"Español español español!" "English english english!" "Español!"

April 22, 2015 9:32 AM

I've noticed a trend on TV: multi-lingual families are shown having conversations in both languages at once. Usually, it's the older generation speaking in their first language and the younger generation speaking in English. Is this something that actually happens?

One example of this is Jane the Virgin. In a conversation, Jane's grandmother will speak in Spanish, and then Jane or her mother will respond in English. Another example is Fresh off the Boat, where a similar dynamic plays out, but with Chinese. Note, the issue isn't a single speaker mixing words/grammar from both languages. Instead, what's at issue is a dynamic between two speakers in a conversation together, where one uses one language and the other uses a second language.

I've always assumed that this was an unrealistic portrayal of how conversations go in multi-lingual households. I always assumed that TV shows just did this to limit the amount of captioning involved for a show intended predominantly for English-speakers. It usually bugs me, when it happens, because of my assumption that it's unrealistic. But then I realized, I don't know! I didn't grow up in a multi-lingual family, so, for all I know, this could be an accurate portrayal of how conversations tend to flow between languages.

So, is it? In a conversation with speakers who are both fluent in two languages, is it realistic to portray one predominantly speaking in one language and the other predominantly speaking in the other?

posted by meese to Media & Arts (43 answers total)

In my experience this is very very realistic.
posted by town of cats at 9:36 AM on April 22, 2015 [24 favorites]

I know of a Romanian/American couple who speak this way. He doesn't like to speak in English, but understands it. She doesn't like to speak in Romanian, but she understands it. For a lot of people, speaking is the most difficult/intimidating part of a second language, so I'd imagine it's fairly common.
posted by chaiminda at 9:37 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is how my mother used to speak to her grandmother, in Italian, years ago before my great-grandmother passed away.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:38 AM on April 22, 2015

And yes, it was a similar situation to what chaiminda suggests - my mother could fluently understand Italian, but not speak it as well.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:39 AM on April 22, 2015

Yes, this is very accurate IME.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:40 AM on April 22, 2015

Yes, it's A Thing. Fun to watch sometimes!
posted by resurrexit at 9:40 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is exactly my experience. My parents are immigrants and Chinese was my first language, but when I started school and became more proficient in English, it was harder to maintain spoken Chinese. It didn't help that we spoke a dialect at home, rather than a major language like Cantonese or Mandarin. I spoke, read, and wrote English at school all day, and only had the opportunity to practise Chinese with my parents, because (it seemed to me at the time) no other Chinese person on earth spoke my dialect.
posted by methroach at 9:41 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's not even limited to families - I see friends/coworkers interacting with each other this way pretty frequently, say, if one is Vietnamese-American and the other is Vietnamese-from-Vietnam.
posted by mskyle at 9:43 AM on April 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

This is actually something called "code switching"-- using elements of one language while speaking another or alternating between more than one language (linguists, feel free to expand or correct). My mother speaks a handful of Filipino dialects and English and some words just aren't translatable so she uses the English. This flipping was especially handy during childhood as she cursed me out in Filipino (which I don't speak) but used a key word here and there to let me know that I broke a thing and I better get back here and clean it up.
posted by thefang at 9:44 AM on April 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've done this with Spanish, which I am not fluent in but which I understand reasonably well. I associate it with not wanting to go through the extra step of figuring out how to phrase the thing you want to say in a secondary language and dealing with the unfamiliar pronunciation and grammar rules, even if you can understand the secondary language quite well.
posted by sciatrix at 9:46 AM on April 22, 2015

I had a lot of friends in high school who were children of immigrants, and this was very common. Usually, though, the kids knew the mother tongue well enough to talk to their parents in it also, and both parent and kid would frequently switch between languages in the middle of sentences.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:50 AM on April 22, 2015

