Are bilinguals doomed to a life of franglais, spanglish, or their own peculiar combination of languages? I guess it’s a small price to pay for being able to switch so easily. Beirut baby came out with her first gallicism at about 2 and 1/4: “I banged myself on my front.” When I looked at her she was rubbing her forehead, a word I haven’t really used with her. However her daddy plays a lot of body part games with her, le nez, la bouche, les yeux… le front.

It strikes me as strange, though, that she think to anglicise the French word front to fill a gap. You can’t hear the ’t’ sound in French – so how did she know it was there? She must have already linked le front to the English word “front” despite the pronunciation and meaning being fairly different.

In fact, she has taken on board the difference between English-sounding and French-sounding words to such a degree that not only does she hardly ever mix the languages, but she wants to keep them firmly in their place. “Who’s that?” she asked me about a French friend. “It’s Benjamin,” I answered, pronouncing the name in French. “No Mummy,” was the immediate reply, “say it in English.” Later at dinner, when I told her to eat up her carrots and mangetout, she gave me a funny look: “Daddy say mangetout,” she said frowning at the obviously French ring to it.

He doesn’t as it happens, even in English. “No, mummy says mangetout, and daddy says…what do you say actually?” “Haricots,” he affirms, with barely a hint of hesitation. “No, they’re peas not a beans.” He looks at his plate as if for the first time, with an expression that says, they’re green – what’s the difference? In the end we looked on the packet in the freezer. It said pois croquants which sounded like a translation of snap peas. The same retailer sells what it calls “courge butternut” instead of doubeurre so they aren’t above a few anglicisms.

While it is obvious to us that mangetout is borrowed from French, any farmer in the depths of the British countryside is familiar with the term, and I was surprised that my little girl, hearing it for the first time, home in on the fact that it doesn’t quite belong in the English language. Until last summer she wasn’t able to speak enough to actually talk about language, but it shows that little brains do a lot of silent work mapping English words to their French equivalent and vice versa before even vocalising what they’re learning. Recently she declared, “French and français, it’s the same.” She was eminently satisfied at being able to express her discovery.