More and more adults nowadays transfer their children to foreign countries and cultures, where the children's natural desire to play involves them immediately in communication with other children. Thus children start to interact with each other without any common language. The subjects of our investigation are 20 Russian children aged from 2;4 to 9;7, whose parents brought them to Finland about 1-3 years ago and who are attending the Finnish-Russian kindergarten KALINKA, or the first three grades of the Finnish-Russian school. In the kindergarten, 75% of the children are Finnish, while others come from Russian or mixed Finnish-Russian families. There are four age-groups of 20 children in the kindergarten, each looked after by three adults: one Finn, one Russian and one bilingual teacher. After two years of experimental observations we would like to show that play without a common language makes a real contribution to cooperative communication, to language learning, to the understanding of other people's intentions, and to the creation of different group relationships.
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