The difficulties of becoming bilingual – Hungarian children in the United Kingdom

Absztrakt

Between the child and the parent, a bridge is provided by speech, the basis of human communication. In order to create this bridge, the child has to be in an environment filled with speech. However, that environment may offer as communication media not just one but several languages that link the child to other members of the immediate speech community. In our paper, we give an insight into families living in the UK in which one of the parents is a Hungarian native speaker. Within these thirty families, a total of fifty children are being raised in contact with at least two languages in a natural way (2019–2020). Multilingual parenting can be carried out in several ways, for example when the mother’s and the father’s first language is the same and they both use it when talking to the child, who is exposed to another language outside the home. It is more outstanding, however, when the father and the mother are from different nationalities and use their own language when speaking to the child, but the parent can communicate with the child in a language learned by him/her as well. In our paper, we write about the advantages of being bilingual as well as the sometimes unforeseen difficulties multilingual families might face while bringing up children.