User:Hahahuff/“one person, one language”

The “one person, one language” approach is popular method adopted by parents attempting to raise simultaneous bilingual children. With the “one person, one language” approach, each parent consistently speaks only one of the two languages to the child. For instance, the child’s mother might speak to him or her exclusively in French, while the father might use only English.

Reasoning
Traditionally, the “one person, one language” method has been regarded as the best method for bilingual language acquisition free of mixed utterances. The term “one person, one language” was first introduced by the French linguist Maurice Grammont in 1902. He theorized that by separating the languages from the beginning, parents could prevent confusion and code-mixing in their bilingual children. This method has been linked to an early development of metalinguistic awareness.

George Saunders wrote in his book Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens that the “one person, one language” approach “ensures that the children have regular exposure to and have to make use of each language. This is particularly important for the minority language, which has little outside support."

Implementation
Naomi Goodz has found that fathers tend to adhere more strictly to the “one person, one language model." Even when parents reported strictly following a “one person, one language” scheme, naturalistic observations found repeated instances of language mixing in both parents.