Having lunch the other day, at the table behind me is a couple with their 8(ish) year old daughter. The parents were speaking half Spanish - half English.
Basically, the parents seemed to be taking their daughter to task because she doesn’t speak enough Spanish:
Parents: You have to learn Spanish, it’s a part of your heritage.
Her: I DO know Spanish!
Parents: You need to speak more of it.
Her: [Sigh] Okay… I will!
Parents: If you don’t learn now you never will.
Her: Okay!!
Weird thing is, whenever they spoke Spanish to her she seemed to understand. (Even though she would only respond in English.)
So my take away form this exchange is that learning the “other” language must be a chore? That’s weird, I always assumed it was just a natural thing growing up in a bilingual household.
From my own experience, we only spoke Spanish in my home until I started school. I only found a couple of years ago that I DIDNT know English when I first started school because I don’t recall ever having trouble communicating.
As we (my younger brother and I) grew older, our languages mixed. Starting off in Spanish ending in English or vice versa. Sometimes we spoke one language when it was an emotional situation, and another to express details and technicalities.
I have 3 teens. My oldest started out learning Spanish and after we moved out from my parents house when he was 3, we really only spoke English at home and the Spanish influence and exposure mostly went away. And it didn’t disappear because we didn’t want it to exist, for myself, the expedience of English coming to mind made it easier to express and at a quicker rate. Just last night I had almost the very same conversation as the OP posted with my oldest son who was the three year old that spoke Spanish. He now swears up and down that he understands it but doesn’t speak it and for the most part, he doesn’t seem very interested in learning, and when he does I inwardly groan because that right there is my fault that he doesn’t know his tenses and pronunciation. As a parent, it was my responsibility to teach him along with keeping it up. I feel this is one of only two regrets I have with my kids because I get a ton of flack from my Spanish speaking relatives that feel I CHOSE not to teach them, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
My wife is the middle child of five siblings who grew up in a Chinese-speaking family. Her siblings are successively more reluctant to use Chinese the younger they are, although they all understand it perfectly. Her oldest sister has no problem speaking it. Her youngest sister rarely speaks it: Her conservations with her parents usually have them talking Chinese to her and her responding in English.
I’ve seen it a lot when children grow up in a house with a non-English speaking parent or grandparent. My own children are like that. Their mother and her parents are Korean and my kids can understand spoken Korean, but rarely if ever respond in Korean.
I actually try to do the same thing as the OP overheard, easier for them to become fluent while they are young, and I can’t think of any down-side to knowing a foreign language fluently.
I used to live in a neighborhood with a lot of extended families from Latin America. The grandparents were inevitably monolingual in Spanish, the parents bi-lingual, and the kids monolingual in English as far as speaking was concerned. The kids could clearly understand their parents and grandparents’ Spanish, they just never spoke it back.
Colleges have special language courses for “heritage speakers” who most likely can’t speak all that much but can understand what they hear.
There’s many reasons why a child would refuse to learn a language that’s not dominant in their area. If the only people they can speak it with is their close relatives, if everything they get to read is in the dominant language (even worse if all media is in the dominant language, I hope that’s evident), if the only reason given is “because we’re [identity they don’t identify with, nationality they don’t have]”. A child will not realize or be interested in understanding that “Elbonian” doesn’t only mean “those who have Elbonian nationality” but also “those who have Elbonian ancestry”; and on one hand you have your parents pushing you to be successful in this new country, to live the American/British/Whateverian Dream, and on the other they want you to identify with a country you have only seen in pictures… that doesn’t make any sense, specially when it means extra effort!
My father didn’t learn Basque (two of his brothers did), being one of the three siblings who decided it wasn’t worth the effort; my mother didn’t try to teach us Catalan because she didn’t want us to “be confused about our roots” like she was growing up in an always-on-the-move household (apparently the “roots” confusion is genetic, because the Bro who takes after her grew up with only two addresses but, like Mom, says he “didn’t feel like he had any roots until he met his spouse”). I know a Basque-speaking family which had access to a Basque-Spanish school but didn’t want to send their children there because the school taught violent independentism along with declensions; their five children (now aged in their 40s and 50s) have a whole gradation on how well they speak Basque, with those who were more interested in the language having gotten lessons in it at some point.
We had good friends back when we lived in Chicago. The father was French, the mother was American. The daughter, who was our son’s age was bilingual (as bilingual as a 5 year old would be). If someone she hadn’t met spoke to her first in French, she would respond in French only* if that person was a native speaker. If it was an American speaking French to her, she’d respond in English. She could somehow tell (accent I assume) who really knew how to speak French.
*I saw this quite a few times, and was told by her father it always happened. Obviously this was not a controlled experiment.
Kids want to fit in, and so they don’t like to be seen as someone different. As they get older, they’ll see the value in being bilingual, but an 8-year-old isn’t thinking strategically.
Also, keep in mind that it’s not uncommon for children of immigrants to understand their parents’ native tongue perfectly well, but still not be comfortable speaking it.
One thing to remember is that throughout the 19th and most of the 20th centuries the overwhelming cultural push was for U.S. immigrants to learn to speak and read English and leave the old language (along with most of the rest of their cultures) in the old country. In most households, there was a bias against the kids being bilingual. In a lot of communities, that bias still exists.
Both my and my wife’s grandparents were immigrants. They learned to speak English (some better than others) and used it as much as possible; our parents’ generation could usually understand the old language – at least the dialect of their elders – but could barely manage a few sentences, and our generation pretty much only recognizes a few nouns and maybe an occasional verb in context.
In high school I had a classmate who took French specifically so she could talk with her French-born father in French. He told her he wanted her to speak to him only in English.
I have seen the same thing with friends who raised their daughter to speak German (Mom’s mother tongue) and English (Dad’s mother tongue). Pretty amazing, actually.
A friend and her husband are both 1st gen immigrants from mainland China. They were speaking Chinese at home (I don’t know which dialect). A couple years ago their little 3yr-old son stopped responding at all. For days, then weeks, then months. Panic, hearing tests, audiology specialists… normal hearing. Panic, behavioral tests, evaluations …
He decided he only wanted to speak English, that’s all. It was what all the other kids at daycare spoke. Just WOULDN’T speak Chinese.
Nit pick: Language, not dialect. Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages, not different dialects of the same language. Same with many of the other so-called dialects of “Chinese”. There is no “Chinese Language”; they are many languages spoken in China.