I have a weird language history, so let me chime in. I was born in Brazil to Japanese parents. My first language as a young child was japanese. As I entered school, portuguese became the predominant language in my life and both my parents decided to focus on that, speaking portuguese at home. Once I grew up, I went to college in Canada and have lived in North America ever since.
I have lost all fluency in Japanese. Japanese culture had always been a part of my life as a child, but despite my family (cousins, etc) growing up on misoshiru and jpop and anime, we all spoke portuguese, so Japanese-the-language never felt like "home".
These days, I also occasionally forget portuguese vocabulary. I do still "speak" with family, but mostly by text via WhatsApp, and conversations are usually pretty casual and don't involve nearly as much eloquence as, say, a good book. The vast majority of my life now revolves around english-speaking culture: my job is full of english technical jargon that I've no idea how to translate, english is the language I share w/ my wife, and it's the language I use to consume information and entertainment. English is now my "home", so to speak.
I think the author has a similar experience: she learned english in primary school and lived a primarily english-oriented life, so english became "home". The phenomenon of wanting to reconnect with one's roots later in life doesn't strike me as particularly unusual either. In retrospect, I did unintentionally distance myself from my own parents during my 20s (partly because that's sorta the whole point of becoming an independent adult and discovering new things) and only really started to regain that level of touch after having kids.
My point is: loss of language can have a lot to do with prioritizing things one feels are impactful in their lives (though those things may not necessarily be important - parents are certainly important, but it's the sort of thing that one can easily take for granted). Having had such a weird life experience wrt "first language", I'm keenly aware that the first-ness or even the familial aspect don't necessarily correlate with the cultural surface area that a person interfaces with the most. In some rare cases, your second - or third - language is what feels like home.
Just a comment on your parents adopting Portuguese at home, because they thought it was important. I know this was (and still is) common among immigrants, and in some countries it was very strongly discouraged by schools etc to speak your native language.
However there's now significant research showing to not do that. Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish, because it's counterproductive. Essentially knowing another language helps children more than listening to their parents speak in imperfect Swedish.
So if you are an immigrant, speak in your native language with your children, they will pick up the new language better by themselves and know another language.
This one thousand times. School and full immersion in another language will make your children learn it perfectly no matter what. Please speak with them and make them watch TV/videos in your family language. And if you happen to be a mixed couple, follow the One Parent One Language rule, to make things easier for the kids. Obvioualy these are rules of thumb and there might be special needs for different children.
I totally get the better-for-the-kids argument, but I think there's some nuance people gloss over.
My dad's Portuguese is fluent but still has quirks to this day. Obviously picking it up from school works. But my paternal grandma never learned Portuguese and her husband died young (car crash). She never developed a social circle after that, which meant her health deteriorated slowly over time (since she'd just stay home all the time) and she ended up dying isolated in a elderly home, even though she was surrounded by people.
On my mother's side, my grandparents immigrated to be farmers, so my mom had a lot of siblings. They developed a quirky pidgin where sentences - especially when more advanced vocabulary was involved - mixed Portuguese and Japanese. This speaks to limitations of learning a language exclusively in a familial setting: some topics just never come up, especially considering age-appropriate subject matter.
I think the educational and social-outside-home components are extremely important to learning a language - most of what I remember from Japanese comes from spaced repetition from nihongakkou (Japanese school) or self study.
>However there's now significant research showing to not do that. Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish, because it's counterproductive.
Won't this cause the situation Estonia has with the Russian-speaking minority? Enough immigrants banded together to create Russian-speaking communities. Many of them never learned any Estonian as a result, because they didn't feel they needed to. Most people in stores spoke Russian, they put their kids into a Russian speaking school etc.
The end result is that there are many people in Estonia that have lived here almost their entire lives, but cannot speak Estonian at all. This makes their lives more difficult: from finding a job to getting a better education to dealing with bureaucracy.
Even if you send your kids to an Estonian speaking school it causes issues. They'll suffer academically - imagine doing school effectively in a foreign language. It would make a kid want to go to school even less. In that case you're effectively handicapping their future.
