My second language is not perfect. Should I speak it to my child? 

     This is a difficult question to answer simply. It really depends on how perfect or imperfect your second language is. If you are a bad model of language for your child, you should not speak that language to the child. If a child begins to learn incorrect linguistic structures or inexact expression from you speaking a second language, you may be undermining rather than helping the child’s language development. Instead, consider speaking the first language to your child knowing that many skills and competences learned in the first language (e.g. ideas, meanings, concepts) transfer easily to the second language.

     The language you speak to the child, particularly when the child is young, may be at the level where correctness is relatively assured. In speaking to young children, there is often a simplification of both grammatical structure and vocabulary. So it may be that you have sufficient language competence to be a valuable model to the child and your competence grows in a language along with the child.