2w ago

if you have a multilingual family, do you speak all their languages or just one/some?

i know of some bi/multilingual families in the us who'd talk to each other in their native tongue when they didn't want the kids to know what they were saying.

i speak my dad's native spanish as well as dad's learned portuguese, but i don't speak the polish or norwegian from the other side of mom's family. (she's also latina but doesn't natively speak spanish)

however, i'm learning the two i don't know, and practicing polish (the language my mom does know) with her

34 comments

Japanese and English flow from one sentence to the next. It’s pretty good.
- That's subarashii! My haha only spoke nihongo with me, but since she nakunatta, I feel I have wasureta a lot of vocabulary. Tokidoki shaberu chances ga aru desu keredomo amari nihonjin are around here so I'm pretty heta at this point. (シ_ _)シ
  
  That sounded like those spanish speakers in American movies that have to place spanish words in their speech
  
  なぜ。なぜあたしの心を壊れてあげるの？
  (Or alternatively, I didn’t know you sing for Monkey Majik!)
  
  I understand it until the 'but'.
  First I wondered why you were laughing.
  
  ありがとう、嫌う！

My family is Portuguese and they did the whole "speak Portuguese when we don't want the kids to know what we're saying" thing, which didn't work because kids learn languages really easily. Nobody taught me so I can't speak it very well but I can translate into English, as long as whoever is speaking has the same accent as my family...
- makes a lot of sense, my mom can be like this with her family because she’s half-polish and idk polish

When I was working in Switzerland briefly, people would speak Swiss, German, French and Italian as well as English all in the same breath. I was told they used whatever word was easiest at the time.
- Swiss?
  
  I guess it should say "Swiss German and German", that's the usual combination in Switzerland.
  
  Long day!
  
  Yeah they mean swiss german because it's not understandable to common hochdeutsch speaker whereas the french has barely any difference. Don't know about the rest (italian?).

My daughter in law is from Myanmar so I really should learn Burmese one of these days, unfortunately I'm not finding a lot of local resources on that language. :(
- There's a large population of Burmese in my city, and learning a bit would probably help with things at work sometimes, but yeah, not many resources.
- i once dated a girl (lost contact with her years ago) from myanmar. she spoke burmese at school (we were in high school) and with family but mainly spoke to her online friends and me. she also prefered english and while she could speak/understand spoken burmese, she could not read it without translating into english
- could she perhaps teach you?? burmese seems like a cool language
  
  I kinda want to surprise her for when we get grand kids. :)

Both of my parents can speak our native language fluently but I can't. I can say some words and understand it slightly but I was never taught I'm nowhere near fluent.

All. Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Japanese in college.
- whoa falo os 3 idiomas tbm mas falo portugues possivelmente melhor do q os outros
  
  Apprendi español primero. Depois aprendi português com meu irmão adotivo. Japanese is my worst, English is my best because I use it the most.

Sadly my mother stopped speaking Norwegian with us when we started having friends over. It felt too weird and impolite to her. And with time she stopped entirely. Nowadays I only know a handful of Norwegian words.
- do u think your mom will teach u again??

Finland’s current president Alexander Stubb’s family language is Swedish even though I’m sure that his wife and kids speaks English better. His wife is from Scotland. Alexander’s dad is Swedish speaking and mom was a Finnish speaker. Alexander himself speaks Finnish better than Swedish (after elected he forgot some Swedish words and had to ask the press was it correct). Wife understands Finnish pretty well but isn’t fluent speaker. Swedish is so much easier to learn than Finnish so I guess they decided that hey we roll with that. (edit. and if you didn’t know, Finland’s 2nd official language is Swedish. Also Alexander is a polyglot. He speaks Finnish, Swedish, English, French, German and Italian).

I went to a Sikh wedding once, and spent the day hanging about with a bunch of the guests, all of whom were British or Indian. I spent the whole time amazed that they'd seamlessly switch between English and Hindi, apparently without noticing.
- code switching is awesome. sometimes i'll hear bilingual hispanic people being like "oh, by the way, ya has visto squid game (have you seen squid game yet)? it's so good"

I had a couple friends who were raised to only speak English at home because their parents wanted them to be fluent and native sounding. One of them, the parents only ever learned basic English so as a concequence it is difficult to communicate any complexity. And functionally no communication with extended family.
That's a very old fashioned viewpoint and now we know extra languages dont ultimately prevent acquisition, although it can slow thing down a bit at first for an individual language.
I think knowing other languages at any level is only a good thing and kids can learn so much easier.

We speak all of them and sometimes mix.

My mother speaks German and my father Tajik, natively. They speak Russian with one another. I speak both of their native languages but only have a very basic grasp of Russian, since we moved to Germany when I was very young, still. My older brother speaks all three.

In the past I refused to learn it.
And my parent didnt really have anything bilingual to speak with besides grandparents which werent around 24/7 to speak to and local language was just fine.

34 comments