Ming from Agents of Speech explains how to raise multilingual children without delaying speech. Key strategies: don't accept English replies when you speak your mother tongue, and assign each parent a consistent language. Even bilingual parents slip into English for work talk because most speech therapy literature is in English.
I'm bilingual and my wife is trilingual. So our children are most probably going to speak like four languages. What I'm trying to tell you here to navigate this is try not to allow your child to speak and respond in English when you're speaking in the mother tongue. There's loads of studies out there, some highlighting the strategy to have roles at home. Meaning if I'm the dad, I speak English, only the mom speaks in the mother tongue. And. And then we don't deviate from that. But it's very difficult because even for me as a bilingual speaker, like, I would say that my Chinese and my English are nearly at the same level in terms of literacy and proficiency. Sometimes I prefer to say something in English. Like my professional work. It's very difficult for me to speak in Chinese for professional stuff. That's because all the books are read and speech therapy and like child development stuff were all written in English. That's why that's part of the problem too.
