Celebrity Parents Raising Bilingual Kids

Publish date: 2024-05-28

Like us, celebrity parents are all about nurturing their children’s development and skills however they can. For some, that includes ensuring their kids can speak another language fluently.

Cardi B at Hollywood Unlocked's Fourth Annual Impact Awards held at The Beverly Hilton on June 21, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images)

Of course, famous or not, raising a bilingual child doesn’t happen overnight. It requires exposing your child repeatedly to the new language, according to the Linguistic Society of America. And there are all sorts of strategies to do just that. Some parents swear by not allowing their kids to speak English at home, while others also enroll their kids in language courses or stock the family library with child-friendly books written in the other language.

The effort can be worth it, as there are plenty of benefits to being bilingual. It can help boost empathy, reading skills and the ability to multitask, to name just a few.

And then there are the more personal reasons a celebrity parent may want their kids to master another language. Eva Mendes, for example, teaches her kids Spanish as a way to maintain a link to her family’s Cuban roots, while Camila Alves and Matthew McConaughey make sure their three children can speak Portuguese so they’re able to communicate with her family in Brazil.

No matter what language their children are learning—or how they’re going about teaching it—we love seeing the way celebrity parents are broadening their kids’ horizons. Check out the famous moms and dads who are raising bilingual kids below.

Amal Clooney & George Clooney
George Clooney admitted in 2022 that he and his wife Amal made a “terrible mistake” by having twins Ella and Alexander learn a second language.
“We taught them Italian,” George said on an appearance on CBS Mornings. But we don’t speak Italian. So, we’ve armed them with a language that they can harm us with, and we don’t really know what they’re saying.”
Heidi Klum
Heidi Klum’s kids Leni, Johan, Henry, and Lou — who she shares with ex husband Seal — all speak German. Teaching them is something she feels strongly about. “They’re bilingual,” the model said. “You owe that to your children if you have the ability to speak another language.”
Zoe Saldaña
Zoe Saldaña’s three kids — Cy, Bowie, and Zen, who she shares with husband Marco Perego — are trilingual and confidently speak English, Italian, and Spanish.
“They understand all three languages, and they also choose who they speak the languages with,” the actress told People. “So with their Italian grandparents they will speak in Italian, with their [Spanish-speaking] grandparents they speak in Spanish, and with Mama and Papa they will speak back in English — but they understand in any language we speak to them.”
Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt
Brangelina may be no more, but Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s combined efforts to teach their children multiple languages are still going strong. “None of my kids want to be actors, thank God,” Jolie said while hosting a BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour June 2016 segment. “They’re interested in being musicians. And they are all learning different languages.”
Jolie revealed that their six children speak seven languages among them. “All the kids are learning different languages,” she said. “I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is the Cambodian language, Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.”
Chris Hemsworth & Elsa Pataky
Chris Hemsworth is supportive of his wife, Spanish actress and model Elsa Pataky, teaching their children to be fluent in Spanish. The couple share daughter India and sons Tristan and Sasha. “Yeah, they’re fluent in Spanish,” Hemsworth said during an April 2018 Ellen interview. While the actor admits he can only speak “one sentence” of his wife’s native language, he says his children fluent. “When I hear the Spanish directed at me, it’s usually unfortunate, controversial, aggressive situations,” he said. “So I’m just thinking, ‘What is she saying right now?’ and, ‘What’s my comeback to this?’ When we’re fighting, basically, which is never! If she gets angry enough, she’ll drop the English façade.”
Eva Mendes & Ryan Gosling
Eva Mendes and husband Ryan Gosling have gotten candid about the challenges that come with raising their daughters, Amada and Esmeralda, bilingual. “I’m Cuban… so yeah, we’re trying to teach the kids Spanish, and it’s harder than I thought,” Mendes said in a May 2019 interview on The Talk. “Because I speak Spanglish and that’s what they’re picking up. So it’s adorable, but it’s technically not a language. It’s Spanglish.” Mendes has also opened up about her efforts to immerse her children in Cuban culture. “We’re constantly playing Cuban music,” Mendes said in an August 2016 Vanity Fair interview. “I speak to them in Spanish, and my mom speaks to Esmeralda in Spanish. Well, now she speaks to both of them in Spanish. Any time I have an opportunity to introduce her or them… to my culture, whether it’s through music, or through food, I do.”
Matthew McConaughey & Camila Alves
Matthew McConaughey’s wife, Camila Alves, is from Brazil, so naturally the famous couple are raising their children to speak her native language, Portuguese. “The kids are taking Portuguese classes for the last week,” right before their family headed to Brazil to visit Alves’ relatives, McConaughey said in a December 2016 interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “They already know a lot of Portuguese, but they’re taking Portuguese classes five hours a day for the last week in preperation for going on this trip.”
Ricky Martin & Jwan Yosef
Ricky Martin is very open about life with soon-to-be ex-husband Jwan Yosef and their four children: twins Valentino and Matteo (b. 2013), Lucia (b. 2018), and Renn (b. 2019). The singer credits them for helping him to come out, and one reason he says he talks about them so often is to help “normalize” families like his. One particularly unique aspect of life in their household? Multiple languages are spoken.
In a September 2013 Ellen interview, Martin said he and Yosef speak Spanish and English in the house. And Valentino and Matto go to a French school, meaning the older boys can speak Spanish, English and French. “That’s the beautiful thing about New York,” Martin said of the city where the family has a home. “It’s such a diverse city, culturally speaking, and you have the opportunity to bring your kids to this school that goes by the French system,” Martin said. “I want them to be exposed more.”
Shakira & Gerard Piqué
Shakira and her ex Gerard Piqué, share children Milan and Sasha. The Colombian singer launched a bilingual parenting app called Grow, in partnership with Fisher-Price, back in 2016. While promoting the app, Shakira offered some insight into her own experience raising bilingual children. “It helps if they are able to associate a person with a language at this early stage, to minimize language confusion,” Shakrai told Popsugar in March 2016. “Their father, for example, always speaks to them in Catalan. I try to speak to them in mostly English, but if I switch, I try to not mix two languages in one sentence.”
Rosamund Pike & Robie Uniake
Rosamund Pike and husband Robie Uniake share sons Solo and Atom. In a February 2021 interview on The Graham Norton Show, Pike revealed that their children speak Mandarin — and that it was mainly her husband’s idea. “I’ve got my kids homeschooling me,” Pike said. “Because my kids speak Mandarin, and I don’t. They grew up bilingual, really, because my partner thought he was going to have more kids, because he had had four already, and he thought it might be exciting for him to talk to them in a language that we don’t already know,” Pike said. “So he taught himself Chinese from the ground-up.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, she finally learned the language herself. “He’s basically talking to them in a language I don’t understand so I thought maybe lockdown was a good opportunity for me to catch up,” she said.
Salma Hayek & François-Henri Pinault
Actress Salma Hayek and her husband, François-Henri Pinault, share an only child, Valentina. At just 2 years old, the famous couple’s daughter was already trilingual. “She speaks three languages,” Hayek told People Moms & Babies in April 2010. “She’s speaking fluently…English, Spanish, and French,” Pinault added. “She can have a conversation.” At the time, Hayek was also learning multiple languages alongside her tot. “It’s amazing how fast it comes,” Pinault continued. “She’s teaching French to her mother.”