# Do Bi-Lingual People Really Hold Conversations In Two Languages? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 21, 2015, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406 "2015-10-21T22:37:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2015, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/82 "2015-10-24T20:59:05Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > My experience, too. I can sort of fake it in rudimentary French based on knowing English and Spanish and understanding the sound shifts between the languages. When I was in Paris trying to bumble through some French, most waiters would just switch to English. It was like we had a truce-- you can listen to my tortured French, or help me out with your pretty good English. And maybe I was oblivious, but I never felt like they were being snooty about it. Yup, that’s pretty much the super secret social contract - you have to make the initial effort, is the point. Which is your side of the politeness, then we’re (more often than not) polite in return. If you start off in English however, then switch to LOUUUDEEER AND SLOOOWEEER frustrated English when the first time around didn’t work, that’s when we tend to get a punctual case of the _no comprende_ :o. (As for myself, I’m a terrible Parisian and often get out of my way to help out tourists or volunteer my services as interpreter when needed - English, Spanish or German. I just get a kick out of y’alls relief :p) ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/83 "2015-10-25T03:38:45Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Yup, that’s pretty much the super secret social contract - you have to make the initial effort, is the point. Which is your side of the politeness, then we’re (more often than not) polite in return. > If you start off in English however, then switch to LOUUUDEEER AND SLOOOWEEER frustrated English when the first time around didn’t work, that’s when we tend to get a punctual case of the _no comprende_ :o. Oh, that happens with LOUUUUUDER AND SLOOOOOOWEEER frustrated Spanish and French and Catalan too, to mention three I’ve seen (well, I expect the French part may not happen in Paris, but depending on the dialects involved maybe it does). Moving to gestures and drawings and valiantly trying to keep the smile up is a good way to get help; moving to repeating the same thing that was not understood, without any attempts at looking for a different way to say it, is not. And the best way to give everybody in the surrounding area a horrible case of sudden-onset-deafness is to scream something along the lines of “doesn’t anybody here speak [language]?” The cases of “person speaking in one language, another person in a different one” doesn’t even require both people to know both languages: they just require them to understand the other. It can involve, as in the examples given so far, people who understand one language better than they can express themselves in it, or it can involve languages which are close enough to be mutually understandable with very small effort: Italian and about any other romance language; Spanish, Italian and cow-French (French pronounced as if it was being read by a Spanish-speaking or Italian-speaking cow)… I’ve been part of conversations where everybody was supposed to be speaking the same language but, because one of the parties was very “closed” (1), the conversation was less fluid than what you get from two Romance-language speakers who have decided they’re by Jove going to understand each other. 1: unable to rephrase and to enunciate properly, apparently also being unable to comprehend that not everybody spoke their dialect. Several of these people were such bad speakers that their own mothers or boyfriends had problems understanding them on the phone. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/84 "2015-10-25T04:43:48Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Eh, I don’t know. Most every Parisian speaks some English, but we’ll make it a point of honour not to understand American tourists if there isn’t a buck in it ;). I know this used to be a standard complaint, along with the Jerry Lewis Conundrum, but I haven’t found it to be the case in the last few decades. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/85 "2015-10-25T04:46:09Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Digital is the new Analog’s comment about her roommate always speaking in English so as to not leave her out reminds me of what I’ve been told about the rules (not formally promulgated but just informal rules of etiquette) about speaking English (or any other spoken language) on the Gallaudet University campus. Gallaudet, in Washington, D.C., is the only university in the world where all classes are taught in sign language. All the students and a lot of the professors are deaf or at least significantly hard of hearing. The rule is that all publicly observable conversations are in sign language (perhaps simultaneously with spoken language). The idea is that speaking people are never to look like they are deliberately keeping deaf people from understanding them. The deaf students consider the campus to be their one refuge where they’re not treated as some kind of freaks who can be kept out of conversations. > > A member of the book club I belong to teaches at Gallaudet (and she’s not deaf herself, nor is anyone else in our club). Sometimes we have held movie days in a movie theater on the campus on a Saturday. She can get us permission to use the theater for our book club by declaring our movie showings to be campus events where all the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet are invited to see the movie too. The movies had to be subtitled in English. Members of our book club introduced the films speaking English while the member who teaches at Gallaudet simultaneously interpreted in sign language. She told us that we were to be careful for us to not all hang out in one group in the theater speaking to each other in English. What you say is considered proper etiquette where there are any deaf people present anywhere. Although why they should get bent out of shape about it is a different discussion. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 10:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/86 "2015-10-25T10:07:11Z")
> [@Carryon](#): > > I once trained a Chinese man at a job and as I spoke to him in English he took all his notes down in Chinese, it was pretty cool. > > I have notice Filipinos, in my experience, hold conversations in two languages. The Chinese script is language-agnostic. It’s not particularly Manderin or Hokkien or anything: it works just as well with English. It’s a bit harder to learn than phonetic scripts, but writing was seen as a universal: any educated person would understand and write script, regardless of language. English script was, of course, just scribble: you would assume that an educated person could write script regardless of language. ---
