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An example is parents with different mother tongues living in a foreign country, teaching those three languages and also English.
How and when should this language be taught?
Can all be taught in early age or only when the others are firmly embedded?
What languages should be taught first? The similar ones or the local language?
Our daughter (29 months old) is currently learning 4 languages. I am a native speaker of Swedish and Greek, while my wife is a native speaker of Turkish. We live in Sweden, so our little one is exposed to Swedish when she's at kindergarden or in contact with relatives. I talk explicitly Greek with her, while her mother speaks only Turkish. Her grandmother speaks only Swedish with her. Me and my wife have been speaking mainly English, so she has snapped up that as well. The result:
She understands all 4 languages
She addresses each one of us explicitly in the language we talk to her.
Grammar works well: a) She uses articles in Greek, b) definite/indefinite in Swedish, c) agglutination works fine in Turkish (i think)
In interaction with locals she uses local words to address us e.g. pappa instead of baba, mamma instead of anne.
She knows how to change language context e.g. you asked her to count in all 4 languages separately and she does that without being confused
She is a late talker, but that is expected. Besides, my friend's monolingual child is a late talker too.
The most important rule however is one and only: Do not mix up the languages when addressing the child. The language you use to communicate with your child should be your native tongue. If you talk half English, half Spanish at the same time, the child will probably end up not speaking well the language it doesn't hear from its environment. While making a sentence it will be like 5 words in Spanish 3 in English, then 3 Spanish 2 English and so on.
In parts of the world very dense in languages (e.g. Nigeria, India, Papua New Guinea), a common scenario is this: a child's mother speaks language A, the father speaks language B, a vehicular language C is frequently used for interactions between people from different villages, especially in cities, and language D is an official language which is the medium of instruction in government schools. In such places it is not at all uncommon for a young adult to be fluent in four languages.
For concreteness, imagine an Indian child whose mother is Tamil and whose father is Telugu. The child speaks these languages within his/her extended family. Hindi is used when going out into town to do business, and English is used in school.
From a purely cognitive point of view, it doesn't really matter how many languages you introduce, or in which order so long as:
Example: mom's native language is Arabic, dad's native language is Japanese, family is living in Hungary. Each parent is fluent is the other's native language as well as Hungarian. The ideal environment in this household is one in which, when the child is present, the mother speaks exclusively Arabic, the father speaks exclusively Japanese, and they speak exclusively Hungarian when interacting with locals. Here, chances are the child will end up acquiring all three languages simultaneously.
Obviously, this is an idealized situation. More common are situations where the parents are not totally fluent in each other's native languages and/or the local language. In these cases, you'll need to adjust a bit, but you'll be fine so long as you keep points 1. and 2. in mind.
In malaysia, malaysian chinese might speak malay, english, their chinese dialect and mandarin.
In India, marriage among different linguistic groups is very rare. Majority of the Indians generally tend to be monolingual, especially in villages. some of them might be bilingual or trilingual. A tamilian might speak tamil alone, sometimes english too. A malayalee might speak malayalam alone, or english. Most of them speak their respective state language alone. If they happen to live in borders, they might speak an additional language. Less than 10 % of indians might speak four or five languages. A majority of these multilinguals are bad at writing in languages other than mothertongue.
Learning four languages is very difficult. If all the languages are in same linguistic family, it is comparatively easy to learn. If all of them belong to different families, (father- chinese, mother - tamil, country- japan, foreign language - english) it is very difficult.
Generally, the parents' mothertongues are ignored. Reasons: 1. Both of them tend to speak a neutral language to the child. (may be the country's language) 2. The parents language doesnot have much to do with the culture of the country or it doesn't have anything to do with jobs.
The local language has to be taught first, since it helps to mingle with the society. Even if more than three languages are taught, it is very difficult to learn with high fluency.
However. in places like Bangalore, most people happen to speak 3+ languages due to the interaction with other communities living in the surroundings.
