He said his first word!
My baby boy said his first word the other week.
Well…it’s not technically his first word. He’s been babbling in English for a while now and actually has quite a large English vocabulary now.
He said his first word in Maori.
This is really exciting for me, our family and our broader clan in a number of ways. I’ll come back to that later though.
I don’t actually talk to my children in English. I only ever speak to my children in Maori. I do this for a few reasons. One is in terms of their cognitive development the other is in terms of their psychological wellbeing and development. I’ll talk about the other reason later in this post.
For those of you who don’t know me I grew up mainly in New Zealand. And, I grew up in a largely Maori community. My mother is Maori while my father is not. Both languages – English and Maori – were spoken around the community. Here in America I say to people we’re like Hawaiians – but the Southern version! In fact our languages are really closely related and even sound quite similar.
There aren’t that many left of us who speak our language. There are lots of great developments in play which are helping us raise a new generation of speakers but our language is still in a perilous state. There are about 60,000 of us left who speak our language. It might seem like a lot – but on the world stage it’s not really that many. As parents we have to work hard to ensure that our children grow up speaking our language. The trick is just speaking to them – the way my son will grow up bi-lingual is by speaking to him: so that is what I do.
My son growing up bilingual in Maori and English will have really positive developmental benefits for him in terms of his long-term cognitive development. There’s a large and growing body of evidence which is showing that children raised bi- or multi-lingual tend, amongst other things, to:
- have better attention and task-switching capacities;
- better adjust to environmental changes; and
- experience less cognitive decline as they age.
In terms of psychological wellbeing, native and minority children raised with their own languages tend to:
- be more confident;
- have greater sense of self-identity; and
- be more resilient in the face of change.
These then are just a number of the gifts that my son will receive by being raised bi-lingual.
There is another gift.
Speaking a language is a way of seeing the world.
On the flip side – the loss of any language is a tragedy for humanity at a whole. For, with the loss of a language an entire way of looking at the world is lost.
By raising my son bilingual I give him an entire world.
And, by speaking our language, we help keep that one special way of looking at the world alive for another generation.
That is my greatest gift to him through bilingualism!
So, what was his first word in Maori?
He said “Kao!”
What does that mean?
He said “No!”
And you should have seen the huge hug he got from his Papa for saying “No!”