Anyone with trilingual children?

Question

I'm a Canadian currently living in Austria and had a baby with a Slovak man. So our little girl is speaking English with me, Slovak with him and exclusively German at daycare.. Im wondering if anyone else has raised their kids trilingual like this. Did your kids take longer to start speaking or have troubles socially? She's 14 months now and babbles like crazy with the occasional word but hasn't started saying things consistently.

Answer

My first is being raised bilingual English-German and I have a neighbour who is raising her daughter trilingually Russian-Ukrainian-German. We live in Germany. 
My daughter hasn’t started speaking yet, though she understands words in both languages - this is normal because she’s only 10.5 months old!
As for my neighbour’s daughter, she’s 2.5 years old. Russian is her main language. She understands German but isn’t confident enough to speak it back to you. She just says “da” a lot (“yes” in Russian) with a cute smile 😉
I did a little research into bilingual babies and what I read is that they always have the same size vocabulary as monolingual babies, but spread across the languages. This means they might have the appearance of speech delay. For example, a monolingual baby might know 150 words in one language - whereas a trilingual baby would know 150 words spread across three languages, say 50 50 50. This giving them the appearance that they’re behind, when they aren’t. 
They’ll overtake their monolingual counterparts in their vocabulary size when they’re a bit older.

Answer

My first was raised bilingual and my second and third trilingual (English, German, Korean). My son was speech delayed but it was unrelated to the languages (trouble pronouncing several letters) My second is about to turn 2 and she talks a lot of jibberish and mixes up the languages. She doesn’t speak whole sentences yet but we aren’t concerned. She has a lot to process. My third is only 4 months old so I can’t tell how it’s gonna be for her yet but I’m guessing she’s gonna catch up a lot from her big sister as they’re so close in age

Answer

My son is bilingual and talk alot of gibberish at the moment but you can see he does understand commands in both languages he just mixes them up quite a bit. Also we are guilty of not realizing what language he is talking sometimes :P (aka yelling bas bas bas at us trying to say he wanted to wear socks but we understand it as bah bah bah and responded yes that’s the sound a sheep makes. He wasn’t impressed)

Answer

I’m German, my husband is Hispanic, and we’re living in the US. My LO definitely first learned English, because that’s what we mainly speak at home, and what she hears at preschool. And at one point her pediatrician was a little concerned with her speech and suggested to stick to one language for a while, so that’s what we did. I do speak Spanish though, so now that’s she’s speaking fluently we are very focused on speaking more Spanish, and she’s learned so much in a very short period of time. She understands everything and can have a full blown conversation with you. Surprisingly she also understands most of what I say in German, and talks quiet a bit, even though she only hears me speaking German on the phone once a week with my family, or when I’m super upset and automatically switch to German 😂

Anyone with trilingual children?

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