Baby Sign Language & Bilingual

Signs are arbritrary untill you give meaning. This is prime time to introduce multiple languages! Just be consistent. I have my mom speak Spanish to my son (17mo) and I've been working on signs since 6 mo. Milk came first(he also uses for hungry) and More came after a year. Some kids pick up signs earlier. Just keep doing it!

Best of luck!
-C.

Go for it! We are bilingual (English and Cantonese) and introduced sign when my daughter was 6 months. We used sign for the basic stuff like, "more", "no more", "tired". Usage of sign did not last long for us as my daughter started using her words around 1 year old.

I was speaking Spanish to my daughter exclusively when it was just her and I since birth. When my husband came home (not bilingual) I switched to English, so he can take part in conversation and bonding. My daughter started getting introduced/learning sign language around 6 months. She picked up sign language quickly and around 1 & 1/2 years old, she started telling me not to speak to her in Spanish. She took a preference to Spanish, she is now 3 1/2 years old and I have a newborn. Again I speak to my newborn in Spanish and English to my daughter. She is now requesting I speak to her in Spanish too. I use sign language to have her guess what I am saying to her in Spanish; she gets it all the time.
From what I remember, sign language uses the same part of the brain as a foreign language, so once your baby is bilingual he/she is likely to have the faciliation of picking up other languages with ease. I don't push my daughter and hope she continues to express interest in foreign languages. Good luck to you.

Greetings H.:
I am a strong believer in teaching ASL/Sign to all people. My husband spoke a bit of 31 languages, I have several friends whose children speak 3-5 languages and English is the last and most difficult to learn they tell me. We have been using Sign Language in our home for many years, and for 1 child with Asperger's it has made all the differance for communication when he can't get another word out. At Castro Valley High School,we have an excellent teacher Ms. Ovida DeJulia, that teaches ASL. She is deaf and has been able to do great good in educating people, It is one of the most popular ____@____.com students have found jobs as interpeters for Kaiser,Sutter, and school districts. Both of my 2 y/o grandchildren are learning to sign colors, animals,cookies,and thier basic needs.
As they get older it is also a way for teens to talk and not have others know what they are saying-- I know that there are many wonderful sources for teaching and learning it. America is the only place where we limit our children for language. Good Luck, in your efforts. If you need any help please feel free to contact myself ____@____.com or ____@____.com

Never be afraid to introduce new languages to babies... I am a sign language teacher (to big kids) and I grew up tri-lingual (spanish english and sign). I feel that it is a large part of why I can speak 5+ languages. My older daughter now 3 was tri-lingual but has dropped a lot of sign since learning to talk and I think that it has added to her incredible vocabulary and understanding. I have a little bit failed to teach my 1 year old a lot of signs and I can see the frustration for her in expressing herself that was never present with my older one. It is invaluable to give your kids as many languages as possible. Don't let old wives tales about languages especially sign blocking other languages. Kids move at their own pace and sometimes when they can sign the lack of frustration that comes with it also comes with an ever so slightly slower acquisition of using spoken language because signing as a small baby is so much clearer and easier... I can tell you from both research and experience that teach your kids as many languages as you can and they will sort it out, it will not be confusing to them!! they're sponges and soak it all up!

I think signing would be a great way to link the two languages since she will see the same sign regaurdless of which language you use at the moment.

It would be the same sign/gesture for either language. But the language part would be bi-lingual.

My kids are bi-lingual... and they both learned sign language from 6 months old. It was fine. I would say "drink" in english and they knew the sign for it... but Hubby would say "drink" in his language... and the sign is the same for it.

As the other poster said... signing is universal.

Are you yourself bi-lingual AND fluent on both languages? Is your Husband fluent and bi-lingual on both languages?
The ideal thing, is for each parent to speak to baby in your own language, your first language. Not both. Or, not speaking both languages within the same sentence... otherwise the child will learn incorrect grammar/sentence structure.

My kids are bi-lingual. Fluent in both speaking and hearing, some reading. But it becomes more and more and the child gets older. Don't expect it to happen all at once. I speak English, my Hubby speaks to them in his 1st language even though he is bi-lingual, or he can also speak to them in English. And now at my kids ages... they know both. They know it is 2 distinct languages. I did not see teaching them signing... as a separate "language" per say (though it is a 'language')... but a supplement to their development and another mode of communication... a "tool" if you will, to help the child with expressive language and communication.

All the best,
Susan

Hi there! Definitely go for it :)
My daughter is bilingual (English and German) and also signed beautifully starting at about 10 months. She used signs before her language caught up at about a 1 1/2 years and the signing faded (mostly because we didn't keep it up with her). She is incredibly articulate in the two languages and in her case, there was no delay in speech as we thought there might be given she is processing an extra language.
Baby sign language was amazing in helping her express her wants and needs when she was still pre-verbal!!
I also have friends who are raising their children with four languages! Kids are just amazing!
Best of luck!

By all means, teach your child as many languages as you can. They are remarkable the way they figure it all out. Our child hears both English and Spanish and we did lots of signing with him. He's almost 2 and he continues to use signs when we don't understand his words. One thing that helped us increase our signing vocabulary was to check out "Signing Time" videos from our public library. These are kid-friendly videos that teach ASL. Although our son never watched for more than a few minutes at a time, they increased our vocabulary tremendously so that we could teach him over 100 signs. Start with the basics (milk, more, all done, drink, eat, sleep etc) and then dive right in. It's so fun!

