Bilingual Homes
Family language planner

Make a language plan for your family

In a language plan, you set out what language(s) you would like your child or children to learn, to what level, and how you can support their learning.

Bilingual Homes offers a free and fully private Family Language Planner. It’s an interactive tool that helps you plan the times or activities for each language, along with things to help your child’s learning (media use, interaction styles, community engagement, schooling, etc.). As you complete the planner, you get practical tips and insights, all based on research on bilingualism. At the end, you download your personal Family Language Plan (PDF).

There are three versions of the planner. Please choose one below. If you’re not sure if any of these works for you, take the Strategy Guide first or check out the questions further down on this page.

What setup do you want to make a plan for?

One parent will use the society/majority language, the other another language (OPOL with one minority language)Each parent will use a different language, but neither of these is the society/majority language (OPOL with two minority languages)Both parents (or a single parent) will use one and the same language, but this is not the society/majority language (Minority Language at Home)None of these, we have another setup

What’s a society/majority language, or a minority language?

With the majority language (sometimes called the society language), we mean the language that’s spoken in the wider community. This is usually the main country language, and often (though not always) the language children learn at school. The minority language is a language that is not spoken in the wider community or society, and usually not learned at school. Making a child highly proficient in a minority language needs extra effort, especially when the language is spoken by only one of the two parents/caregivers.

This planner is built for three common family setups:

  1. one parent speaks the majority language at home, and the other a minority language (example: a Spanish-Dutch couple raising a child in Spain; the child uses Dutch and Spanish at home, and Spanish outside the home);
  2. neither parent speaks the majority language at home, but they each speak another minority language (example: a Portuguese-French couple raising a child in Sweden; the child uses Portuguese and French at home, and Swedish outside the home);
  3. neither parent speaks the majority language at home, but they each speak the same minority language (example: a Danish couple raising a child in the US; the child uses Danish inside the home, and English outside the home).

What if the planner doesn’t meet our family setup?

Maybe you don’t know what strategy you’ll follow, or you think you’ll improvise and combine strategies as you go. That’s completely fine; most parents start the process without knowing. I suggest you try the planner with one of the OPOL versions; choose one depending on how many languages you plan to use in your home (one minority language, or two). Almost all of the questions and tips will be relevant even if you won’t follow OPOL, and those that aren’t, you can simply skip. There’s also plenty of space in the tool to add free text and notes, so you can adapt the plan to your needs.

Questions or feedback

I built this free tool to give anyone practical support with raising their child bilingually. I’ve done my best to aggregate knowledge from the literature, and present it in an accessible way. If you want to share your thoughts with me, I’d really love to hear from you. Email: [email protected].