Why We Speak Two Languages at Home
Before my daughter Nadia was born, the language situation in our family was simple: my wife, Anastasia, and I spoke only Russian to each other.
That had been true since we met in Moscow in 2015, first as friends and later as a couple. Russian became the language of our everyday life almost without our noticing it, and it has remained so ever since. Even now, living in the United States, we continue to speak Russian together.
Nadia’s birth in 2022 brought a joyful complication to this arrangement. Suddenly English, which for years I had used mainly with students, friends, and family back in the United States, returned to the center of my private life.
From the moment Nadia was born, I have spoken to her in English. Anastasia has spoken to her in Russian. We never really discussed this arrangement. It simply seemed natural.
I speak Russian fluently and lived in Russia for many years. People who know me well sometimes tell me that, apart from an accent and the occasional unnatural construction, my Russian sounds almost native. But I have never felt that Russian could be the language in which I raised my daughter.
The reason is difficult to explain in terms of vocabulary or grammar.
I have no childhood in Russian.
I began learning the language when I was twenty-one. However far I have gone with it since then, there is an entire linguistic world that I entered too late to experience from the inside.
I sometimes think about this when I walk past a playground and listen to children talking to one another: the words they use, the strange imaginary worlds they create, the rhythms of their arguments and games. An adult can study a language for decades and learn to discuss literature, politics, music, or work in extraordinary detail, while still knowing surprisingly little about how a five-year-old talks to another five-year-old.
The same is true of the language between parents and very young children.
Listen to an adult speaking to a baby. The voice changes almost automatically. Intonation becomes more exaggerated; vowels stretch; sentences become shorter and more repetitive. We use pet names, nonsense sounds, nursery rhymes and expressions that may have been buried somewhere in our memory since our own childhood.
Perhaps when we speak this way, we are partly repeating the language once used with us.
I can speak Russian to my wife because we met as adults. We both entered our relationship with adult vocabularies and adult lives. But speaking to a newborn seemed different. I did not want to reconstruct in Russian a kind of linguistic intimacy I had never personally experienced.
English, on the other hand, required no thought. It was simply there.
For Anastasia, Russian was equally natural. She speaks excellent English, but she never expressed any desire to use it with Nadia. Russian is the language in which she was herself a child, and the language in which she instinctively comforts, plays with, scolds and talks nonsense to our daughter.
And so our family developed an unusual linguistic geometry. Anastasia and I speak Russian to each other. She speaks Russian to Nadia. I speak English to Nadia. Nadia hears both of us perfectly well and, from the beginning, has been free to respond to either of us in whichever language happens to come to her.
Her geography has made the situation even more complicated.
She spent most of the months before her birth in Russia, hearing Russian around her, along with the little English songs I sometimes sang to her. We left Russia for Serbia shortly before she was born, and the first words anyone said to her after she entered the world were Serbian: our doctor greeted her with “Zdravo, Nada!”
A month and a half later we returned to Russia, where she spent the next year and a half. Almost everyone around her spoke Russian. I was the major exception.
Then, when she was nineteen months old, we moved to the United States.
Almost overnight, the balance reversed. English became the language outside our home: in shops, at playgrounds, in classes, with neighbors, and eventually with other children. Russian, once the language of the surrounding world, became the language she heard mainly from her mother, from the conversations between her parents, and from relatives and friends.
That reversal made our original arrangement feel much more consequential.
Our hope is not simply that Nadia will “know some Russian.” We would like her, as far as possible, to grow up genuinely bilingual: able to speak, understand, read and write both English and Russian without either language feeling foreign to her.
Whether that will actually happen is another question.
Anyone who lives in an immigrant community in the United States knows the familiar story. Parents speak their native language to a child, the child understands everything, and then, once school and friends become more important, begins answering exclusively in English. Eventually the family develops a curious bilingual conversation in which the parents speak one language and the child another.
I saw this myself years ago while working in a bilingual school in San Francisco.
Now I find myself wondering whether the same thing will happen to us.
At the moment Nadia moves easily between Russian and English. Sometimes she chooses a word from whichever language happens to be easier. Sometimes she combines the two. Increasingly, she also seems to understand that different people belong to different linguistic worlds.
Watching this happen has made bilingualism feel much less like a system that parents impose and much more like something a child actively constructs.
We can provide two languages. We can read to her, talk to her, introduce her to people, books, songs and places. But ultimately the languages will become hers, not ours.
That may be the most interesting part of all.
For now, English is the language in which I speak to my daughter, Russian is the language in which her mother speaks to her, and Russian remains the language her parents speak to each other. Within that small triangle, she is gradually building a linguistic world of her own.
This series will follow what happens next.
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