As I understand, the best time for a child to retain language is in their preteens. 9, 10, 11, 12. The time to teach basics is from birth, so they get an “ear” for it. But retention-wise, pre-teen ages are the best.

A Japanese lady friend lived with her son in the US at that time and he doesn’t need to bother with English classes now that he is back in Japan at the high school level even though no one speaks English to him on a regular basis.

And also a male friend of mine lived in the US for five years during high school. After he returned to Japan, he rarely spoke English. 20 years on, his English is still great.

That’s not to say everyone has such experiences, but these are mine and my friends’. Take from them what you will.

and raise children in a household that only speaks spanish? absolutely not. is it a disadvantage to the child? absolutely yes.

Actually if the child speaks English at school or whatever I think it would most positively be an advantage. The child grows up bilingual.

I think it’d be the same with this child. True Klingon isn’t going to be a very useful language, however I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that if you grow up bilingual you are much more likely to pick up new languages later in life (which makes perfect sense as your brain isn’t nearly as locked into one pattern).

Klingon (if it was actually the kid’s initial language, it sounds less like it now) is far beyond a “disadvantage”. Repurposed (above you) makes a pretty good point.

With languages that are either artificial, rudimentary, or improvised it takes until the second generation to form a fully fledged language. You can see this in the movement from pidgin languages to creoles. This is why the results of the Esperanto experiment do not surprise me. The children just corrected what didn’t match with UG and made the language more functional.

Also the language needs to be used frequently until after the language period in order to maintain use of the vocabulary. I am not sure you ever lose the underlying grammatical instinct but as a former native speaker of Tagalog (my first language mind you), I know that it is possible to no longer have utility of a language you learned during your language period.

Someone please create a community of Elvish speakers to test this out. We can create a village in the woods of New England.

I think it works better when each parent speaks their native language to the child. I’m a native English speaker living in Finland. When my daughter was younger, I spoke only English to her, and her father (and other caregivers) spoke only Finnish. She is now 6 years old and fully bilingual in English and Finnish. I’ve noticed some subtle effects, like applying Finnish grammar to English, but otherwise she’s right on target for her age in both languages.

One of her friends speaks Spanish, Finnish, and English equally well. She learned Spanish from her mother, Finnish from her father, and English from the parents speaking to each other. They never tried to teach her English, she just learned it through immersion from their conversations. Children (up to a certain stage of development) have an amazing capacity to learn languages.

As a failure, it was a silly waste of time. If it had succeeded, and Klingon had trumped the local native tongue, it would be both child abuse and and a colossal setback for the kid, who would then have to go about assimilating the local dialect without the imprinting his parent should have provided.

I’m also interested in the mother (assuming she was part of the family at the time). She went along with this?

Plus, we checked any sense of humor or inquiry at the door.

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Isn’t this how Berlitz was raised — each parent, plus the nanny (and perhaps others) all speaking a separate language, consistently, throughout his language acquisition years?

quick wiki-search, et viola:

As a child, Charles [Berlitz] was raised in a household in which (by his father’s orders) every relative and servant spoke to Charles in a different language: he reached adolescence speaking eight languages fluently. In adulthood, he recalled having the childhood delusion that every human being spoke a different language, and wondering why he did not have his own language like everyone else in his household. (source)

QED

Q: What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
A: Tri-lingual.

Q: What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
A: Bi-lingual.

Q: What do you call a person who speaks one language?
A: A native English-speaker.

But if it was ONLY Klingon, what a retarded thing to do to a kid. What he’d really prove is that a doctorate in anything just means you’re good at school, not actually smart.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8

Raising kids in an environment where a constructed language is spoken would be a very interesting experiment: it could test whether some constructed languages are unlearnable by kids if they don’t fit into the UG paradigm. I doubt that Klingon doesn’t fit into UG (but, I’m not nerdy enough to know anything about its grammar), but another constructed language like lojban/loglan or a language constructed purposefully to violate UG would allow this type of (cruel) experiment.

Saying it’s child abuse is like saying that teaching a child English and Japanese is child abuse (if the child lives in the US). Just because a language can’t be used in the current environment doesn’t make the experience any less valuable to the child’s mental development.

Even if the kid can’t now speak Klingon or remember those years, there has to be some place in the brain that architected itself to the Klingon input, among the other stimuli he assimilated.

the theory goes that children, when they are acquiring language, will strongly favor communicating in the “language of most utility.” in other words, if dad speaks klingon and mom and all your friends and all your day care providers speak english, guess what? you’ll speak english.

i tried a related “experiment” by speaking nederlands (dutch) to my son when he was 0 to about two years old, but spoke english to my ex. our day care provider spoke spanish to our son, but english to my ex. and my ex only spoke english to us and to our child.

when our son started speaking, it was predominantly english, despite the fact that he spent the majority of his waking hours with dutch and spanish speakers.

Communciation should be for everyone, not just for an educational or political elite; that is how English is used at the moment.

Your readers may be interested in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0 Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.

A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net