Welcome to Multilingual Kids!

Linguistic anthropologist.  Business owner. Mom.  Most of the time these different parts of who I am work against each other (e.g. I’m busy running a business so don’t have time to read up on the latest ling anth stuff, my son has a dentist appointment so I have to take off half a day of work), but I’m excited that my latest venture unites all three.  Multilingual Chicago is a new division of my 4 1/2 year old business, Workforce Language Services, which provides multilingual translation services and corporate language/diversity training.  This fall, we’ll be offering a variety of Spanish classes for adults and kids, and come January, we hope to add other languages to the mix.

Watching the language development of my 3-year old son, Henry, has been fascinating in general, but given that he’s been in bilingual daycare since he was an infant, I’m keeping a close watch on his Spanish development too.  Here’s a video of him in Mexico back in December of last year, where he was showing off his translation skills – and he loves to correct my ‘mistakes’!

He’s finally starting to use a little Spanish spontaneously – especially when he knows it’ll get my attention (‘Mami, ven aqui’ gets fewer ‘Just a minute!’ responses from me than ‘Mommy, come here’).

I’m excited to research more on raising a bilingual child for my own knowledge, but also to share with friends/clients and help support their efforts.

I welcome ideas, comments and suggestions as I take my first steps into bloggerland!

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