Here, in a nutshell, is the demography of my family situation. I was raised in Greece. My father is Greek and speaks no English, and my mother is American (not Greek American) who learned to speak Greek in high school and college before moving to Greece in her twenties. So I grew up bilingual, but I have lived in the American Midwest for almost three decades now, so I think and speak primarily in English, in which language I have no accent. My wife is Spanish and grew up in Spain. My daughter is now seven and speaks Greek fluently, though perhaps not as well as she speaks Spanish and English.

I can remember, before my daughter was born, that I debated with myself whether to speak to her in English or Greek. I knew that it would be exclusively in one or the other, but which one? English is my preferred language, so that was a factor. The hurdle of trying to teach a child a foreign language in the US, as the only Greek-speaker in the family, was formidable. I feared not so much that I would fail but that I would succeed halfway, and that she would be left with a rudimentary grasp of the language with the result that our communications would be limited to basic matters. We would have to switch to English for anything more advanced, in which case why bother with the Greek? On the other hand, I was certain that she would become a native speaker of English anyway (what with school, the social environment, etc.). Even a bit of Greek is better than no Greek, and my wife was going to speak to her in Spanish anyway, so why not? As my daughter is only seven, we have not yet reached the point of many higher-level discussions, so how that goes remains to be determined. But she is more or less fluent in the Greek (and Spanish) that a seven-year-old can be expected to speak. How did we go about it?

I was certain from the start that I would speak to her exclusively in one language. My wife speaks to our daughter exclusively in Spanish (which I can basically understand) and I exclusively in Greek (which my wife can basically understand). This way my daughter identified each of us with one language, and she tends to do this with people regularly. When she was younger, I remember that she waited upon meeting someone to determine which language to use, and then used that language exclusively with that person, even after it became apparent that English was a common language (now she tends to go for English, but not with us). She would get upset if one of us used the “wrong language.”

The key is consistency, consistency, consistency. I have seen parents of foreign origin speak a mish-mash of English and the foreign tongue to their children, and I cannot understand this practice, which seems counter-productive. It establishes a bridge-head of English into the foreign language, which the child will reach for whenever the English term comes more readily to mind, and this will happen more frequently as children grow up in an English-speaking society. The mish-mash will eventually resolve itself in favor of English. The parent sets the precedent that the foreign language cannot work on its own without help from English. Linguistic exclusivity, by contrast, mentally requires the child to look for the right Greek word. When my daughter cannot find the right word and says it in English, I ask her to say it in Greek, and if she can’t remember it, I either tell her the first syllable or set up a practice sentence (in Greek) that calls for it, and then she always remembers it.

My daughter’s Greek is probably not as strong as her Spanish, and neither is as strong as her English, but so far I would call our efforts a success. There was no competition between the Greek and the Spanish. In fact, the acquisition of a second language probably boosted the acquisition of a third. Why? Well, there are cognitive reasons for this that specialists can tell you about. But I think that children’s social perception of language is also a factor. If they begin to realize that the whole world speaks one language (English) except for their weird parents, they are likely to reject the weird language in order to fit in more and not have to make the effort. But with three languages in play rather than two, and with frequent exposure to other speakers of Spanish and Greek (guests, relatives, etc.), it took our daughter a longer time to figure out that English is the local norm, which gave the other languages more time to become entrenched in her mind and in her social relations. For example, the nanny that we hired for her first two years was a bright young woman from Wisconsin whose father was from Honduras, where she had spent much time growing up. We asked to speak only Spanish to our daughter. So instead of our daughter’s language pie being 80% English and 20% “other,” for our daughter it was, for a while, more like 45% Spanish, 30% Greek, and 25% English. My wife and I speak English to each other, and our daughter hears this all the time, but she did not ever (and still hasn’t) figured out that she can just speak English to both of us and be done with it. When she has something to say to both of us, she will say it in Spanish and then translate it into Greek for me, or vice versa.

