Too many languages?
Me and my two partners are expecting our first child in a few months.
Each of us is multilingual and we'd like for our child to grow up with some of our native languages as well.
I grew up speaking both German and English.
My boyfriend grew up speaking Urdu, Hebrew and English, but he also speaks German, ASL, French, and Spanish.
My girlfriend grew up speaking Farsi and Hebrew, but she can also speak English, French, Arabic, German, and Spanish.
We live in the US, so the community language will obviously be English, and that is also the language we usually talk in.
For now our plan is to do OPOL, with each parent picking one of our native languages to talk to our child.
An issue we have with that is that we'd have to leave out one of our native languages, so we think that it would be nice for our child to learn all five. But we're unsure, because we've received conflicting information on whether or not it's possible to raise a kid to speak five languages fluently. Do any of you know more about that? We're also aware that adding another language would be a lot more work, because then one parent would need to speak two languages to our child.
Another question we have is if it's better for us to continue speaking English with each other so our child can pick it up from the start, or if we should rely on community exposure and focus on our minority languages at home.