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’
@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
Adrianna Tan
·J Mopp
webhat