A word on language

SIR – In reply to Ray Powell (Letters, May 20): of course the best way to bring up a bilingual child is to speak the native language of each parent.

I was brought up in a household where my grandfather, a Scot, spoke to me in English, and my grandmother and mother spoke Welsh to me. My older sister, and my father when I saw him, spoke to me in English.

I spoke English and Welsh with equal fluency when I went to school. Young children are sponges and unconsciously absorb sounds and rhythms that they would have to learn in later life. It was all perfectly natural to me and I am happily still bilingual. Angela Thomas London NW7 SIR – In the Eighties, my husband’s work took us to Pakistan for 18 months.

When I arrived, I worked with a couple who had a one-year-old boy in the Danish company’s regional office, which was also their home. The father, who was from Pakistan, spoke to his son in Urdu and Punjabi; and the mother, who was from Denmark, spoke to him in Danish. The parents spoke to each other in English.

By the time I left the child understood every word of all the languages. Bev Furner

Maidstone, Kent

SIR – The most remarkable and, I suspect, successful attempt to teach children to be bilingual that I have witnessed was in a ski lift queue in Switzerland.

The young French couple in front of me were towing their young children behind on their skis and talking to them, and it became clear that the routine was that the mother would address them in French and expect a response in English. The father did the opposite, so all the time the children had to think in two languages.

They took to it like ducks to water, and it was a pleasure to see. William Ward London N10