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
@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?
Adrianna Tan
temporalthought