Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments and eloquent reflection 🙂

Christof, I have actually seen happening in practice what you are concerned about in your family. I work with mostly expat/immigrant families, who are trying to maintain a home language other than Dutch or English, while having their children schooled in Dutch or English. It is quite a common pattern that siblings speak the home language together until they are both at school in the “other” language, and then within a year of being schooled in the dominant language they experience a language-use shift, even at home, within sibling groups. I advise parents on many means and methods to work against the tide of a dominant language, but it is a constant battle and very often a constant source of stress for the parents. And once the children start to peer-identify in middle-late elementary, use of the home language often becomes restricted to use with the parent/s, but reluctant, and refusal to use it with siblings. I think it is very normal for kids to want to play/interact with other children in the language that is most often used to do so, which is, with certain exceptions, the school language.
I think that it is not an easy road you have chosen for your family, but as a strong proponent of child bilingualism myself, I believe it is ultimately a worthwhile one.

Ingrid,
You may be right about linguistic choice and inertia — although I noticed that you only wrote about this in reference to German speaking between me and my daughters, not them speaking German to each other, which, given the circumstances, is highly unusual. There are other very unique components to our our situation. While my oldest daughter is one grade ahead of my youngest, they are in the same classroom at Colorado International School. In a U.S. public school, they would be separated all day long, and, of course, be spending 100 percent of their school time in English rather than the 75-25 German-English mix they are now in. As may be clear by this entry and others I’ve done, I am not a detached, social scientific observer and analyst type (I actually don’t believe there is such a thing), but am quite politically and emotionally involved in the question of multilingualism and multilingual practice. That may have some disadvantages and I know many people with academe do not think mixing study with activism is appropriate — I think they’re wrong on too many fronts and counts to list here, but one of the advantages is that I’m motivated to work hard at what I’m doing, namely creating a world that is at least a little less lodged in monolingualism and monolingual ideology and a little bit more rooted in multilingualism, multilingual ideology, and, most importantly, actually lived multilingual practice, including by the dominant fundamental language groups.

Although non-European languages are definitely lower on status “list” for bilingualism (with the possible exceptions of Japanese and Chinese), there is also a hierarchy for European languages. One of my pet peeves living here is how many people discount exposing their children to Dutch with a derogatory “But Dutch is a useless language…”. In fact, it was my first blog post almost a year ago – I took my pet peeve to an international platform… Happily, I am seeing more monolingual English parents choose Dutch options for their children.

Eowyn,
I think you are correct that formally codified and celebrated multilingualism in Europe focuses very much on European languages. It’s too bad that all forms and types of multilingualism are not supported, celebrated, etc. In fact, it’s very clear that some multilingualism combinations — German-English, French-German, Spanish-French,and, above all, any multilingualism involving English, French-English, Danish-English, Italian-English, etc. — are valorized in Europe, and elsewhere for that matter, while other manifestations of multilingualism, Turkish-German, Arabic-French, etc. are actively denigrated and even suppressed, often by the very same people that celebrate other specific instances of multilingualism. Sigh…

Peter,
Thank you for your comments and reflections. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to have children in a language immersion program that’s in a language that is not spoken, or even understood much, by either parent. It would be really interesting to read a parent’s — and a child’s — account of this type of situation.