Echoing that this is something that happens. My mother's family emigrated to the U.S. from Germany when my mother was 6 and my aunt was 3. My mother often lamented that her spoken German was not quite as good as it could be, because once she and her sister learned English, while her parents would speak to them in German, they usually would reply in English.
posted by gudrun at 9:52 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Happens in my family and with my friends all the time. For me, now that I've outgrown defiantly speaking English just because, I don't really notice when someone else responds in English if I speak to them in Chinese. But I've definitely decided to persist in English in conversation (or switched halfway) before because I didn't know the right vocabulary, or was too worked up to express that well in Chinese, say.
posted by undue influence at 9:53 AM on April 22, 2015

This is how my parents and I communicate (but with Dutch instead of Spanish).
posted by Emanuel at 9:54 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pretty common. Also common in friendships where you're both fluent in both languages and aren't looking to practice the other language -- each person just speaks mostly in their own language. I've had this happen in work meetings too.
posted by jeather at 10:05 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Super common. People tend to understand other languages more readily than they can speak them. I have pretty rudimentary Spanish, but I can hold a basic conversation with someone with rudimentary English if I speak in English and he/she speaks in Spanish.
posted by mchorn at 10:06 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

To echo everyone else, yes this is very realistic (though I have never seen the examples mentioned). It isn't just a thing in the United States either. I have seen immigrants to Mexico from the US and various European countries who are fluent in Spanish but speak in their native tongues while their kids (also fluent in said tongues) respond in Spanish.
The fluidity of language is fascinating and horribly confusing when you are barely bilingual in a situation calling for quadrilinguality.
posted by Seamus at 10:06 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nthing yes from my experience: my family moved to the US when I was 3 and my brother 5. They spoke to us in Spanish, we'd answer in English, with a few words in Spanish that for some reason we hung on to, like Palta (avocado) and Bata (bathrobe).

Living in Chile, my 7yo son is bilingual. He speaks to us in 100% pure Spanglish, with inter- and intra-sentence code switching, my wife answers in Spanish, I answer in English.
posted by signal at 10:07 AM on April 22, 2015

This is how my father communicated with my Oma after she reverted to Frisian in her old age. English became too much work.
posted by heatherann at 10:08 AM on April 22, 2015

So, is it? In a conversation with speakers who are both fluent in two languages, is it realistic to portray one predominantly speaking in one language and the other predominantly speaking in the other?

Yes. When I am home with my parents and my brother there may even be a rapid conversation going on with my brother and I speaking English and my parents speaking only Spanish. We all understand everyone else but everyone has a different language they prefer to express themselves in. So:

Bro: What time are we going?
Mom: A las cinco.
Me: Why we are we going so late?
Mom: Porque no abren hasta las cuatro!
Bro: We have lots of time then...
Etc...
posted by vacapinta at 10:12 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yes, this is common ime.

I'm a native English speaker and my dad is a native French speaker -- if he says something in French, I'll usually respond in English. Or maybe I'll respond in English but throw in a French word/phrase or something if it's not readily translatable.

In my daily life, I'm speaking English 99% of the time anyway, so it just comes more easily/quickly to me (and I also just plain know English better, it's my mother-tongue). If we're in a French-speaking place, though, I'll pretty much speak French to everyone, including him.

Another thing that comes up is if we see/hear something in French (the news, TV, a movie, etc), we'll both often talk about it in English. I don't think we've ever been watching TV or something in French and actually talked about it in French, we both always use English. Idk what that's about!

Anyway, a lot of the time nowadays when he speaks to me in French, it's because he's been speaking to other people in French (his sister or somebody else who doesn't speak English anyway), and he'll sort of forget that he's speaking French rather than English anyway. I won't really be paying attention to it, either, unless for some reason I don't understand what he's saying. It's not really a conscious thing, it's all pretty automatic.

