Mono-, bi- and multilingual

As a Family Guy addict I am tend to compare many situations in daily life with scenes from the Griffins family (for the Germans out there: you have to see the original episodes and not the dubbed ones). One scene I might be confronted with in few years is the following:

It is both funny and scary (for the mother in this case), but as yet we are more struggled with the question how to raise our prospective son, especially concerning the language. We are both German; she native, with a slight East-German dialect, and I with Turkish origin. Hence German is our mother tongue, my second language is Turkish, whereas hers is Swedish (in contrast to me she studied Swedish at the university, whereas I try to learn it from the subtitles on TV – for the Germans out there: Sweden shows foreign movies/shows/series in their original language with Swedish subtitles, irrespective of the original language). English is my study and work language and might play a more important role in our future. So there are four languages to select from.

German is a necessity, because the child has to communicate with his parents in the best language of his parents. Up to here the choice was easy. But what then? My wife can speak in Swedish with him, I might speak in Turkish. And both of us might improve our English to speak in English with him. The Kindergarten can be in Swedish, German or English here in Stockholm, so it doesn’t make our choice easier. We don’t know yet how many years we might stay in Sweden, but for sure we plan not to go back to Germany, nevertheless German will stay our common ground for the foreseeable future.

Doctors and friends with experience assure that two language are easy to manage by a child, whereas at three or four languages the opinions start to differ. Furthermore both of us have only two spoken languages which can be considered very good or fluent, whereas the third can be considered satisfying or good. There must be other parents out there with similar problems? Where are they? If you are one of them, let me know 🙂

Hass-Liebe

Hass-Liebe is one of the words, which would characterise most of my relationships towards things. In school we ones learnt that love-hate relationships (observe the interchanged order of the words compared to its German counterpart. Maybe an indication for the more pessimistic view of Germans?) are a symptom for schizophrenia. In my case it is not as drastic, but it still occupies lot of my “RAM memory”, e.g. my relation towards sweets and vacation days. The former is not as crucial as the latter, because I wouldn’t mind taking on few kilograms or to go to the dentist (even though its expensive and painful, because one can enjoy sweets for quite a long time compared to the time spend at the dentist). Vacation days, however, are hard to overcome, if not spend at least 300 km far way from the residential area. That is approximately the distance, where (my) common sense would tell me “this is far enough to be considered vacation; it is not worse to go there if not for at last one night”.

I finished one week at home, appeared three times at work, spent more money than usual and felt more guilty towards my daily stint than normally. I had big plans. Wanted to read some books, finish all the homework assignments and finish to paper drafts for a scientific journal. I haven’t accomplished any of these plans and I don’t feel relaxed at all. As I already mentioned, this is my first “stay at home vacation” and I really don’t know how other people can manage to stay at home, without going nuts. Maybe it is just the anticipation of becoming a father in less than 6 weeks, or a sign of ageing or is it the darkness here in Stockholm? Now I am still just a husband and son, but soon I might be son, husband and father (and Yusuf Islams (aka Cat Stevens) Father & Sons comes to ones mind) and soon I might miss this times.