There is a particular kind of quiet that catches bilingual parents off guard, the point where a child who was babbling away quite happily suddenly seems to retreat, answering in single words or not at all, sometimes in either language. It is easy to read this as a step backwards, especially if a monolingual cousin the same age is already stringing sentences together. Mixed in with the worry is usually a fair bit of mental translating of your own, working out what your child needs in one language while grandparents or in-laws are asking after them in another. A five minute game of Playsolitaire tucked into the gap between all that interpreting has become my own small pocket of the day that asks for no language at all, English or Italian, which is rarer than it sounds in a house running on two of them.

Why Bilingual Children Often Go Quiet for a While

This quiet stretch has an actual name among researchers, the silent phase, and it shows up often enough in bilingual and second language development that whole studies exist purely to describe it. During this stretch a child is listening hard and working out the rules of whichever language currently feels less familiar, leaning on gesture, tone and context rather than words while that processing happens in the background. How long it lasts varies enormously from one child to the next, and organisations supporting bilingual families note that some children move through it quickly while others take considerably longer and slow their speech right down in the meantime. None of that reflects a problem to fix. It reflects a young brain quietly doing the harder version of a job monolingual children only ever have to do once.

Why Mixing Two Languages Isn't Confusion

The other worry that tends to follow close behind is language mixing, reaching for an Italian word mid English sentence or the other way round, which can look like the two languages have become tangled together. Research reviewing bilingual development in early childhood describes this instead as a normal and largely practical habit, often triggered by a genuine gap in one language's vocabulary or by simply mirroring the mixed speech a child hears from the adults around them. Even two year olds have been shown to adjust which language they reach for depending on who they are talking to, which is a fairly sophisticated bit of social awareness for someone barely out of nappies, not a sign of a muddled mind. A child who mixes languages is often doing exactly what the bilingual adults in the same household are quietly doing already.

Counting the Words the Right Way

Perhaps the most reassuring finding is also the most practical one, and it comes down to how vocabulary gets counted in the first place. Measured strictly in English alone, or strictly in Italian alone, a bilingual child will often appear to know fewer words than a monolingual peer of the same age, and this is usually where the comparison to a cousin or a classmate starts to sting. Researchers who instead count what is called conceptual vocabulary, every distinct concept a child can name in either language, consistently find that bilingual children know roughly as many words overall as monolingual children do. The words are simply held across two systems rather than piled into one, which makes a single language milestone chart a genuinely unfair measure for a child quietly building two of them at once.

A Quiet Pocket in an Otherwise Two Language Day

None of this makes the waiting any easier in the moment, since reassurance from a study rarely lands the same way as a grandparent's raised eyebrow across a quiet dinner table. It does mean the quiet, the mixing and the shorter word lists in either language are worth filing under normal rather than behind. In a household where almost everything, bedtime stories, telling off, phone calls to grandparents, gets run twice through two different languages, there is something genuinely restful about a stretch of time that needs translating into nothing at all. A quick, wordless game on the phone while a child works through their own quiet phase in their own time is a small thing, but it is one corner of the day that asks nothing of either language.

Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.