TheFry's Linguistic Development: Bilingual Babbling

There are a couple of things I've wanted to do during TheFry's early growing-up years.  One of them was to make a baby book, which, after about two years, I finally finished.

Another was to keep track of all his developmental milestones beyond one year, which I've neglected to do.

Yet another was to write down a list of his first words, which I neglected to do until awhile ago, and then stopped about two weeks of trying to keep up with his rapidly developing vocabulary.  I even had a list of his words written in IPA with their intended meanings, in both Korean and English.  So, you can see what a daunting task that was, and I just didn't have the time for it.

One thing that I refuse to give up on is to track his linguistic development.  As a monolingual myself, I am constantly fascinated by my son's linguistic development.  I never thought I would raise a bilingual child (without having become bilingual myself, that is - a state in which I think I shall never find myself at this rate).  I think my undergraduate studies in linguistics has tainted the fascination somewhat; when other monolingual parents of bilingual children that I know seem in awe of his abilities to switch between Korean and English, I tend to shrug it off.  However, when that new word or phrase sprouts up, whether in Korean or English, and I see his maturity coming about, I can help but be joyous - it's almost as if he has two personalities, and he's dissected them completely.  However, he is one, and he knows he is one.  He recognizes himself in the mirror and in pictures, and talks about himself using his given English name and also his Korean name.  But, I wish to talk about the bicultural aspects of his linguistic development later.

This post is about the very beginning stage of his language production: his babbling.

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Bilingual Babbling


As much as I wanted to raise TheFry bilingual in Korean and English (even though he was born in the U.S.), when it came time and he was born, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t have the special vocabulary that made talking to an infant in Korean endearing. Korean, in my mind, was a very functional language for talking with other adults. I had no knowledge of Korean “baby talk” words (you know, like how we say “pee pee” instead of “urinate” in English…), nursery rhymes, lullabies, or any such conventions. Thus, I began to raise him as a monolingual.

When he was 10 months old, we moved to Korea. It was August 1, 2009. TheFry stayed at home with his father while I took a job as an English teacher at a private after-school program in Seoul. However, my husband was looking for a job, and it soon became clear that we would not be able to swap care of TheFry and have him stay at home as we had for nearly a year in the U.S. No, it was time to look for a suitable daycare for him.

There were no English-language daycares near us that we knew of at the time, and even if we had known of the few that existed, they would have almost certainly been out of our price range. Thus, in November 2009, when our son was just 13 months old, he was enrolled in a public all-Korean daycare near our home. The price was just under 400,000 won per month (roughly $350 at the time), and we were excited about the prospect of financing a second language so cheaply. As we could not possibly rear him bilingually on our own, the cost of the Korean-only daycare was completely worth it to us.

Now, TheFry was a bit behind the curve in development in many ways. At 13 months he could not walk and was still struggling with drinking from a sippy cup. We had barely gotten him to sleep in his own bed – and that’s only because we all slept on the floor next to each other; he just got a different mattress. Also, his linguistic development was slow – he was still barely babbling, and could not even say simple words like “mom” or “dad”, or even sounds resembling them. He continued to be fairly nonverbal throughout November, but towards December he really began to vocalize more often.

Here I must pause for a moment before talking about daycare to briefly describe what our lives were like out in public in Korea. People were constantly talking to TheFry wherever we went. They played “peek-a-boo” with him, and made a number of exclamations ranging from “wow, he’s cute!”, “he looks like a doll/angel”, to “he must be cold!”, all in Korean. He responded positively to these exclamations, basking in the attention and really playing it up. But something else started to happen as a result of all this sudden exposure to Korean, and it began before he started attending daycare. At the time I thought I was just imagining it, and even now I’m not so sure of it, but I still remember thinking: He started babbling in Korean.

Before, his babbling consisted of a lot of stops, for example: /b/, /d/, and /g/ were the most common. Now, I was hearing plosives, such as ㄲ (Romanized [kk] or [gg]) and ㄸ (Romanized [tt] or [dd]. As anyone can guess, once he entered daycare, it didn’t stop there. More “Korean” babbling ensued, and in fact took over his “English” babbling to a large extent. Furthermore, when my husband and I were very eagerly awaiting his first words, there emerged Korean words when we were still expecting English. (His first word was eomma, or “mom”, which was followed quite closely by kkakgung, or “peek-a-boo”).

From that point there came an explosion of vocabulary, most of which was Korean. In fact, when I hear him playing now, at two and a half years old, I hear plenty of conversations between toys and blankets and stuffed animals that I know is Korean and that I also do not understand.

I must say that there was a brief moment of a few months in all of this where I worried about TheFry’s linguistic development, especially his English development. At 20 months he hardly knew any English words, but was saying complete enough sentences in Korean (for example, I heard him say “my, how handsome!” in Korean after trying on a pair of my sunglasses).

At present, the two languages seem fairly evenly implanted in his mind. Back in November 2009, he was attending daycare part time, perhaps 4 to 6 hours a day, three or four days a week – now he attends for 8 or 9 hours a day so that my husband can study full-time while I’m working. However, even though his hours of Korean exposure outnumber his hours of English exposure by quite a bit during the weekdays, he communicates well enough in both languages – even though his two-year-old pronunciation is generally not understood by anyone except PapaFish and I.