Have you seen this headline anywhere? “Languages make your brain bigger - FACT!” It’s the kind of headline that sounds amazing, but oversimplified, so I asked our multilingual ambassador, neuroscientist Dr Thomas Bak, for the...

English is one of the most spoken languages in the world, but did you know it is actually made up of lots of different languages? English is in fact multilingual, and we’ll be looking at this over a series of interesting facts.

Fact no.1 - place...

Don’t you think it’s weird that the English word ‘two’ has a silent ‘W’ in it? Especially when all the other numbers that start with a ‘tw’ we pronounce the ‘w’ – twenty, twice, twelve!...

Whether you’re homeschooling a toddler or a six-year-old, languages could be a really valuable part of their day.

Here are our top tips to integrate languages into any homeschool curriculum:

1. First, don’t panic! If you don’t know any...

Have you heard of 'the chimp wars'? Whether or not humans and apes share some of the same language-learning mechanisms is a hotly debated topic.

A researcher called Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues published several papers in the 1990s about Kanzi the...

Translanguaging is an increasingly popular buzzword in education, but what does it really entail? How can monolingual teachers make use of their pupils' multilingual repertoires?

I think it's understandable that teachers who speak one language (perhaps...

Screen time is such a hot topic in the parenting world… is it ‘bad’ for our kids? Is it ‘lazy parenting?’

At Babel Babies, our weekly resources are largely based around screen time with:

prerecorded videos featuring Cate...

You've been speaking your home language (e.g. Lithuanian) together since they were born. Your little one is about to start school. Should you switch to the majority language, such as English in the UK? That sounds logical, right, and would surely help...

By 12 months, babies understand about 50 words (Fenson et al., 1994) and by age 6 a typically developing child knows between 9,000 and 14,000 words!! That's learning about 9 words a day on average! Linguist Stephen Pinker called them 'lexical vacuum...

Ever wondered why we can identify our own baby's cry amongst others? Some fascinating research I've been reading about at uni this month has a theory that babies' cries are like a little melody, each with its own melodic arc.

German babies cry with...

Far from being confounded by the slew of sounds they hear from birth (and even before), babies are slowly and carefully piecing together evidence of how speaking works, what it's for, how it feels physically and emotionally, what all these sounds mean,...

Let's talk about the damaging and redundant term 'semilingualism' that has cropped up around social media recently.

You might have heard it? Sounds a bit scary. Semi = half. Half-lingual? It's not a term that researchers use now, and it is quite...