68. Do similar languages confuse children?
Sep 3, 2026 · 41 min · 11 segments
In this episode of the Multilingual Montessori Podcast, Gabrielle and Jenna answer a question from a parent raising her son with Portuguese while he attends a Spanish-language preschool. She’s…
In this episode of the Multilingual Montessori Podcast, Gabrielle and Jenna answer a question from a parent raising her son with Portuguese while he attends a Spanish-language preschool. She’s concerned that the similarities between Portuguese and Spanish, along with her own occasional mistakes in Portuguese, might lead to confusion or affect her son’s Portuguese language development. We talk about mutually intelligible languages, cognates, and language transfer, and why learning similar languages can actually be an advantage for multilingual children. We also discuss how parents can help children notice the differences between languages and develop metalinguistic awareness without worrying about language confusion. Plus, we share practical strategies for increasing minority-language input when local resources are limited. We also discuss the complementarity principle and why multilingual children don’t need to know the same words or have identical vocabularies in all of their languages! Along the way, we share some of our own multilingual adventures, including Gabrielle’s experience volunteering at the FIFA World Cup in New York and what Jenna has learned from having her phone in German for the past four years. We also discuss the language-related books we’re reading, endangered languages, and how television can actually support children’s foreign-language vocabulary acquisition! Have a question you'd like us to answer on the podcast? Submit it here! **Things we mention in the episode:** - Gabrielle's Parenting Multilingual Children Workshop - How to Kill a Language by Sophia Smith Galer - Why Save a Language (Sophia Smith Galer interview on WNYC) - Language City by Ross Perlin - The Language Archive by Julia Cho - In the United States, Every World Cup Team Is a Home Team (NY Times) - German study about children's language acquisition through watching television **Follow Multilingual Montessori:** Website Instagram Consultations Support the Podcast
In this episode of the Multilingual Montessori Podcast, Gabrielle and Jenna answer a question from a parent raising her son with Portuguese while he attends a Spanish-language preschool. She’s…
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