I'm not sure that some minor cognitive advantages are worth the risk of not assimilating.
The studies are about parents speaking one language but fully integrating their kids in the local language.
What you are talking about is development of communities in a language different than the local language with their own stores, schools etc... That's a different subject altogether.
Plus, the Russians in Estonia came there during Sowjet occupation. They saw Estonia as a colony of Russia and their kids went to Russian-speaking schools.
It’s hard to generalize about the immigrant experience. While there are indeed many cases where immigrant children benefit from continuing to speak their mother tongue at home, there are also families who want to integrate with their new home countries quickly and aren’t interested in maintaining their earlier language and culture. People who were members of an oppressed ethnic minority in a country that they had to flee as refugees, for example, might prefer to focus on settling into their new country rather than trying to maintain the language and culture of a country that they may never be able to return to.
The issue isn't one of preference, it is one of intellectual development. When you speak your native language to your children, it is easier for you to teach them how to think. And if they can think in your native language, they can transfer that skill to a new language.
By contrast if you speak a language that you struggle with, your lack of fluency gets in the way of supporting your children's cognitive development. And a child who has never learned to think in any language, has a cognitive deficit that is hard to fix.
The thing, though, is that "nativity" can get fuzzy depending on a variety of circumstances. I think a lot of new bilingual parents assume that all bilingual parents are like them: strong speakers of a native tongue who had kids shortly after a recent move to a new country. That's not always the case: there are bilingual parents that moved to the new country as children and may have varying degrees of mother tongue attrition, there are second/third generation parents and there are multilingual parents (e.g. immigrant parents whose parents speak a dialectic variation of the official mother tongue, or even completely different languages altogether)
For many parents, the primary goal for promoting bilingualism is purely practical: speaking w/ grandparents and other family. For the most part, the child will still need formal complementary studies later in life if they want to truly master the parents' mother tongue to a grown adult's level of proficiency, especially for languages with little or no overlap w/ english.
IMHO, the benefits of nurturing a mother tongue are largely coincidental: e.g. romance language learners get an advantage over pure english speakers from understanding latin-based radicals (especially for stuff like scientific nomenclature). But for many languages, maintenance comes with an opportunity cost aspect: my wife speaks Mandarin and actively maintains it, but that comes at a cost that her English vocabulary is not as well developed/polished as mine (as a romance language speaker who doesn't need to do virtually any upkeep wrt writing/reading skills and who enjoys vocabulary overlap between english and latin-originated words, etc)
Sometimes I feel like a broken record for saying this, but know the individual child and decide upon a course of action from there.
I have seen everything from the heartbreaking circumstances of the author, where the child is unable to communicate with their own parents, to children who steadfastly refuse to learn the language of their peers. Both extremes result in social and intellectual development being stifled. In both cases, there is a need to help the child navigate a middle road in order to aid their social and intellectual development. That is before you even consider the typically cited benefits of being multilingual since it is only considering being functional in their communities.
As someone who falls into that bucket, I like to think I don't have any (abnormal) cognitive deficits. I do regret not learning the language of my parents, but I have friends who are much less adapted to western culture than I am because their parents weren't so keen to assimilate.
But who knows really? Perhaps I'd be even smarter if I were trilingual?
For some years I trained with a man in his 60s who fled from Hungary in 68 to The Netherlands. He married a Dutch wife. He never learnt to speak proper Dutch, he still had limited vocabulary. In his professional life he had worked as a sailor, which means he would work with people from all over the world speaking a little English. And he also was no longer able to speak Hungarian anymore as he was no longer using that language. So he spoke many languages, but none fluently. I thought that was really depressing!
> parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish
I married into an Armenian family, and can attest that you don't have to teach your kids English if you live in America. I know several families who spoke Armenian exclusively at home and their kids still found themselves fluent in English by 5 years old. It's everywhere and they are sponges.
The only challenge is writing: English is awful to learn, compared to other languages because of how obtuse and irregular it is. (Chinese & Kanji aside I'm sure, due to memorization). It's hard for kids who learn say, Spanish in school then at home struggle to master also the English language. Still, I suppose English is hard for most people regardless!