For one parent to pass on a language requires a lot of contact with the child and a lot of talking. Spaniards talk a lot, so I had to step up my game too. I was, I believe, quite involved in our daughter’s upbringing, from feeding and changing diapers to walks to the park and so on. I talked to her about what we were doing, about all the words for the things around us, I coached her to say her first words in Greek, gave her rewards, and all that. I tried to talk and read (and even sang) to her a lot in Greek, even when I would rather brood quietly on my own work. Here it helped that in my profession I can do a lot of my work from home, so I was not in the difficult situation of many fathers who have to leave home early and return late. But if your notions of Greek masculinity prevent you from spending this kind of time with your children because it’s women’s work, then you may want to rethink how committed you are to preserving the Greek heritage (and you may want to rethink those notions generally).

I also used the following strategies. First, I read to her from Greek books and told her bedtime stories (the books I would either have sent from Greece or would get them there myself, when we visited). Another strategy that made me cringe but that I think it worked was to play cartoon movies dubbed into Greek for her. Now, personally I can’t stand the voices that are used in Greece to dub children’s films, though they have gotten better since the time I grew up there, and I also can’t stand the messages conveyed by most Disney films (so many of which promote wretched stereotypes). But I did it for the language. My daughter is still not fully aware that these movies were originally in English and then dubbed into Greek. As far as she knows, these are Greek stories. It is terrible, I know, but it worked. I tried to get as many as I could find about Greek mythology, especially Herakles, whom she loved. The point of this was to drive home the idea that there was a wider world of Greek entertainment to which the language gave her access; it was not just the secret, weird language of one parent. I have never let her watch American television and she rarely interacts with glowing screens (smart phones, ipad, etc.).

Another crucial factor is that my work requires me to be in Greece for part of the summer. Now, this offered many opportunities for immersion, but also a number of challenges. For one thing, my family in Greece speaks mostly English, except for my father. Although he is thrilled that he can speak in Greek to his granddaughter, he works a lot and is not a credible playmate. My nephews there speak in English, both to each other and to my daughter, so that did not offer a linguistic advantage. What I did instead was to put her in a private day-care with all-Greek kids in the neighborhood, sometimes for up to a month. This drove home the perception that Greek is a language that an entire society could speak, including other children, and was not limited to one parent. I credit this day-care experience in Greece as one of the chief factors that kept the language alive for her. It would tend to decline during the winter (for example, she would make more and more grammatical mistakes, forget words, etc.), but that one month gave her the injection that she needed to make it through the next year.

At the appropriate age, I began to teach her to read and write in Greek too, starting before her school did so for English. First, I made laminated place-settings (where she would eat) listing all the letters of the alphabet, one for the small-case and another for the large-case letters. She picked those up pretty quickly. At that point we were going through a “mythological” phase, so we began by spelling out the names of the Greek gods and heroes. I used a small white board where we could stand and practice. This took a long time, over a year to learn how to write a word or full name, but I was in no hurry. I linked reading and writing to rewards and play time. So, for example, if she wanted to watch a cartoon (in Greek!) she would have to write out its name or a full request to me, on the board (I wasn’t worrying about correct spelling at that point, and am barely concerned with it now). We spent hours practicing reading from children’s books. For about a year, I was also helped by a young Greek woman who had recently moved to my city: she would come by once a week for a couple of hours of reading, which was excellent. They did grammar exercises too, but what mattered were the conversations and playtime. My daughter can now read pretty much anything in Greek fluently. Unfortunately, many – not all – Greek children’s books are written with awards committees in mind, not children, and so they are filled with arcane literary terms that no person ever uses in real life. I have had to choose them carefully. I don’t want them to be so difficult that she becomes discouraged because she understands only one word in three.

The Greek American reader will notice that this story contains no references to the local Greek American community. Early inquiries revealed to me that, alas, few Greek American parents speak Greek systematically to their children so that they become fluent. My fear was that, if I were to introduce my daughter to other kids billed as “Greek” but who would speak to her only in English, she would realize that other Greek parents communicate with their children in English, so why couldn’t we? I did not want to face that obstacle, in addition to all the rest that life in the US entails for the acquisition of foreign languages. So in order to raise my daughter to speak Greek, I kept her away from the community, excepting individuals who I knew would speak Greek with her.

So that is where we are now.