It's Never Just About the Language — with Maria "Mimi" Potvin

Move abroad and you'll hear it within a week: don't worry, kids are sponges. It's meant kindly. It's also the tidy half of a much larger truth. In this episode, linguist and Growing Up Multilingual founder Maria "Mimi" Potvin sits down with Mickelle to talk about the half that gets left out, not how children pick up a new language, but what quietly happens to the one they already have.

Mimi grew up in a monolingual Bulgarian home where languages still played "like music," left for Germany at eighteen, and now raises two multilingual children in the Netherlands. She brings the research and the emotional reality in the same breath: the grief of a child drifting from a heritage language, the tenderness of wanting them close to their grandparents, and the quiet realisation that language was, at times, what carried her through.

In this episode

• Why "the kids will just pick it up" is comforting, incomplete, and sometimes costly
• Language as emotion: why we learn best through play, and often from the people we love
• The difference between hearing a language and learning one
• Communicative vs. academic language and why a child can sound fluent while struggling underneath
• What it really takes to keep a home language alive across borders
• Heritage language as a homecoming - for the child, and for the parent

About the guest

Maria "Mimi" Potvin is a linguist, multilingual specialist, and the founder of Growing Up Multilingual. She studied linguistics, applied linguistics, and multilingual education at LMU Munich, CELTA, and Oxford Brookes, with a focus on second language acquisition. Born and raised in Bulgaria, she spent twenty years in Germany before settling in the Netherlands, where she raises two multilingual children. Her work brings research and everyday family life together to help parents raise confident multilingual kids, without turning the home into a classroom.

Find her here:

• Website: growingupmultilingual.com
• Instagram: @growingup_multilingual
• Substack: Multilingual-ish

Next steps

If you're raising children across languages or carrying a home language you're afraid of losing, this is the conversation to sit with. Listen to the full episode, then pass it to the friend who's mid-move. And when you're ready to live your international life more intentionally, House of Peregrine is your network, protocol, and platform for life abroad: https://www.houseofperegrine.com

Because it was never just about the language.