**Author:** ![amanset](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@amanset](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amanset)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/87 "2015-10-25T10:18:15Z")
I’ve done it loads of times, with English and Swedish. Frequently I do it when I want to be absolutely sure I am saying the correct thing, like with Doctors. When I was being treated for a sleep disorder, my therapist spoke Swedish, so she could be sure that she said he right thing, and I spoke English. Regarding flipping between the two, I will indeed do it mid sentence, usually when I am not entirely sure what a word or phrase is in Swedish. I know that the people I am speaking to will understand it. I do this a lot at work. I do, however, have one friend who just can’t handle me doing it. Because I still speak Swedish with quite a British accent it takes him a few words to trigger that I’ve switched language. Thus I don’t do it with him. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/88 "2015-10-25T14:57:43Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > The Chinese script is language-agnostic. It’s not particularly Manderin or Hokkien or anything: it works just as well with English. It’s a bit harder to learn than phonetic scripts, but writing was seen as a universal: any educated person would understand and write script, regardless of language. English script was, of course, just scribble: you would assume that an educated person could write script regardless of language. That’s not strictly true. Chinese script doesn’t really work for a highly inflected language, for example, or an agglitinative one. ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/89 "2015-10-25T15:28:59Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > As the OP notes, it’s VERY common for Hispanic Texans to drift in and out of English and Spanish when conversing, but I’ve never seen one person speaking English while the other speaks Spanish. Happens at my office all the time. We have a large chunk of Mexican-Americans. Some of them speak much better Spanish than others. Most of them speak “kitchen” Spanish, as in they know the terms for subjects that might come up in a household. But sometimes their legal vocabulary is not the greatest, especially the ones who have not also had formal instruction in Spanish or who are second- or third-generation heritage speakers. I had an officemate for a while who was in his mid-20s and came to the U.S. when he was a small child, and he was in charge of negotiating settlements for his practice group, sometimes with monolingual Spanish speakers. He had a bitch of a time coming up with the Spanish words sometimes, so I (a native English speaker who didn’t really have an immersion experience in Spanish until age 19, but had a lot more formal language instruction than he did, and a lot more legal experience) would yell the Spanish words out to him when he was on the phone and got stuck 🙂 ) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/90 "2015-10-25T17:21:31Z")
It’s not quite true that the various Chinese languages are identically written in characters. Those languages (i.e., so-called “dialects” like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) differ in some ways. Besides pronunciation (which doesn’t matter to the characters), they have slightly different grammars and words which aren’t in the other languages. These words not in the other languages now have their own characters. There are two ways to handle this. Some non-Mandarin speakers know how to change their ways of writing enough to make what they write acceptable to Mandarin speakers. Other non-Mandarin speakers just use the characters only in their own language and the grammar of their own language. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/91 "2015-10-25T21:14:05Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Actually, I think the family is supposed to be Taiwanese, so if the show is realistic, she would not be speaking Mandarin. She could be one of the Nationalists who came over in '49 when the Mainland fell to the Communists. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2015, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/92 "2015-10-26T01:39:47Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > in which every inabitant is bilingual and speaks to other towns people in their native tongue, German or French) and is anwered in the other language if it is their native tongue. As I misremember, there was an Indonesian/Malay area where in an interesting inversion, the ruling class spoke demotic to the plebs, so as not to seem stuck up, and the plebs spoke court language to the ruling class, to demonstrate that they could. ---
**Author:** ![Toledo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/34f0e0/32.png) [@Toledo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toledo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2015, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/93 "2015-10-26T02:15:55Z")
I’m slightly surprised that no one has mentioned the Apollo-Soyez joint US-USSR space mission back a few years (well, quite a few. 1975 if I remember right) The US astronauts spoke Russian and the soviets spoke English. The idea was that that way the conversations were slow and deliberate, and less likely to be misunderstood, as e.g., the US astronauts would not be able to wander off in rapid and colloqiual english which the Soviets would miss, and vice versa. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2015, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/94 "2015-10-26T02:23:58Z")
Plus, it’s easier to understand someone mangling your native language than it is to understand someone speaking their own, which is foreign to you, no matter how slow they go. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2015, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406/95 "2015-10-26T15:09:20Z")
On a variant, the Métis on the Canadian prairies developed Méchif, a Cree-French creole language that apparently was very unusual because they consistently used nouns from one language, and verbs from the other. Most Creoles are mixtures, but don’t have strict borrowing pattern like that. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-bi-lingual-people-really-hold-conversations-in-two-languages/735406.md?page=4)