Heres one for those from mixed nationality marriages, where you have brought up your kids speaking two or more languages from the start.

Our son is 2 years 4 months & seems to me to be quite slow, especially when I hear kids of the same age at his kindergrippe rattling away.

I speak solely English with him, Mrs P speaks German out & about & Slovak at home. He also gets hit with a smattering of Bern Deutsch at kindergrippe & in interaction with other kids.

Can anyone give me their real life experience here ? Is it a case of he just has too much to think about & will catch up in due course.

I do not think your son has to much to take on board at all. He is learning all the languages without even knowing!! Although my children speak 3 languages I know of kids that they grew up with who were exposed to several languages at a young age and now can go from one to another without even thinking. Your son is still quite young and I bet in another years time he will chatter away in whatever language he is with!!

I wouldn't be too worried for now. Our kids are growing up with a similar situation and especially the son took quite a while longer than his unilingual friends to start speaking freely. Around 3 was when it seemed to break with him.

We are in the same situation although our Son is very young so we have it all to come. I speak English to him, the missus speaks French and just about everybody else speaks Swiss German.

A friend of ours in the same situation said it takes longer for kids to start to speak (at all) when they have multiple languages to contend with so I guess the uptake would be slower at first as well.

Apparently kids of multilingual families speak a bit later than kids growing up with one language but it doesn't affect their development at all. I know there is info on t'internet but I ain't got time to Google.

My husband and his siblings all grew up in the 70s in Switzerland with a Swiss mum and Brit dad. They spoke English mainly at home and picked up Swiss German when they ventured out to play with the kids in the area.

They've all turned out okay and are fully articulate in both languages and had no problems in their education - all are educated post grad level

I even got my husband saying "Eh, mate gis a kick of your footie" in best Scouse.

The best bit of advice I heard was to be consistent. If you always speak English and your wife speaks the other language, stick with it.

Our little fella is at a bilingual nursery but we speak English with him at home. At the moment, at 16 months old, he seems to be speaking a bastardised version of Klingon which keeps us amused.

I'm not afraid he won't pick up either high German or dialect, my husband's family is living proof that this method works.

When my son was the age of yours, he was speaking just a handful of words. And we only spoke English at home (at that time). Your son is pretty young still. Give him time.

I've also heard that with one or more languages in the home, kids tend speak later.

My Son is only getting two languages English at Home andFrench at his Creche. 2 years 5 months. He'sfast picking up both and mixing them both together. Then again he's fast at talking and slow on the physical side. He didn't start crawling until 3 days after his first Birthday and starting walking at 17 months.

Each child is different and progress at different speeds so I wouldn't worry too much about it unless the child is becoming oerwhelmed by it all.

Well, I've heard before that kids growing up in a bilingual environment start speaking a bit later than monolingual ones. I'd have to ask my mom if that was the case for my brother and me...
All I can say is the advantages I've had from growing up speaking three languages (English with dad, French with mom, Spanish at school) outweigh by far any inconveniences due to a slow start.

out of interest why did you decide to send him to a bilingual nursery? Why not a Swiss-German speaking one?

Purely because the nursery ticked all the boxes: They were close to home, had a good programme, we liked the staff and the fact that they were bilingual meant I didn't have to do a lot of arm flapping and bad German with the staff to tell them that the little fella has a cold/bad temper/grandparent picking him up.

Bilingual for the little fella doesn't matter a toss. He just points at what he wants and goes "Meh!" which is international toddler speak for "give me that before I go mental!"

I wouldn't worry. First, I've heard, and it's been my experience that boys don't speak as quickly as girls. I have a 25-month-old daughter, and she's a little chatterbox. My wife speaks Czech, I speak English, and she gets German around the neigborhood, but she's not in any formal Kindergrippe. She speaks about 50%-50% Czech/English, though probably more Czech since wifey is with her all day. She can form almost complete sentences, subject, verb, direct object. She's got the basics of german: hello, goodbye, numbers. Comparitvely, our neighbors have a son who's 2.5. Mother speaks Spanish, father speaks German. The boy speaks very very little. I've heard him say maybe 5 words total.

Because they're being raised multi-linugually, they will likely have a smaller vocabulary than a mono-lingual child at the same level of development, but they'll have that vocab. in both (all 3?) languages. It all evens out after a while.

What's more important, in my view, is they're learning to think in both languages. That's why adults have such a problem learning languages, you think in your mother language then have to translate that. Your kid won't have to do that.

So, don't worry. He'll get there.

