An Easter kind of Carnival...

It's almost Easter, but before you dash out painting eggs with your kids and hiding chocolates for them in the garden, take the time to sit down and browse through a whole range of great blogs, and discover what's new in their multilingual venture! Welcome to the March/April 2010 issue of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, initiated by Letizia, founder of Bilingual for Fun, and hosted every month by a different blog on multilingualism.

It's my first time hosting it and I truly enjoyed discovering new blogs I wasn't aware of, but especially realizing the variety of motivations and circumstances that committed all these families to a multilingual journey!

For instance, Sarah at Home Educate in Italy this month writes about the [inevitable] necessity to correct our children when they make mistakes in the minority language, and how this might hurt their sensitivity and  inhibit them to keep speaking the language. Find out how she overcame this by finding creating ways to get the message across without damaging her child' confidence: a great lesson in multilingual as well as emphatic parenting....

Smashedpea over at Intrepidly Bilingual tells us about a rather common phenomenon among young bilinguals:  her youngest child mixes a lot between English, the dominant environmental language, and German, her native language, currently being learnt also by her not-for-long monolingual husband.

Lauren at HoboMama is raising her child bilingual in English and German, while not being a native German speaker. This month she unveils her plan to be more consistent in her own learning of German, in order to summon up the courage to speak German with natives!

Jan at BabelKid considers how her daughter seems more comfortable counting in English (the environmental/school language) rather than his native German.

And German is once again the language of honor at Mummy Do That, where Steffi lists her favourite German children books.

Eve at Blogging on Bilingualism analizes the benefits and pitfalls of dual citizenship, for herself and for her children. In her case, the French/American citizenships opens up wider options for her kids' higher education.

And Sarah of Bringing Up Baby Bilingual profiles a fascinating Trinidanian English spoken family, where the mum has self taught French, and has chosen to raise their 2 year old child bilingual English/French.

Which leads to my post here below on what do we consider as a maternal language when we are raised bilingual, and how does that define our identity.

Here we have it once again: different families, in different countries, with different projects, all sharing the need or the desire to raise their kids in one or more languages. Each Carnival gives me more confidence that our children's generation will be, by sheer numbers, equipped with more tolerant leaders, more apt at dealing with the issues of the world!

Should you wish to receive updates or to host the future Carnivals, you can sign up here.
Happy Easter everyone! May the hunt begin!