In many Chinese families it’s pretty common for people to talk to each other in completely different languages. My New York aunt speaks to me in Mandarin / Hokkien. She speaks to her husband in Toishanese. They speak Cantonese to other people. We all sort of understand each other when we are speaking different languages, but respond in our own language. From time to time we might dip into another language to illustrate a point.
My grandma used to call this ‘chicken and duck talk’
The languages are from entirely different language trees.
Hokkien / Teochew are southern Min languages, Cantonese is a Yue language
Mutual intelligibility is debatable, but many (especially older folks) just learn all the ones they need informally. My parents speak Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Mandarin.
https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/spoken.htm
I’ve always been fascinated by language choice and pairs when the people involved speak a range.
I almost feel like we adopt a main language with a specific person or context and rarely change, even if they speak another to someone else.
Example: my parents mostly speak to me in Mandarin, to each other in Hokkien, I speak English only to my brother, I speak Teochew to some relatives but Mandarin to others, and I’m so curious about why and how we ‘decide’ one is the main language.
Some of it is age / context. At the Vietnamese Chinese noodle shop in SF I frequent, I speak Teochew to the grandparents, English / Teochew to the people my age. But other times it feels random.
#Languages #Chinese
I used to be fascinated by my grandma talking to her friend in Teochew
And her friend would respond in Tamil
I find the obsession with language fluency and testing hilarious coz it’s just so much more fun like this
@skinnylatte Yes! I would be delighted 😄
I remember having something similar happen when I worked with an international school, where English was the default, but staff often also spoke Dutch, especially if they had lived here for a while, and the conversation would switch back and forth at times, sort of automatically, depending on who you were talking to.
@skinnylatte My theory is that your brain has a default 'thinking language' from which you translate into other languages. For most people, this is their native language, but it switches based on usage, exposure to other languages.
(This is also the language you curse in, LOL)
I reckon that polyglots who use multiple languages daily have this for specific contexts, and if those contexts overlap, it turns into code-switching? 🤔
@sindarina
Probably for many/most. But I don't do my thinking in words without a word based context. When I learnt French in school, I'd think in French for tests, and such, as limited as it could be, and even now my limited Swedish kinda takes precedence in Swedish conversation, and I'll get stuck, and take for effing ever to remember I can English.
It's weird, and sure, I'll own that, but I don't think I'm alone.
@skinnylatte
@skinnylatte personally it feels like comfortability talking with the other person? i got friends whom i talk with in filipino, others primarily in english. it feels off if i use the other language when talking to each other
but sometimes we switch languages to emohasize, uh, irony? jokes? mocking?
@skinnylatte Welcome to the wild, woolly, wonderful world of "sociolinguistics".
It's an academic rabbit's warren. Beware.
This link led me to what appears to be a 10-minute summary of the Christian Bible in Dungan language. Complete with Semitic looking actors!
@skinnylatte Ahh. Totally forgot the need to learn the one language to bind them all. :/
I managed hello, and thank you in Mandarin. I tried two beer but the baar keeper looked rather confused. Next time I’ll practice for the beer.
@jmopp @skinnylatte that's similar to us, we speak English as a family and we only go over to Dutch when speaking with my partner, their mother and their mother's family
A friend has something similar, speaks Dutch with her mother and husband, French with her Father and mostly French with her children, although she's occasionally speak Dutch with them in company. Her husband, who is Surinamese Indonesian, speaks exclusively Dutch
My aunt, closer to your examples, spoke Brazilian Portuguese with her mother, Spanish with her husband, English with her siblings, even tho her brother speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English. He'll speak the Scots dialect of English with his sister, my mother. I can understand some of the words of Spanish and not speak
@skinnylatte I was 45 minutes into 2046 before I realized this was happening:
"Each character speaks their own languages. Mr. Chow speaks Cantonese, Bai Ling speaks Mandarin, and Tak speaks Japanese, even when talking to each other. Even so, they seem to understand each other perfectly."
Adults learning languages 'formally' worry about grammar and such, but children instinctively know that the whole point of using a language is to communicate meaning. And I don't think our brains care at all about which language we use for communication. Whatever tool will do the job is good enough. During my 3rd year in the Peace Corps in Senegal I combined French, English, and Wolof in one sentence. That was when I thought it might be time to come home at the end of the school year, before my brain turned to scrambled eggs.
😂
When I was a kid, my parents would speak to me in English, and I'd reply in Spanish.
Some words and phrases are definitely just better in specific languages
I wish!
I speak English. Drop me in France and I can buy bread and ask for directions. Won’t understand the answer. Certainly couldn’t hold a conversation.
Fuck.
I’m embarrassed to admit this.
Fantastic, indeed I experience the same being married to a Cantonese wonder since 50 plus years. Oh my can you imagine the mix of cuisine yummy..
Adrianna Tan
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