This happens a lot on Fresh Off The Boat: Eddie’s grandmother will speak in Chinese (Mandarin, I’m guessing), and everyone else will speak to her in English, and they’ll carry on conversations this way. There are obvious, TV-based reasons for this, but I’m curious if it goes on in real life.
I know that some multilingual people will slip between languages when speaking, especially when conversing with someone else who speaks the same languages. But is it commonplace for two bilingual people to converse where one participant in the conversation speaks exclusively one language, and the other exclusively in the other language?
If you’re looking for anecdotes, it certainly does happen in real life: My mother-in-law talks to my sister-in-law in Chinese, and she almost always answers in English. MY SIL is the youngest of five siblings, and has the worst command of Chinese, although she understands it perfectly well.
My first college roommate switched seamlessly between Norwegian, English and German when talking to his parents. They were German, both language professors. It was fun listening to him calling home.
It is generally easier to understand a language than it is to speak it easily and fluently. Bilingual people are often asymmetric in their speaking and rapid comprehension skills so it is common for people that are opposites in those abilities to reply in the language that they are most comfortable speaking.
I see (hear) it all the time at work. We have a large percentage of Portuguese speakers and some of the older ones grew up with Portuguese as their first language. They will often speak to the younger employees in Portuguese who will then reply back in English because that is their primary language. They are all technically fluent in both languages but that doesn’t mean that both languages are equally comfortable for them to speak conversationally.
I have a friend who does this with his parents, they talk to him in Spanish and he talks to them in English. He understands Spanish perfectly well, but when he’s forced to try to speak it, he kinda sounds like someone trying to phonetically read words he doesn’t understand.
Real life examples: Indian and Vietnamese friends who would speak in English, while the parents and (even more so) grandparents would speak to them in Hindi or Vietnamese.
Huh. My experience has been the exact opposite. Although I’m by no means fluent in Spanish, I’ve taken enough to be able to put together something resembling a coherent sentence, should I ever need to speak it. But even when listening to the kids speaking on Sesame Street, I only pick up about a third of it.
Several accounts of remarkable facility here. Yet, IME bilingual people often speak of thinking in one or the other specific language, and I have witnessed verbal stumbles in the switchover from conversing in one with one person, to the other with another.
When I was stationed with the Air Force in Germany, one of my co-workers was a German-born American citizen who would code-switch between English and German in the middle of conversations. Listening him talk on the phone was entertaining.
This is actually a really good movie example of being able to speak versus understand a language. I believe that the idea is that Chewie does not have the anatomy to speak most non-Wookie languages, but can understand some of them, and conversely Han can understand spoken Wookie but can’t make the sounds himself. This may also be what is happening with R2D2. He can’t verbalize human (or Wookie) speech, but he can be understood by others (C3PO at least) and is able to comprehend what others are saying.
I used to work with a French-Canadian woman whose 17 year old daughter would often stop by after school was over. Mother would talk to her in French, daughter would respond in English. Mother’s English was good but accented.
Yes, I do it all the time with my wife because I understand her native language but am nowhere near as good at speaking it as understanding it, so for brevity I will just reply in English unless I instantly have the proper response in mind in her language.
Yes, it happens all the time. As many have pointed out, it is extremely common for children to address their parents or grandparents in the majority language of the culture they live in, while the members of the older generation speak their native language. Receptive language skills generally tend to be better than productive skills (listening/reading comprehension outpaces speaking/writing skills).
In our household, we switch between two languages frequently, often in the same conversation. But everyone speaks both languages fluently. Code switching depends on subject matter or emotional content or the whim of the moment.
My grandmother, who only spoke Dutch, lived with us from the time I was five until I was 10 years old. As a kid, it never seemed odd to me that everyone spoke to her in English and she understood, even though she always answered in Dutch. She spoke to me all the time as if I understood her and mostly it didn’t matter. She taught me enough to be able to help her when needed. Once you know that “bril” are glasses, even a kid can figure out that “waar is mijn bril” means “where are my glasses?” Dutch has many words that sound similar to their English counterparts. So I was semi-immersed in Dutch for about five years.
The funny thing is that 20 years later I had occasion to visit The Netherlands for several weeks and I found that after a few days of listening to the people around me speak Dutch and mostly watching Dutch television in my free time, I could understand most of what people were saying. By the end of the third week I had picked up enough work related vocabulary that the two guys I was working with (both of whom could speak English) would mostly speak to me in Dutch and I would speak to them in English. No one said anything about it, it just happened.
So for what it’s worth, my experience is that understanding is easier than speaking.