Finnish acquisition check-in: 3-year-old; 13 months in Finland

Sterling turned three years old yesterday. Let's see how his Finnish is coming along.

I have said before that Sterling probably has the most practical and proficient functionality in Finnish than anybody else in our family. That still holds true. It helps that he is not called upon to perform high-level tasks in Finnish, though.

He understands both Finnish and English well. Something interesting is that his English production (speaking) developed dramatically over the summer. It was amazing to behold. He was home from päiväkoti for two whole months and only spoke/was spoken to in Finnish on the weekends at church. In addition, my parents came to visit from the US and spoke to him in English. I will always remember when my mom arrived in early June and sat down to talk with Sterling. He just stared and stared at her, in large part (I think) because here all of a sudden was this woman who spoke ENGLISH. It is entirely possible that during his time in Finland, Sterling had decided that English was some weird, made-up family language that only Mom and Dad and his sisters spoke. He had an abundance of English input during the summer and it really made an impact on his language development.

Now that he's back in päiväkoti, though, his Finnish is developing more, too. He doesn't speak it at home, though.

The most interesting thing about 3-year-old Sterling is that he just figured out how to talk *about* Finnish and English, rather than just function appropriately in them according to the context. The day before his birthday, he asked me how to say something in Finnish: "what is this called in Finnish?" It was the first time I'd even heard him say the word Finnish, let alone show he understood that a thing could have a different name in it.

This may have begun with our neighbor's dog, whose name is Vadelma. Vadelma means raspberry, and if you ask Sterling what this dog's name is, he will not say Vadelma, even though that is all he has heard this dog called by its owner and us. He will say its name is Raspberry. He is figuring out there are two different sides of this language thing.

Then again, he's still doing stuff like saying "Minä haluan [I want to] put on sunglasses." So he's still got a ways to go.