The dinner scene in the US pilot for The Slap, when the family is mixing Greek and English, is surprisingly realistic in that way imo. I especially liked how the tone of what they were saying got changed from one language to another, depending on who could understand what they were saying.
posted by rue72 at 10:12 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

My friend is bilingual in English and Irish Gaelic, as is her entire family - I once was privvy to a family conversation in which people would switch back and forth from English to Irish within the very same sentence. So yes, it's a thing.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:16 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

My family does this with English and Ukrainian, and then wildcard, we throw in German or Spanish words for very specific things; which I think is unique to us, mostly because both parents are somewhat quatralingual. (Going upstairs is always arriba, a vaccuum cleaner is always staubsauger.) We also don't necessarily realize that we are doing it, and with my English-only significant other, I often have to stop and think about why they are staring at me blankly when I've switched midsentence to a random other language; I apparently switch around languages when I'm tired, drunk, or very comfortable with people and assume they know what I'm talking about.
posted by larthegreat at 10:26 AM on April 22, 2015

My SO does this with his family all. the. time. Not only switching back and forth between languages in the same sentence but also the parent speaking one language and him responding in English.

+1 to The Slap. I'm watching the Aussie version and it's also very realistic.


I wish I had a recording of the break-up argument between me & my French boyfriend. We both reverted to our mother tongues and had a perfectly bilingual yell-off.

Actually I don't want a transcript, once was enough
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:31 AM on April 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

in societies/communities/countries where bi-/multilingualism is a standard feature, code-switching is extremely common, and an established part of the milieu. Where I'm from, a part of that multilingualism is the prevalence of subtitles but often only for foreign shows. But there's a tv station who also does subtitles for its local shows, and you can see the codeswitching happening in real-time in the subtitles themselves.

Anyway, if you ever find the time and opportunity you should check out dramas from such countries, like India or the Philippines.
posted by cendawanita at 10:31 AM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

My family moved to Michigan from Switzerland when I was 3. My parents tried to keep us fluent in French. At first we answered in French. Then we started answering French with English. Eventually we just said "What?" to French and that was the end of that.
posted by O9scar at 10:33 AM on April 22, 2015

I used to live in Germany with a family from the Netherlands and not only would the adults routinely speak Dutch to their German-responding kids, sometimes I'd have to switch to English to get them to realize what they were doing and use German for me.
posted by teremala at 10:40 AM on April 22, 2015

Every single day, growing up. Chinese-speaking parents, English-speaking me.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 11:04 AM on April 22, 2015

My boyfriend and I do this a lot. I'm English & he's Romanian. We are both fluent in each other's language, but for each of us it is a bit easier to express ourselves in our mother tongue. Therefore if we are tired, or feeling lazy we have whole conversations, each speaking our own language & understanding perfectly well the other language being spoken in return.
posted by cantthinkofagoodname at 11:33 AM on April 22, 2015

This happens in my family -- they speak Russian (or more accurately, a bizarre hybrid where a third of the words in a sentence are Russian, another third English, and another third English verbs/nouns inflected with Russian suffixes) and I answer in English. I do it because I can't at all express myself in Russian the way I would like. Somehow I became too shy to speak it at a young age & never worked past it.

At the same time, I am fluent in understanding/reading to the point where I have no conscious awareness of what language I'm hearing -- I first noticed this when non-Russian-speaking friends would come to family gatherings and wanted me to translate jokes around the table (where people would switch between languages every 10 minutes) and with every request I would have a moment of confusion as I realized that people hadn't been speaking English.
posted by geneva uswazi at 11:49 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone! I really appreciate the answers, and now I'll be able to enjoy Jane the Virgin and Fresh off the Boat even more.
posted by meese at 11:56 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

My parents are from India and they would speak Marathi while we kids answered in English. Totally realistic.
posted by sweetkid at 12:12 PM on April 22, 2015

This happens even with strangers here in Montreal. The bartender at the pub will ask me my order in French, I will understand but respond in English, he will respond back in French.

Once you get past the weirdness of it, it is the most comfortable way for two people to communicate when both are bilingual in the same pair of languages but most comfortable in the opposite tongue from one another.
posted by 256 at 12:14 PM on April 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

IME, whenever you have a group of 2 or more people who have compatible plurilingualities, the natural tendency is to speak in whatever language you want, and switch codes whenever. When my son code switches with me, I don't really notice it unless somebody points it out or I really try to notice.
posted by signal at 1:26 PM on April 22, 2015

Very realistic, and also nothing new.