I think that neglects how much children can help their parents learn the host country’s language. There are several variables involved, as the parents doing well economically will also help their children in a different way.
First, this somehow assumes that immigrants aren't doing well enough. And what - poor people should speak the local language at home just in case it improves their economic standing, even though it would lead to missing a lifelong benefit for the children. But if you are already doing well, don't?
If you don't keep poor people suffering like folks do in the US, being poor isn't as big of a detriment and the adults are perfectly able to improve on their own time. And it isn't like being an immigrant means you are poor.
Poor people in the US are remarkably well-off. According to [0], if you’re in the 20th percentile in the states ($25k income), you’d be in the 80th percentile of Germany. 20th percentile and lower is the OECD definition of working/lower class.
Personally I found the 80% figure hard to believe. According to something else I saw online, it was 20th percentile in the US = 50th percentile in Europe. Which still shows how dominant the US is!
I can't prove this but I suspect this comparison is reflecting the relative price of goods and services which is a hyper-competitive market in the USA.
Other differences between the USA 20th percentile group and the Euro 50th percentile group is that one of them has healthcare and a longer lifespan.
Europe has far greater inequality between countries than US between states. People talk about EU/Europe but they mean developed/rich Europe, they gloss over that poor parts are way worse than underdeveloped parts of US. For all that egalitarianism and social policies they sure like to use cheap labor from underdeveloped countries and box them out of their systems for years/exclude from residential markets with rent contract requirements.
Shit is looking up in backwards south-east Europe, too. Perhaps not all that much and all that fast, but still, the direction and speed seems better than the poorer bits of the US. So how much worse off than Mississippi is Albania really today?
That’s wonderful for Albania et al, more prosperity is always a good thing. My point is just that people should compare apples to apples, especially with US vs Europe, or US vs city states/tiny countries like New Zealand
I agree with this and yet i never speak to my child Russian and we don't speak Russian at home so prevent child from picking up Russian language, Russian speaking contacts or absorb Russian/Soviet culture on the internet, to get away from it fully as soon as possible, because i see it as evil.
Well, i'm a political emigrant. I left Russian because i believe it's a bad country. Obviously i don't want my child o grow up Russian (and it works, at the age of 10 she can't read Russian at all and speaks it as a so-so foreigner, but has fluent English and Greek).
That's a strange mindset to actively deny this culture and heritage to your kid, much of which has nothing to do with modern Russia or the Soviet Union.
My parents fled Communist China but they still made sure I learned Chinese language, history and culture.
Nowadays I disagree with much of US and UK politics but I still want my kids to learn English and be well versed in classic literature, etc.
Well, in your case you have another "good" country to identify with: Taiwan (although i'm sure learning Traditional writing system solely for this end is too much). We have no "good" Russia.
Moreover, we are not descendants of any "good" culture (such as those who brought us famous Russian classics): they were all either brutally killed or pushed out of the country. We are the descendants of illiterate peasants who came to power in 1917 and killed everyone else - we have no good heritage behind us, apart from the heritage of Communism, which while did some cool things to be proud about, was inherently evil - to be proud of Soviet achievements is like being proud of Nazis because they built cool autobahns.
It would be nice if there was a Russian-speaking community with Western values, out of reach of Russian government. But realistically, if you taught your kids Russian, it would probably just expose them to Russian values and propaganda of Russian government. I guess you did the right thing, but it's sad that you had to.
I suppose the "White Russian"[§] emigré / exile community of the 1920s and 30s in cities like London and Paris kind of died out... Most of them were nobility anyway, so at a guess their descendants might be too snobbish to mingle with GP in any case.
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[§]: Not "White Russia" as in Byelorussia / Belarus; "White" as opposed to "Red".
Exactly, most Russian-language content is the pro-Putin one because he's supported by almost everyone. Imagine U.S. where the MAGA crowd was not ~45% but about 85% of society, and kept that way for generations - would you be still proud to be American?
I'm even glad Trump got to be a thing. At least it's not difficult to explain what's going on in Russia anymore.
