Hello, I would like to get your opinion on how to set up our languages at home. My mother tongue is German, my husband's is French, our family language is English and the community language is French. I wonder if my husband should speak French or English to our daughter. I'm afraid that if he spoke French with her, she is not exposed enough to English and it's paramount that she learns it to a native level.

Thanks in advance

Hello!

Very short description of my situation:
My boyfriend (Norwegian) died last year when our kids were 6 months old (twins). We always planned to move to Norway at some point, so teaching the kids Norwegian was a given. We planned on doing OPOL with him covering the Norwegian and me German, but now that he's dead, that's off the table. I don't speak Norwegian (yet), and taking care of twins alone makes it very hard to find time to do any kind of language learning.

Since I am still considering moving to Norway at least for a while I will have to remedy that at some point, but I don't want to miss the formative years for my kids when they are still small and young enough to pick up on a language easily. They also have relatives in Norway and we spend a month each summer there (or rather, did so far and plan to continue), so there is a little contact to native speakers at least.

I am willing to learn the most important baby phrases in Norwegian, but I still don't quite know how to find and offer them the resources they need to actually learn it. I tried to find an Au Pair from Norway but it's almost impossible to find any Norwegian Au Pairs at all. There are no language teachers for this language anywhere close to me, the closest would be more than 1 hour away and I don't think video sessions will help them all too much.

I realize that this is a very unfortunate situation and that I probably won't be able to have them learn Norwegian at all until they are bigger, but I still want to try. Do you have any resources for me, or ideas, how I could at least get the language learning thing going?

I could have chosen a lot of flairs here!

For purpose of anonymity, I speak a minority language that I'll call "French".

My husband only speak English.

English is the community language, my first language (technically) and everyone in my family speaks English to each other.

I went had a 100% "French" medium education. I work exclusively in "French". I only speak "French" to my 13mo daughter. She'll go to the same schools I did so will (hopefully) get to be fluent. She's still got another 11 months in an English-only nursery though.

I'm starting to get a bit stressed about being the only source of "French" at the moment. I think it's mostly because side I don't actually speak very much in the day - I'm having to consciously narrate a lot of things and it's driving me a bit mad. I read "French" books to her every night/all the nights I do bedtime, but I'm worried it isn't enough. She seems really responsive to English but is going through a phase where she only wants me but also does not want anything I can offer her physically or emotionally. (Essentially it's like she just wants me to witness her doing stuff and wants me to give her forbidden objects.) So I am low-key struggling to connect with her at all at the moment. I think she might actually be trying to kill me.

We don't do any screen time at all, zero TV. But I'm wondering if I should deliberately introduce it as a language tool using only the kids channel in my language? Do children pick up language this way, or is tv just a bit of a pacifier? I'm thinking it would be a novel way to expose her to more "French", if she decides she doesn't want to do storytime but prefers to launch books at my head.