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baby sign language and bilingual kids
Our daughter is now almost seven months old. She is increasingly trying
to communicate with us by utterances or gestures, which we usually don't understand. So we would like to start teaching her sign language. The question is - which one? We are both German but live in England. So for her it's German at home and English at nursery, and we hope that she will grow up to be perfectly bilingual. Should we now use signs from British or German Sign Language? DH and I know neither, so the learning experience for us will be the same. My initial thought is to use BSL for the following reasons: (1) They might start using it in nursery eventually (they are "looking into it"). (2) She lives in Britain and is more likely to meet British deaf people than German ones, should she choose to continue with the language. (3) There is a lot more material available on BSL. But we will use these signs while speaking in German. Will it confuse her language if the signs aren't German? I.e., will she never be able to learn proper sign language if we are giving her mixed messages now? Don't worry, we don't have a career as a sign language interpreter planned out for her; if she's anything like her parents, she'll have very different interests, and we'll encourage her to find her own way. With high probability, she'll forget the signs once she's speaking. And I doubt that we'll take this to the level of a complete language (making her trilingual) rather than a collection of words. It would just be a shame to mess up an opportunity, and I know a couple of bilingual kids whose spoken languages are messed up because their parents handled it badly. What are your opinions? Any language experts out there? Or can you point me to a website, newsgroup or forum that could provide information on this issue? TIA, Karen |
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