Multilingual Mamas

In this episode we welcome Brunella Martinelli de Medeiros Fiuza, a native of Vitória, Brazil, who now lives in Johnson City, TN. Both Brunella and her husband are trilingual, being native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, and second language speakers of English and Spanish. In this episode, we discuss the importance of connecting children’s home language to the culture, the importance of literacy, and some unexpected benefits of the COVID stay-at-home orders.

In episode 3 of Multilingual Mamas, we interview Ariane Brearly-Smith, a British mother of 3 bilingual French-English now adult men. She tells us what it was like raising bilingual children in Europe in the 90s and how she worked hard for her children to learn, not only English, but British English. Ariane has a very interesting linguistic background and is the mother-in-law of one of the co-presenters of Multilingual Mamas. Listen to the episode and find out whose!

In episode 2 of Multilingual Mamas, we discuss monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition. Our very first guest, Dr. Tania Ionin, who is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializes in adult and child language acquisition. She walks us through the different stages of child language acquisition and tells us about her personal experience raising her bilingual (Russian and English) daughters.

[The audio of this episode is sometimes choppy, we apologize for the inconvenience]

In episode 1 of Multilingual Mamas, we discuss some popular myths about bilingualism and the research behind the reality. We discuss the idea that bilingualism confuses children, that real bilinguals learned both their languages from birth, and many more. At the end, we also discuss some important terminology surrounding conversations about bilingualism such as first vs. dominant language and sequential vs. simultaneous bilingualism.

In this episode, we introduce ourselves and our linguistic background. We discuss the languages we speak with our partners and children, some the strategies that we use with our children, and we end the episode explaining why we decided to create this podcast.