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Originally Posted by noodle
My parents as a baby started speaking to me in Berber and apparently the moment I started forming sentences and speaking (2 to 3? At what age do kids start forming coherent sentences?), they spoke to me in all three.
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This is the important part. They didn`t mix while you were acquiring your first language. If they had been mixing from day one you would not have had the background to be able to figure out which bit belonged to one language and which belonged to another.
As an infant acquiring a language for the first time, without some rule to show that languages are separate, there is no way to distinguish between them. It isn`t underestimating at all. Even adults cannot do this.
As an example, let us say that you are dropped into a situation where you interact with people who do not speak a language you are familiar with in any way. If they speak to you mixing two or more unfamiliar languages together, you will have no way to know where one begins and the other ends. In fact, you will have no idea at all that they are mixing! And if you pick up the language, you will pick up this mixed form. This is what happens when an infant is exposed to mixed languages from day one with no indication of the lines between them.
On the other hand, let`s say that you go somewhere and are talking to people who use a mix of a language you may not be a good speaker of, but that know quite a bit of. You will probably be able to tell pretty easily which parts belong to language 1 and which belong to language 2 - even if you don`t know the language all that well, it will be fairly clear from the feel, word form, and grammar differences. This is what happens when a child has exposure to a single language long enough to acquire a great part of it. (What happened with you.)
ETA;
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Originally Posted by Columbine
Sorry to butt in, but I find this discussion really interesting. There's lots of kids in the world being raised with three or four languages, and they never have any trouble. I know several British Indians who speak the native dialect of their mother, the native dialect of their father, hindi or urdu AND english. It's pretty natural to them to swap between them depending on the situation. When it's just mum, they speak in mum's language, when dad comes home, they speak hindi/urdu; outside the house it's all English. But there's no way they could combine it because for starters, dad doesn't speak mum's dialect and visa versa, and dad's good at english but mum isn't so much, etc etc.
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I`m not sure whether you wanted to support what I said or go against it...?
What you are saying supports it, if that is what you intended.
For a child in that sort of family, they are a native speaker of all of those languages. If the mother speaks to the children in her dialect, the child learns that "mommy speaks this way" and will speak that way with the mother. The same goes for the father... And the same also goes for "mommy and daddy speak to each other this way" for the third household language. There is a clear pattern that is easy for a child to learn and which will give a very good way to keep the languages separate.
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Actually, fluency must be a factor, right? I imagine for a lot of mixed Japanese families, both partners aren't going to be perfectly fluent in both languages. Plenty of couples out there where one side doesn't speak a lick of Japanese, or conversely, only middling english. The only time I can think of where it might be better if both parents were to constantly speak both languages to the child across the board is for languages where male and female speech are drastically different.
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I`m sure fluency is a huge factor in making the choice of who speaks what, what sort of pattern to stick to, etc. Obviously, it will be easy to have the mother speak her native language to the child and the father speak his if one of them isn`t very good with the native language of the other. There are cases where the parents themselves are natively bilingual but still do the one-person-one-language pattern, so it doesn`t have to be based on fluency.
The key just seems to be finding and sticking to a pattern. Consistency is what makes the big difference. I`ve even heard of a day rotation - English on Monday, Japanese on Tuesday, then English again on Wednesday, etc.
One thing that is pretty clear is that mixing by the parents with no rules to the exposure usually ends up with a monolingual child only speaking and being fluent in the outside language in the end. (Language of school and peers). The second mixed in language ends up being a second language at best, a sketchy "foreign" language at worst.