A woman was surprised to hear her 9-month-old daughter speaking Spanish. She was even more surprised to find out where her daughter learned to speak Spanish.
Gracyn’s mom Ebony said her daughter was only 9 months old when she spoke her first word: “agua” instead of “water.”
Now mommy and daddy are learning Spanish to understand Gracyn.
“I started noticing, around 9 months, she was saying ‘agua’ instead of water,” Ebony, who is Black, tells PEOPLE. “And to this day she still calls water ‘agua.'”
Ebony went to her daughter’s daycare to find out what was going on. She discovered that one of Gracyn’s teachers spoke mostly Portuguese and another teacher spoke majority Spanish.
“Then she moved to a different classroom, and the teacher only speaks Spanish, like very little English,” Ebony said.
“Now she says ‘manos’ for hands, she calls her shoes ‘zapatos,’ and she’ll say ‘uno, dos, cinco,'” Ebony says, laughing.
There were days when Ebony and her husband can’t understand Gracyn because she only speaks Spanish.
“Sometimes she’ll say a sentence to us and we have no clue what she’s saying, and we’re like, she’s probably speaking Spanish and we just don’t know,” Ebony says.
A TikTok video shared by mom Ebony shows Gracyn following her teacher’s instructions in Spanish.
“She’s acknowledging what her teacher is saying and doing what she’s telling her to do in Spanish, which we thought was awesome,” Ebony said.
Ebony acknowledged that Gracyn is growing up in a diverse world where Hispanics make up 30% of the population in America. There are estimated to be 80 million Hispanics in the US.
American children will soon be required to learn Spanish to compete in the work force in the future. So Gracyn is already one step ahead of the curve.
“I just really appreciate that she can understand what someone’s saying in Spanish and follow the instructions,” Ebony added.
Ebony’s husband downloaded the Duolingo app to communicate with his bilingual daughter.
“It’s kind of just because we’re like, she’s fully understanding Spanish, like we need to learn,” Ebony says.
“I’ll practice, I’ll say something in English and then say it in Spanish, or I’ll count in English and then say, okay, let’s count in Spanish,” she explains.
“I definitely feel like she’s more intelligent, definitely more curious,” she says. “The things that she picks up on at her age are so uncommon, and it’s probably due to the fact that she can understand so much more.”
She continued: “I think the world we live in now is so diverse. No matter where you live, you’re gonna encounter somebody most likely that speaks a different language or is from another country.”
Watch the video below.
@ebonyjbrown school drop off in style today ?? #toddlergirl #schooldropoff #bilingualkids ? Relaxing chatting tea time – Tomoki Kikuya
