My son was on the bilingual milestone set. Which meant half a dozen words at age 2. (bilingual kids typically run a year "later" - not late, latER) than monolingual kids. Mama, baba, nana, up! being the four used on a regular basis.
Communicating wasn't a problem, though, because his FACE was so expressive.
LOL.. don't get me wrong, though, I'd occasionally get the 'demon look' of frustration, or the full on body flail when I wasn't getting something he was trying to tell me with his face... but most of the time; we could "talk" via facial expression and body language.
Looking back on it... one of the things that MAY have helped was www.starfall.com.
My son's ADHD-c. Many people say they have active kids. In my family, he was pretty normal for an 'active kid'. Which meant he'd easily run 3 mi in the morning, take a 15 minute break... and then be go-go-going for another hour or two, another blink-and-you-miss-it break, and another couple hours. I set up my living room as a jungle gym, and had "stations" throughout my house. Then my SIL recommended starfall, and BLISS for about an hour every day he'd be sitting with his bum in one place clicking on the website (<insert hallelujah chorus>). I didn't sit with him, I took a WELL NEEDED break of my own 5 or 10 feet away (small house). And be listening to gales of laughter. Come to find, that's how Starfall 'works best'. Because if you're sitting with them, your own body language is telling them you're bored, and that's IF you can manage not to say "Let's do THIS one now!" The voices on the computer, however, are JUST as excited on the 50th repetition as the 1st. So the kids can repeat and repeat and repeat to their heart's content.
it's a reading site. And one of the downsides was that he WAS reading by 2.5, and reading fluently (magic treehouse type) by age 3. That really is a downside, but I'll skip that for now. MANY of his "first" words, were sounded out words he was reading. "Sssss-tuh-ahhh-p! Stop!" as we are at a stop sign for example.
Somewhere between 2 & 2.5 my son had a language EXPLOSION.
Half a dozen words to hundreds of words and full sentences. (So while kind of gradual, we did go from 6 words to full sentences in 6mo... which is fairly common for bilungual kids, anyway).
But an hour a day it was "Tuh! T! Tiger! Whoa.... look at his teeth! Whoa. Tuh. Tiger!" and <insert music> duhn duhn da duhn dah duhn Aaah! Astronaut! Ah!"
There would be gales and gales of laughter, and I would hear that tiger growl, or that astronaut dance easily 10, 20, 50 times in a row. And the songs "Listen to the short a sound ah-ah-ah-ah! The a in rat the a in cat, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!"
So Starfall may have helped a bunch, as did relating to my son in many ways like a deaf kid. Meaning I always looked at him when I was talking to him. Because he wouldn't use words to answer me. It would be the cock of an eyebrow, the shruge of a shoulder, lit up eyes, a wrinkled nose.
He wasn't talking, but he was communicating just FINE.
((I should add... he was never in speech therapy. I'd been in neurology classes for about a year, so I knew bilingual kids didn't have the same 'track' monolingual kids have... first words are typically at age 2ish-2.5ish AND my godmother was a speech patholoist. My MUM was hugely concerned, as was my godmother UNTIL she learned he was being exposed to 4 languages on a regular basis. "Oh, he's doing just FINE." she assured my mum. "If he's not talking by age 4, THEN we'd do speech therapy with bilingual kids. But their brains are wiring differently, and spoken language starts between ages 2 and 3."))
Aside from facial and body language, the following phrase HELPED A TON.
"Show me?"
Sometimes kids get soooo caught up in trying to "use their words" that it doesn't occur to them to actually take your hand and take you to the thing they want.