My father (German born) spoke German only until he was six years old and started school; after that he spoke mostly English with his younger American-born brothers but a mix of English and German to their parents, who always spoke only German at home their whole lives. He spoke a mix to us kids, but English only with my mom.

A nephew of mine speaks English, Spanish and/or Tagalog to his kids; his wife speaks to him and the kids in either English or Spanish. They're living in Japan right now, and the kids sometimes speak Japanese to each other. Everybody answers in the language of their choice, which is hilarious when they've got a four-way English/Tagalog/Spanish/Japanese conversation going.
posted by easily confused at 2:07 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

When I was a kid, my mother had a friend who had emigrated from the same town in Italy that my grandmother was from, so they understood the same dialect - but my mother had grown up in the US. What I observed was that they'd both speak in Italian until my mother needed a word or phrase that she only knew in English. Sometimes she'd just drop it in & they'd go back to Italian, but equally often they'd then switch to English for a while, until her friend encountered a phrase she only knew in Italian - etc., etc. I'm pretty sure if you asked them they wouldn't have known which language they'd just been using.
posted by mr vino at 2:48 PM on April 22, 2015

Yes it is a thing that happens.

My best friend's parents were from Czechoslovakia and Cuba, and with each other often spoke Czech (and possibly Spanish but I didn't hear much of that). My best friend understands both but can't speak either, and always conversed with them in English no matter which language they were talking to him in.

Another friend of mine I think was a bit embarrassed to speak Chinese back to his parents in front of us for whatever reason, and claimed he didn't know how to speak it even though I'm pretty sure he does (he used to go to Chinese school to study it as a kid and has traveled in China for extended periods). I have no idea if that was an all day thing or only when we were over.
posted by Hoopo at 3:02 PM on April 22, 2015

Nearly all of my students do this. They speak in English to their parents, who reply in Spanish. Similarly, when meeting with parents who need an interpreter, the interpreter is almost always there to translate the parents' words into English, because most of our solely Spanish-speaking parents understand English very well, but have a harder time producing it.
posted by coppermoss at 6:35 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is absolutely a thing, with other languages too. My family speaks Russian, and often times my mom speaks Russian to me and I answer back in English. This is because speaking and thinking in English is much easier for me, speaking in Russian is a little easier for her, and we both understand each language perfectly, so there is no pause in the conversation for translating.

And then of course, when I do speak Russian to her I throw in English words when I can't think of the Russian word on the spot. Sometimes this accidentally turns into me continuing in English without realizing that I switched languages.
posted by never.was.and.never.will.be. at 7:20 PM on April 22, 2015

I was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents. We would use Spanish in the house and Swedish outside. This was a decision that helped me learn both languages and my older siblings maintain their Spanish.

Years later I moved to Barcelona. It wasn't family, but my catalan coworkers and customers would talk to me in catalan, and until I got comfortable speaking catalan I would reply in Spanish.

Now my brother lives in the US, and from what I've seen he and his wife use Spanish when taking to their daughters, but they reply in English, most of the time, but not always.
posted by Promethea at 6:57 AM on April 23, 2015

Ukranian-American here, we came over when my my brother and I were kids. This is an accurate representation of how we speak to our parents, them in Ukranian and we respond in English. I would think that this is because people just speak whatever language is most comfortable for them. So for the "younger generation" who grew up speaking English, they might understand the native language but are most comfortable speaking English, so they respond in English. People who spoke another language for most of their lives or at least into adulthood will probably feel most comfortable with that language.
posted by atinna at 9:14 AM on April 24, 2015

My mother tells family jokes in English but with the punchline in Cantonese... leaving my sister and I with the choice of laughing along (we know the jokes anyway) or reminding her that neither of us speak Cantonese.

Not quite the same thing, but I know a couple (American/Chinese) where they have agreed that when they argue they each have to use the other's language - the American has to speak Chinese and the Chinese person has to speak English. Slows down the arguments.
posted by ontheradio at 3:42 PM on April 28, 2015

Adding to this: I see it happening on Facebook, and have done it myself. The original post or question will be in one language, the responses will be in either that language or in another (with one of the languages being English, in my experience).
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:03 PM on April 29, 2015