image credit: fairground endpapers, via flickr

Today we’re proud to host January’s Blogging on Bilingualism Carnival. This is a great opportunity for readers to discover great articles on raising bilingual children from all over the world. We’ve received lots of fun and interesting submissions, so let the carnival begin!!!

Andrea from Mother Tongue Books is a woman after our own hearts, since she owns and operates an on-line bookshop which sells bilingual books. She has also recently started a blog to chronicle her own family’s adventures. In her first post, Money Where Your Mouth Is, Andrea candidly explains why she and her children are finally buckling down and learning Hungarian.

From our friends at Intrepidly Bilingual we received a great and aptly titled post called Sneaky Little Punks on how bilingual kids can use language to play parents against one another. Very funny stuff.

Maria at Fab Mums wrote a piece called Making Giant Leaps Toward Bilingualism about the importance of helping bilingual children get to know other bilingual children so that they don’t feel different or singled out. She also has several other great suggestions for reinforcing the minority language.

Our good friends at Spanglish Baby submitted an excellent article about the age old question: Is There Such a Thing as the Critical Period for Language Learning? Bilingualism expert Barbara Zurer Pearson weighs in on this subject with some encouraging words and straight forward advice for all those who are raising bilingual children.

In her post entitled Encouraging Multilingualism, Dominique talks about the importance of learning multiple languages in today’s global society and how she is taking steps to introduce a FOURTH language with her already trilingual children.

Lauren at Hobomama sent us a very interesting post called Monolingual Raising a Bilingual Baby, in which she opens up about why and how she and her husband made the decision to teach their children German even though neither parent is a native speaker of the language. She also wrote a great review of Naomi Steiner’s book, 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child, which could be a great help to parents who are looking for answers.

Jan from Babelkid wrote an interesting post called A New Hybrid Language is Born about the phenomenon of bilingual children mixing their languages to form new hybrids.

In her post, Out of the Mouth of Cubling, Steffi from Mummy do that! talks about the funny things that come out of her daughter’s mouth both in German and English. She also talks about how remarkable her daughter’s language awareness is at just 32 months. Kids really are language learning machines!

So that’s it for this month’s carnival! We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have, and we look forward to seeing you again either here at Bilingual Readers or at next month’s carnival, which will be hosted by SpanglishBaby.

Update:
We just noticed an unread message on twitter, so we’ve decided to include just one more last-minute post.

Eve at Blogging on Bilingualism wrote a great piece on how cultural celebrations do a great job of making the minority language relevant for bilingual children.