And it's not about reach of Russian government. It's about being Russian itself. I have nothing against Putin - he's just riding the wave (just like Trump did not invent the "American idiot" - he's just riding him). I see the very essence of being Russian as evil.
Just take Communism: it's not a Russian invention. It's invented in Germany by a bunch of mostly Jews. But it didn't stick in either Germany of Israel - Russians wholeheartedly embraced it as an excuse to destroy their pre-existing society (which was mostly ran by foreigners - Germans mainly - Russians been mostly in lower classes - and yet it was evil, too), set on a path to destroy the world.
This is something I've always wondered about Mexican families that emigrate to the US: Why do they push their kids to forget Spanish? English will be spoken in their every day environment. But they have an additional language for free...
You have people spending years learning a second language, why throw away that "advantage"? Forget about preserving heritage or any other political motives. Just as pure pragmatic benefit, I would prefer my kid to have 2 languages.
My sister came back home from UK to Croatia for a couple of years but didn't want to teach her kid Croatian insisting he should speak English (as they eventually went back to UK).
This was a terrible choice - he couldn't socialise with local children (preschool age) and is severely underdeveloped in that area, plus his vocabulary isn't that developed as the only place he heard English was at home.
Maybe the Swedish policy works for school age children, but preschool - I very much doubt it without special education programs.
He moved back right before preschool (at 5 years), I guess I shouldn't have used that term - it means both "younger than school age" and "preschool program age" which is a year before school here.
Problem was he couldn't even go to kindergarten as he would be completely unmanageable for them and couldn't socialise well - in large part due to language issues.
Thousand times this. The biggest mistake my parents made, was giving up on their mother tongue to help me learn a language they were not fluent in. I did not learn the new language from them, I learned it from school, reading books, movies and all sort of others things which were present everywhere. Their decision only made socialising with other cousins and family members difficult for me, made unnecessary overhead for our inter-family communication, made me in fact segregated.
If you have kids, let your kid master their parents mother tongues and flourish.
For what is worth in UK immigrant parents are also encouraged to speak their native language at home with their kids.
We have been speaking almost exclusively Italian at home with our son at home, and still his primary language is shifting to English as he started going to school. He even started speaking english with his Italian friends!
"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." - Phil Karlton
Forgetting is cache invalidation! Especially forgetting the names for things.
This is why it's so important to make our priorities part of our routine, so they stay in cache. Do you love someone? Talk to them regularly (whether that's chatting to parents, spending time in a romantic relationship, or prayer). Thank you lhorie for reminding me to message my parents more often!
Can you still read and listen to Japanese though? I learned German as a child and was (probably) fluent in it. However, after not using it almost at all for more than a decade I find it difficult to speak or write it. Reading and listening aren't a problem though. Is it the same for you?
I have lost all fluency in Japanese. Japanese culture had always been a part of my life as a child, but despite my family (cousins, etc) growing up on misoshiru and jpop and anime, we all spoke portuguese, so Japanese-the-language never felt like "home".
These days, I also occasionally forget portuguese vocabulary. I do still "speak" with family, but mostly by text via WhatsApp, and conversations are usually pretty casual and don't involve nearly as much eloquence as, say, a good book. The vast majority of my life now revolves around english-speaking culture: my job is full of english technical jargon that I've no idea how to translate, english is the language I share w/ my wife, and it's the language I use to consume information and entertainment. English is now my "home", so to speak.
I think the author has a similar experience: she learned english in primary school and lived a primarily english-oriented life, so english became "home". The phenomenon of wanting to reconnect with one's roots later in life doesn't strike me as particularly unusual either. In retrospect, I did unintentionally distance myself from my own parents during my 20s (partly because that's sorta the whole point of becoming an independent adult and discovering new things) and only really started to regain that level of touch after having kids.
My point is: loss of language can have a lot to do with prioritizing things one feels are impactful in their lives (though those things may not necessarily be important - parents are certainly important, but it's the sort of thing that one can easily take for granted). Having had such a weird life experience wrt "first language", I'm keenly aware that the first-ness or even the familial aspect don't necessarily correlate with the cultural surface area that a person interfaces with the most. In some rare cases, your second - or third - language is what feels like home.