I started working as an English teaching nanny for a family where the woman is Greek, the father is German and the kid was born here in CH. He was about 18 months old when I got my hands on him. Until then he´d been hearing Greek from mum and high-German from dad, and I introduced the third. At 18mnths he wasn´t talking, and continued to stay stumm for the next 6 months (I think he was sizing me up). I was starting to wonder, at this stage as to the effects of 3 languages on him, especially when he made up a couple of words himself! I thought that maybe, seeing as everyone close to him spoke differently, that maybe he just figured he had to come up with his own language! Now, six months later, I wonder what I was "worried" about. Maybe he was just not ready to speak before, but now that he has started he´s going ahead in leaps and bounds, and uses all three languages plus the swiss-german he´s picked up in play-group lately. It´s so cute, every sentence ends with "weisch?" at the moment!!
Then there was me brother. Apparently he didn´t say a word until after I was born, some 20mnths later. Then one day, as he was watching mum bath me, he just said, "look mum, debbie´s doodle fell off!" A whole sentence with the first utterence! Mum reconed he´d just never had anything important to say before. So there´s no hard and fast rule, you´ll realise if there is a problem and 2years four months isn´t unusual.

I have not had a chance to read all of the posts here so if this is redundant then sorry.

Our neighbor kid is 3.5 years old and speaks/understands 3 languages (english, swedish and swiss german). His mother told me that it was not until he turned three that he really started speaking. At the moment he speaks a mix of all three, which is super cute but after a while he will sort it out.

I think as long as certain things remain consistant (ie: I speak this language when I am with mom, this when I am with dad and this at school) he will figure it out within the next year or year and a half. Then watch out, he will be a language machine

Mine eldest is 2 years 3 months, and he is only just beginning to grasp talking more, we counted about 60 words he knew last month

he gets Swiss german input all day and english exclusively from me and he is just beginning to rocket this week and even showing signs of distinguishing i.e. weg / gone, egg / ei

I would imagine that if you add a third or even fourth language in there, like in your case, the rocketing will come a bit later

It is generally considered a good thing. For example, knowing two languages helps with learning a third. From experience, however, I know there is a considerable risk of the child becoming semilingual. In other words, acquisition of the various languages is never quite up to the level of a child brought up with a dominant mother tongue. Unfortunately, as immigrants, there isn't really much we can do about this.

I have 2 children who i speak english to my husband speaks swiss german when my eldest was born i was also worried about the language but the doctor told me small children can learn upto 7 languages no problem so i felt alot better after hearing that. Also my daughter was alot faster than my son at speaking.

Perhaps I can give a slightly different perspective, as I used to be one of those "multilingual toddlers" ...

I grew up learning 3 languages in my home country - both my parents spoke to me in a different language at home, and I grew up in an English-speaking country.

According to my mother, I didn't speak much until about 3 or 4 years old.

At 3 years old, my mother was worried I was a bit "slow" or perhaps mute, so she took me to see various specialists - paediatricians, speech therapists, child psychologists, etc. I even vaguely remember the tests that I had to undergo. All of the specialists told my mother that the mix of languages around me was perhaps confusing me and slowing my speech development. However, the tests revealed that I was able to differentiate between the languages and that I understood what was being said to me - I just had difficulties in communicating back. The specialists told my parents to wait about a year, and voilà, they've had difficulties keeping me quiet since

Aside from my mother being a bit worried about my slow speech development, my kindy teachers were also a bit frustrated with my lack of communication. They even asked my parents to start speaking in English at home, but my parents had other plans - they persisted in speaking in their native tongues and I am grateful because I can now speak three languages.

I think I turned out ok

Kids in mixed families are the luckiest kids alive. My daughter (now 18) is tri-lingual, her mother is French, father American and she's born / raised in Zurich. So she now speaks English, French, Zuri-German, high German, Spanish / Italian and even dabbles a bit in Portuguese. Even at an early age while vacationing in the USA or France she'd say Papa, it's funny, the children in USA (or France) only speak English (or French). For her that wasn't normal because here in Switzerland the majority of her friends were also multi-lingual.
The only thing I would recommend to keep multi-lingual children from mixing up the languages is not to speak to them in multiple languages (only speak your own) or if the child should come with the wrong words not to accept them (even if you understand them). Sometimes when my daughter was young she might come with a German word (by mistake) and I'd say "excuse me?, I don't understand". If she claimed not to remember what something is called in English I insisted she then discribe it to me what she meant, 9 times out of 10 the word popped into her mouth on it's own and from that moment on she'd never forget it again.
Another game I used to play with her was to never speak German in front of her friends, she would have to translate everything to them and myself. I did shock her friends a few times when she wasn't in the room by then speaking German to them (they thought I didn't speak German at all).

I have 4 kids the first 3 are now 14 and spent from 2- 4 years old in Switzerland/Germany which slowed the speech down to the point when they started a school in the UK they needed extra speech therapy to iron out UK vowel sounds. Now at almost 15 they speak good English and the German etc is helping with languages in the UK school. My youngest is 4 years old and gets German/French at school outside etc , English and Thai at home , he was not saying a lot until recently but now he speaks pretty intelligible English with me and his mum and French in school with his mates. ash

Excellent advice! I fully agree with everything you say.