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.
Adrianna Tan
Sindarina, Edge Case Detective
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Oliver D. Reithmaier
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