’s just the spoken language too: the written word is something for another post.
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