Online speech and development support in Urdu for families in the UAE

Count your child’s words across both languages, not one. A child who says twelve words in Urdu and nine in English, three of which are the same idea in both, has a vocabulary of eighteen — not nine. Growing up bilingual does not cause a speech delay. A genuine delay shows up in both languages, not only in English.

The two lists rarely grow at the same speed. Urdu comes from you and the calls home; English arrives in a nursery room where your child may be the quietest there for a term. Staff see only the English list. You see both. Before our first call, jot down every word you have heard this week, in either language. The background is in does bilingualism cause speech delay?

Some things are not about language at all, and those we look at hardest: whether your child turns to their name, points to show you rather than only to ask, copies gestures, and plays with other children rather than beside them. Our free age-by-age milestone checklists take two minutes and are worth doing before any appointment.

Most are Pakistani parents on employment visas — healthcare, construction, retail, logistics, the trades — whose children were born in Dubai or Sharjah and are growing up fully bilingual. Some have already seen a private centre and want a second, culturally-familiar voice; others are waiting for a school assessment and want to start now.

Families who spend the summer in Pakistan use us to keep a child steady across two homes. The same holds if you move on later: our pages for Pakistani families in Canada and families in India run the same Urdu-and-English format, so a relocation is not a fresh start with a stranger.

Plenty of parents write to us in plain Roman Urdu — bacha bolta nahi, der se bol raha hai, zaban saaf nahi. You do not have to translate your worry into clinical English first. اسپیچ تھیراپسٹ سے بات اردو میں بھی ہو سکتی ہے۔

Sessions run over an ordinary video call on a phone or laptop. Most UAE schools and offices run Monday to Friday, so we usually settle on a weekday evening or a weekend morning. Gulf Standard Time is one hour behind Pakistan, so your 7pm in Dubai is our 8pm in Multan.

We ask you to keep the camera on your child during ordinary play rather than sit them in front of the screen. Watching your child stack blocks, refuse a toy or ask for a biscuit tells us far more than a described version of it. We pause, suggest one change in how you respond, and you try it while we watch.

Every session ends the same way: one or two things to practise, written in the language you prefer, and what we are watching for next. If something stalls midweek, message us rather than wait.

You do not need a diagnosis or an appointment to begin. Four habits do most of the early work in a bilingual Gulf home, and the first change parents notice is usually how much a child tries to communicate.

• Give the word, do not test for it. Instead of “what is this?”, say “doodh — you want doodh” and hand it over. Questions put a struggling child on the spot; models give them something to copy.
• Wait longer than feels comfortable. Count five slow seconds after you speak. Many children in busy households never get a gap big enough to answer in.
• One language per person, not per sentence. Urdu from you, English at nursery is a clean split. Mixing inside a sentence is normal, but a steady pattern is easier to learn from.
• Narrate the boring bits with the noise off. Shoes, lift, car, seatbelt, school. A television behind play swallows the sounds your child is trying to pick out.

Keep a short note of what changes over two weeks: new words, more pointing, longer looking at your face. Bring it to your first call, or to your appointment in the Emirates. It is the most useful thing a parent can hand a therapist.

Some things need a person in the room, and we will say so on the first call. If your child has not started babbling by around a year, has lost words or skills they already had, does not respond to sound, or is struggling with feeding and swallowing, ask your UAE paediatrician for a face-to-face assessment before anything else.

We refer on for anything needing hands-on or licensed local work: a formal diagnosis, a hearing test, clinical occupational therapy, medication decisions, and any report a school or insurer needs in a set format. Online coaching sits alongside that care, never in place of it.

If you are not sure which of the two you are looking at, send a short message with your child’s age and what worries you, or use our contact page. Sometimes the honest answer is “book the hearing test first”.