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I speak both Spanish and English to my kids. But I would say it's 75% English. My mom speaks 99% Spanish to them.

My husband speaks 4 languages, I speak 3. My husband speaks German to our son and I speak English to him. My parents speak in Italian to him at times.

Our family language though, is English. My husband and I speak English to each other. I suppose we could switch to German, I am getting much better at it.

So my husband usually also speaks to our son in German when we are out, BUT in the instances when there are other children present that do not speak German, my husband will speak English, so all the kids understand.

We are a bilingual home (well, DH is and I have a rudimentary grasp of his native language) and we hope DD will speak both languages. For the most part, DH and I each talk to her in our own "mother tongue," but she hears more English by default because that's how DH and I communicate with each other.

We have many friends with bi- or trilingual households and the parents either do things more or less the way we do, or if both parents are fluent in another language, it is the primary language spoken at home. For example, in one family, both parents are Russian and their child didn't start learning English until she was in preschool, but she's now fluent in both.

We're not multilingual, but have friends that are.

Mom speaks Spanish to son, Dad speaks English (even though Dad is Mexican and Mom is white! lol). Out in public, it's generally the same. But if they're somewhere like a restaurant, where it would help the waiter to know what mom asked, she speaks English.

FWIW, mom is a spanish teacher, but didn't start spanish until she was in high school. Dad grew up in a spanish speaking household, and honestly hates the "feel of speaking spanish" (his words, not mine). He's completely fluent and it's his first language, but he refuses to speak it unless he has no other option.

My neighbors speak Japanese to their little boy at home. They try to speak English in front of us but their LO doesn't follow too well so they end up speaking to him mostly in Japanese. He speaks Japanese to my LO but she doesn't seem to mind.

I speak Russian to LO, and DH speaks French, but we communicate between each other in English so LO gets a lot of that when we're all together.

I actually had a bit of a tough time with this when she was younger, because she understood Russian a lot better than English. So although I would try to speak English to her when out in public, I'd often have to repeat instructions in Russian.

She's picked up a lot more and now understands all three. Her trilingual sentences are hilarious.

It's really engraved in me that I can speak Russian when we're alone...When I get left alone with other babies, I have a strong urge to speak Russian to them. Confused baby stares follow

I speak Vietnamese and English, and the hubs only speaks English. We speak English to C and H when he's around, but when my mom is here (she helps watch the kids while I work from home), we both speak to them in Vietnamese.

C is 2 and understands Vietnamese, but only speaks in English H is only 5 months, so he mainly just drools.

We're a bilingual household. The game plan was that we were both going to speak Spanish to our second LO since that's what we did with our first (oldest is 12 and is fluent in English and Spanish), but that hasn't completely panned out.

- As a family, we speak to each other in English.
- I speak to LO in Spanish (home/out and about).
- DH speaks to him in English.
- Grandparents speak to him Spanish.
- Daycare - at our request - speak to him in Spanish most of the time.

We speak Russian with DS, but he's picking up a bit of English too from the radio and the other kids in day care. I really wanted to be teaching him Spanish or French by now, but he's having a bit of a speech delay, and I'll be happy when he learns to talk in one language!

A co-worker does the taking turns thing... he speaks English with his daughter, his wife speaks Chinese, and the day care people speak Portuguese

I'm only sort of bilingual, DH speaks several languages and we only speak to our LO in English. Fail.

We have friends who are really great about speaking to the kids in their native tongues. The mom speaks to LOs in her native tongue, the dad speaks to LOs in his native tongue and the kids speak English at daycare. What is amazing to me is that they know which language among the 3 they should be speaking to any given person.

My DH and I both speak Korean(native tongue) and English. We speak Korean exclusively at home and she is exposed exclusively to English in her daycare. We do read English books to her (18month) at home and speak English when we are interacting with other kids' parents. Hopefully she will pick up both languages from us and also daycare.