Hello! Teri here! Today, I wanted to dive into a topic that I find really interesting : speech delay in bilingual or trilingual kids. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about because, well, I’ve experienced it firsthand working at an international school. Growing up, Spanish was my first language, and I didn’t start learning English and Korean until I was a teenager (I’m 22 now, and still going strong with my language journey). Now, I’m learning Chinese, and let me tell you—it’s been quite the adventure!

I know there are a lot of parents, teachers and caregivers out there who might worry about their child’s speech development when they’re raising bilingual or trilingual kids. And honestly? I get it. It can be a bit overwhelming to think that learning multiple languages might slow down a child’s speech. But trust me, as someone who’s been through the ups and downs of language learning, I can say with confidence after doing research, that being multilingual doesn’t cause speech delays. In fact, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface than most people realize.

So if you’re raising a multilingual child, or if you’re a language learner yourself, I hope this post helps clear up some of the myths about bilingualism and language delay.

One of the first things I want to make super clear is that learning multiple languages doesn’t cause a speech delay. In fact, the idea that bilingualism or trilingualism slows down speech development is a misconception that many people still believe ( even I used to believe that). Sure, juggling more than one language can be a bit tricky at times, but studies show that it doesn’t harm language development—in fact, it can even boost cognitive skills.

I’ve met a lot of multilingual people along the way, and I have met and worked with kids that speak/ are learning more than one language and I think we all have our own stories of language learning, from mixing up words to being super shy about speaking in a new language. Here’s what speech delay might look like in bilingual or trilingual kids (or even young adults):

• Slower Vocabulary Development: Kids learning multiple languages may take a little longer to build their vocabulary in each language, but this isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. They’re just absorbing a lot of information, which takes time!
• Mixing Languages.
• Struggles with Pronunciation: When you’re learning different languages, especially ones with different sounds and rhythms (like English and Korean), your tongue gets a bit confused and that is completely normal. This can sometimes make pronunciation a little tricky. Again, it’s a normal part of the process as you adjust to different phonetics.
• Delayed Sentence Formation: Kids (and sometimes adults!) might take longer to form complete sentences, especially when juggling multiple languages.

My Journey: Learning English, Korean, and Now Chinese

Growing up in a Spanish-speaking house, I never really thought much about “speech delay” until I started learning other languages in my teens and then started working with kids from all over the world. I didn’t speak English fluently until I was about 15, and Korean, well, I´m still in my journey to fluency but I can definitely have daily and some academic conversations, when it comes to Chinese, I am trying to find out a new method that works for me and that allows me to start speaking even if it is a short sentence, because I have seen it a lot, when it comes to learning a new language as an adult it seems, at least from my experience, that speaking comes at the very last part of the journey, and it should not be like that.

I think the hardest part about learning Chinese, for me, has been adjusting to the tones. In Spanish, English, and Korean, there’s no real concept of tone in pronunciation the way there is in Mandarin. So, when I started learning Chinese, I had to teach myself to listen closely to the rise and fall of the tones and not to mix them up with the other languages I speak, because it may sound stupid but you start imitating/ copying stuff that you learn in one language and then you do it in the other language, this also happened with the bowing culture in korean, for some reason I started doing it even when I was talking to spanish speakers, or even at home with my granny. It’s been a challenge, but also an exciting one.