So Little O turned two just over a week ago and is now turning into a little boy – he’s definitely no longer a baby, although he’ll always be my baby. I try so hard not to compare what he can do with what other children of his age can but sometimes it is hard not to. The one area where I can help but compare is language. We are raising him bilingually. I speak English to him, Husband speaks Swedish and Husband and I speak English to each other. At the moment, Little O attends a bilingual (English/Swedish) dagis (preschool) but that is likely to change if he gets a place at a Swedish state-run dagis instead.

He has many words that he uses correctly and “passed” the test with the nurse at 18 months of knowing at least ten words. Interestingly, the way he seems to be learning new words has changed as he has grown. Initially, when hearing both the Swedish and the English word for something, he would typically choose the easier of the two to say. Now, however, he seems to use both words and he is beginning to understand that Husband and I use different words for the same thing: he’ll say “train” to me and “tåg” to Husband and bring us books in our own language to read to him. It never ceases to amaze me the extend to which our little people can understand and pick up things around them.

Where I start to get a little concerned though is that he is not yet really saying phrases to us. Other children of the same age that I hear in the playgrounds here (and who are presumably monolingual) are already stringing three or four words together into small sentences. But the nearest that Little O has got to doing this is “No, Mamma” and “Nej, Pappa”.

At first I was not too worried about it as it has always been said that bilingual children will often be a little behind in some area of their language development. But that theory has now been discounted now, with the cognitive benefits now stated as being great. Googling “bilingual toddler speech delay” did help somewhat as most of the cases there were of children not speaking at all, and when he’s on form, Little O is barely quiet for one minute. The problem is that little of what he says is recognizable as proper words in either English or Swedish. He’s still just babbling.

I’m not ready to rush him off for speech therapy just yet (!), but what do you think? Is he just a little behind and likely to catch up? Or is this something that we should be keeping an eye on?