Here is a fascinating insight into how budding linguists are formed: our Director of Communications, Rachel Bryan takes us through the linguistic trials and tribulations of her young son in this blog post. Perhaps there is a future for him in professional translation services!

My son, Noah, is 6 years old. He is a native speaker of English, and has been in Welsh-medium education since the age of 3. He speaks Welsh fluently and gets more practice reading and writing in Welsh than he does in English. Recently we have started to read more English books and it has been very ‘challenging’, to say the least! Noah assumes English words are pronounced as they are written (and written as pronounced) like they are in Welsh, and I have a new perspective of how unforgiving English can be to learners, adults and children alike. At my little boy’s tender age, I know that the important thing is not mastery of English spelling or the ability to read Great Expectations – I only wish to show him the joy of reading and the importance of language.

So at the moment he is in a transitional period: he has built up a knowledge base of sounds and their corresponding letters or groups of letters in Welsh, but he is applying those to both Welsh and English. The picture below is an example – this is the letter he wrote to Father Christmas last week.

What Noah wrote:
bliss canai haf y lego blis si ion
bliss canai haf chabin
ai byn yGwd doi
dacw falcrysmys
fom Noah

My transcription:
Please can I have a Lego police station
please can I have a trampoline
I have been a good boy
thank you Father Christmas
from Noah

At this age they often mix up the alphabet letters b, p and d and they also find it difficult to ascertain the separation of words within common phrases. For example, “Can I” is such a common phrase to a 6 year old that they will assume it is a single word. This is not limited to bilingual children.

In welsh, the letter w corresponds to the ‘oo’ sound in ‘who’ and the letter y is close to the English schwa. Welsh vowels are phonetic and applied much more consistently than English vowels, and so it is incredibly difficult to explain the English system to a child without confusing them. My beloved English, in which the word fish could be spelled as ‘ghoti’ (using the gh from cough, the o from women and the ti from nation) sometimes drives me to despair! Does anyone have any similar experiences with children or with learning English?

We believe that linguistic knowledge such as this is vital, not just for parents of multilingual children, but for learners of other languages and for providers of professional translation services. For more information about the linguistic support that Veritas can offer, please visit our professional translation services page.