Maintaining Your Child's Home Language While Living Abroad

Living abroad is an undeniable asset. Broader career opportunities, unexpected encounters, new cultures to discover: the benefits of expat life hardly need listing.

For children, attending school in the host country, whether lessons are taught in English, in the local language, or in a mix of both, gives their language skills a remarkable boost. So much so that the school language often becomes their dominant one, and the language spoken at home, be it English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic or any other family language, can slowly slip into second place. Maintaining the home language then becomes a bigger challenge than it first appears.

Picture a Russian-speaking family in Dubai whose children study in English, a Spanish-speaking family in Singapore, or an English-speaking family whose children attend a French or German school. In every case the question is the same: how do you keep the family language alive against the linguistic tide that expat children face every day?

Stay with us, because that is exactly what we are going to look at now.

First, the bad news: a language fades when it is not used. Now the good news: it is very hard to truly forget your mother tongue. It is a bit like riding a bicycle. You may lose fluency and spontaneity, forget certain words, or find yourself searching for expressions. But the foundation remains, and it comes back quickly the moment you are immersed in that language again.

Whatever your family’s situation, there are practical ways to keep those language skills in shape, yes, even in a mother tongue. You may even find that your children end up improving it: the distance created by expatriation often lets you observe your own language with an analytical eye that people living in their home country rarely develop. But that is another story.

Here, then, are eight tips to help your children maintain their home language, whatever that language may be, while living abroad.

1. Play with words as a family. Crosswords, Scrabble, word categories, hangman, and countless other games let you keep the home language active and enrich vocabulary while having fun together. Many apps allow you to play in almost any language, including remotely: a lovely way for children to stay connected with grandparents and cousins back home while practising the family language without even noticing.

2. Simply speak the home language at home. When children are surrounded by other languages at school, speaking their family language with their parents becomes a natural linguistic refuge. A home language is tied to a family’s roots, and the family itself is its best carrier and its best transmitter. Consistency matters more than perfection: the more naturally the language lives in your household, the more solidly it settles in your children.

3. Build a circle of speakers when the home is multilingual. The previous tip is not always workable. In families where several nationalities and languages coexist, parents sometimes settle on a common language that is not the one they want their children to preserve. In that case, regular contact with people who speak the target language is essential: relatives, family friends, other expat families, anyone with whom relaxed, informal conversations can happen often. It is also a lovely way to keep one foot in the country of origin and maintain family bonds.

4. Turn screen time into language time. We often lament that our children spend too much time in front of screens. What if that drawback became an advantage? The goal is still to keep screen time reasonable, but if children are going to be online anyway, they might as well benefit from it. A word of caution: the internet offers an overwhelming amount of content, and quality varies enormously. Well-made videos, series, audiobooks and educational platforms exist in English, Spanish, Russian and most major languages; it simply takes some careful searching and selecting. The same goes for television and other media.

5. Spend time with communities that speak your language. Of course, most people do not move abroad in order to seek out compatriots the moment their suitcases are unpacked. Yet it can be rewarding, and not only for linguistic reasons, to connect from time to time with speakers of your language living in your city. Opportunities abound: Facebook groups, cultural associations, Meetup events, volunteering at your embassy, concerts, guided tours, dinners, playdates between children. The idea is to create situations where speaking the home language feels natural and easy, so that your children maintain their level without even realising it.

6. Consider a school or institute that teaches in your language. This is the most direct and most effective way to create an oasis of the home language in the middle of a foreign-language environment. Like being home without being home: a luxury, is it not? The options range from full international schools teaching in your language (British, American, Spanish, Russian, French and many other curricula exist in most major expat cities) to cultural institutes such as the British Council, the Instituto Cervantes, the Goethe-Institut or the Alliance Française, which offer language classes and activities designed for young people. A more structured, more official variant of the previous tip.

7. Look into distance learning in the home language. Online schooling programmes and accredited distance-education providers exist for most major school systems, from primary through to the final secondary years, with formats ranging from live group classes to marked assignments. Following part of the curriculum remotely, even a single subject, is an excellent way for a child to keep one foot in the education system of the home country, and in its language, from the other side of the world.

8. Finally, last but not least, work with a private tutor. Axiom Academic connects expat families with qualified teachers and high-level tutors who teach in your family’s language, in person in your city or online. One-to-one lessons are often the ideal middle ground between full schooling in the home language and the everyday activities listed above, because they focus precisely on your child’s specific needs, whether that means keeping up reading and writing skills, preparing a language certification, or simply nurturing fluency and confidence.

How Axiom Academic can help

At Axiom Academic, we support expat families around the world with personalised, one-to-one tutoring across all subjects and school systems, including dedicated lessons to maintain and strengthen a child’s home language, whether that is English, Spanish, Russian or another family language. Our tutors adapt to your child’s age, level and goals, in person or online. And because trust matters, your first lesson comes with a simple guarantee: satisfied or your money back. Get in touch and tell us about your family’s languages: we will find the right tutor for you.