Hi H.,

I agree with the other moms - we are raising our boy bilingually and he used sign language extensively before being able to communicate verbally!
You'll have a blast! Try it - a lot less frustration and so much more fun!
Also, he developed his language capacity really early (despite being bilingual and having sign language thrown in) - so no worries.

Stick with using Mandarin at home, the active English will come in pre-school- she will very likely understand English perfectly even if she choses not to speak it yet..
My son is 3 now and English communication is natural now - there is a time period that might be challenging - stick with your native language!
Good luck, C.

From the early childhood education college classes I have taken teaching a baby two or three languages will benefit him/her. They may learn each language slower this way but they will benefit in the long run. I have cared for many families where they speak their native language at home and English in child care with us. Or at home one Mom speaks one language and Dad speaks another language. My son speaks English and my daughter in law speaks Chinese. Their son is five months old and they read to him in both languages too. My granddaugher is our aide three days a week and she speaks Spanish fluently. She speaks, sings, and reads to the kids in Spanish. She went to River Glen School from K to 8th and has taken 2 years of college Spanish too. It is wonderful to hear the children talk Spanish to each other. We have two brothers; the oldest speaks fluent Japaneese and I am sure little baby brother will learn too. I think what you are doing is great!!

Hi H.,
I'm French, my husband is Spanish, babysitter (at the time) and all friends speak English so our son (and now our daughter) was raised in a tri-lingual environment.
Everybody, including our pediatrician, warned us that this - even though a great opportunity for him - would probably create some speech delay at the beginning.
For us, speech delay meant that our son would not be able to communicate his needs, resulting in more frustrations, more tantrums...

We taught him sign language and it's the best thing we've ever done. We all used our own language at all time. When nursing him, I would say "milk" in French and sign i"milk" at the same time.
I think it helped him understand the languages because he had one common element he could communicate with everybody. The sign was the same for all of us, even if the word was different.

At 18 months, he would sign over 120 signs! At the beginning we were teaching him ourself by interaction (whe he was interested in a squirrel outside, we would sign and say "squirrel"). After he acquired the basic signs and the understanding of the sign language, we showed him the "Baby Signing Time" videos. With them, he was learning faster than we and it was hard to keep up!

As a result, he could always express his needs. We had very few tantrums and good communication. Some would say that the sign language created a speech delay but I think the 3 languages created the delay and sign language helped him communicate.

He actually was delayed in speech (evaluated at 14 month when he was 24 months), but when speech came in, it blossomed very fast. He is not yet 3 years old and say over 700 words in French, 500 in English and a little bit less in Spanish. And he understands even more. He can tell his ABCs, colors and shapes in the 3 languages and counts to 29 in the 3 languages.

We are now teaching our 11 months daughter.

Good luck.

Note: sign language IS NOT universal. We taught our children the ASL (American Sign Language) and I know from friends that it is different from the British sign language and from the French sign language. In our case, we discovered sign language and learned with our son, so we chose ASL (because we live in the US, where some schools/daycare use it)

I agree with the other moms - babies are easily able to master several languages at once, and manage to keep them all straight somehow! My husband and I speak English to our girls, but until my oldest was 3, she had a nanny who only spoke Spanish. Many of her first words were in Spanish, but I never knew it because my daughter, when she spoke to me, would only speak English. (Likewise she only spoke in Spanish to her nanny.) Then when she went to preschool, we sent her to a bilingual Armenian-English preschool and she had no difficulties picking up that language either (which sounds to me like a cross between Russian and Arabic). Even though all three languages were so different, she was able to speak each one without an accent and without any confusion. My younger daughter also attends the Armenian preschool and has had no problems picking up the language.

At such a young age, babies and children are so ready to soak up information. I think it's a fantastic idea to let them soak up as much as possible before they lose the ability to do so!

Thanks for asking, this was helpful to us also!

We began to teach our baby to sign at around 7 months and spoke to her in two languages. She started signing at 9 months with no problem, and continued to do so until her speaking skills developed. I found it wonderful to be able to communicate with my daughter through sign language before she was able to speak. We wouldn't have known that she noticed the tiniest glimpse of an airplane in the sky, or a bird in the backyard if it wasn't because of her signing. We used both Mandarin and English when teaching her to sign, with more emphasis on Mandarin because it was the language we use to speak to her at home. Do use both languages if you want her to learn both. Babies have amazing ability to learn, so I wouldn't worry about her getting confused.

if im not mistaken signing is universal so it seems it would be easier to teach the other language if sign is already known Im teaching my son sign and never thought about using it to teach him to be bilingual but i like the concept.

Absolutely use both languages. One couple I knew had mom speak only German, Dad speak only French, and let the kid pick up English at school and from neighbors and from listening to friends and visitors. Little brains are so flexible! We used sign language as a way for our baby to communicate before she could talk. We started with the ASL style baby signs, made up a few of our own, and had about a dozen basic words that made life easier until she could speak those words clearly enough to be understood.