[The importance of mother tongue for unaccompanied minors]

Unaccompanied minors are teenagers forced to grow up too fast. In this race to become an adult, some are faced with the challenge of learning a new language and building skills around it, to the detriment of their mother tongue. When it comes to learning a new language, even in adolescence, the mother tongue remains the foundation on which new acquisitions are built. In the context of encounters with unaccompanied minors, valuing early language skills, particularly when learning a second language is at risk, is a safety valve in the face of multiple paradoxical injunctions.