Five mistakes in passing on a heritage language

Almost every family we speak to describes the same curve. At three the child speaks French, or a language from the village. At seven they still understand everything. At eleven they answer only in German.

That curve is not inevitable. It usually comes out of five decisions nobody made on purpose.

Waiting until the child "has proper German first"

The advice often comes from well-meaning people, sometimes from the Kita. It is the wrong way round. In Germany every child is entitled to a childcare place from their first birthday onwards (§ 24 SGB VIII, checked on 19 August 2026). From the first day there, German is handed to them for hours at a stretch. The other language they get only at home, and only as long as somebody speaks it. The scarce resource is never German.

Attaching the language only to obligations

If French is the language of telling off, reminding and calling to the table, and German is the language of laughing and playing, the child has already decided which one they will pick later. Languages are not sorted by usefulness but by the feeling attached to them.

Only one adult speaks it

When a single person carries the language, it depends on that person's shift pattern. If they are absent, the language is absent. Which is why the video call to the grandmother is not an extra but infrastructure: a second voice that sounds different, tells different stories and uses different words.

Forbidding mixing

A child who switches mid-sentence is not making a mistake. They are using everything they have. Correcting it teaches the child that speaking carries risk, and a child who senses risk would rather stay quiet in the safe language. Repeating what they meant to say, in the language you want to hear it in, works better than any correction.

Giving up when the child answers in German

This is where most families actually lose it. The child answers in German, the parent switches too, and two weeks later that is the new normal. Passive understanding survives for years, and it can be reactivated. But only if somebody keeps speaking the language, answer or no answer.

A word on why we are writing this. Kinavela works in German, French and English, because many Cameroonian families in Germany live across those languages and nobody should have to pick one. In the search, language is therefore its own filter, next to radius and the ages of the children. A child who only understands French needs different afternoons from one who answers in it. What gets spoken inside a family, though, is not decided by an application. It is decided by whoever is sitting at the kitchen table.