to want to drop a foreign friend?

[livingintheeast]

Firstly let me get one thing straight - I am not a rascist and I have a foreign mother (a genuine one not one of those that people sometimes invent just to prove how PC they are). It is a real bugbear of mine that my foreign friend will constantly talk to her lo in their mother tongue. They are both perfectly capable of speaking english - the mother talks to me/my lo in english and the lo talks to me/my lo in english. Personally I find it blooming rude and so irriatating that I'm not sure I want to be around them much at all. Even my lo has resorted to asking me (in her 2.5 year old way) what they are saying - and I don't have a clue! I know my friend wants her lo (also 2.5) to know her mother tongue but surely on a playdate, with english people etc it's just common courtesy to speak in english. AIBU?

Really? Are you for real? Do you actually want to listen to me say in my mother-tongue "don't sit on your brother's head?", "how many times do I have to say DON'T WIPE YOUR SANDWICH ON THE FLOOR?"? Really? Wouldn't you have anything better to do?

It is easy for people to say "she could just speak English to her child whilst someone else is around". I'm trying to raise m son bilingually and trust me, it's not easy. I work 30 hours per week and he is at nursery, obviously surrounded by English speakers. When we're together, there are often other people around who don't speak my language - my DP, his parents, the neighbours, friends, shop assistants, other people in the queue at tesco etc. If i was limit speaking my mother toupngue to him to times when it is just me an him, he wouldnt be able to speak my language at all.

I'm glad my English friends are more open minded and supportive than OP.

My kids' nanny always spoke in Urdu to her own children (OPOL) but in English to my dc.

It never seemed to confuse anyone - her dc & mine used to converse in English, & mine actually picked up a smattering of conversational Urdu, which was a bit of a result!

It's a completely different situation from one person being excluded when part of a group of adults speaking a language the excludee doesn't have; that's rude, obviously.

yabu. That is how you raise a bilingual child.

Do you really want her to translate everything she says to her child into English for your benefit How bizarre - so she needs to stop every few minutes and tell you "I'm just telling her that yes, the ball is blue", "I'm just saying I'm going to wipe her nose".

Do you want the mother to translate everything the toddler says too?

Wow, so many personal insults.

I think it is rude and i have bi-lingual dcs too.

I was brought up bi-lingual, and dh too. Our parents didn't use any method and didn't read 100s books on it. People all around the world have done it before.

We live in UK so when we are out with other people we speak English.

She should at least say something to you and explain or offer an apology imo.

I am also in the YABVVU camp.

I do agree with dragon that it would have been a good idea for her to explain the mechanics of what she is doing and why.

But if I was your friend I would be upset that you feel this way. If it bothers you and you consider yourself a friend, why don't you ask her to explain? I'm sure she will be happy to, you'll learn something interesting and you'll likely change your stand.

Bringing a child bilingually is a hard job for the parent with the minority language. I speak from experience. Attitudes like yours make it much harder.

Like many have said before, social conversations between adults are a v different kettle of fish from talking to a young child, wouldn't you agree? Well, that's even more true of children who are still acquiring language.

All the YANBUs please reflect on that. It's important. I secretly fear that lots of people in my circle feel like this without me knowing . I do try to "educate" those near to us, but there are only so much you can do.

DD has three languages to contend with and as I don't know anyone who speaks my mother tongue I will use every opportunity to use it in conversation with her.

She spoke it pretty well a year ago, same with English (her dad's language), but since she went to preschool, she only uses single words/simple phrases in those languages and mainly speaks French (where we live).

It is so difficult. And it's absolutely a different thing to speak in a language the rest of the company doesn't understand to an adult. That is rude.

I want my child to be fluent in her mother's language and I value it more than a bit of irritation it may cause you, as I suspect your friend does as well. Get over it.

The idea of having a home langauge and an outside language would only work well if you have 2 parents speaking the home langauge to the child. If it is one parent speaking the language and no extended family the child's exposure to the home language would be very limited. As I said previously it is also very strange for a small child to hear their parent speaking the wrong language even if they understand that language, I would liken it to if your mother or father spoke with a different accent randomly, you would feel really strange, it would feel unnatural. that is how the child would feel.

OPOL is not the only way of bringing up bilingual children- I didn't stick to it, dd is 16 next week and as she hasn't turned monolingual yet, I don't suppose she ever will do.

Having said that, there is no doubt that OPOL is a way that works, and as bilingualism can be hard to achieve at the best of times I think it would be quite ungenerous to deny this mother a method that is tried and tested, and that she feels she needs.

fwiw I spent a lot of my childhood round my best friend's house, her parents were Finnish and often spoke to their dd in Finnish, I never felt excluded or resentful in any way (sadly, I never learnt Finnish either)

I think you need to chill a bit.

Stickygotstuck: I know it's unreasonable for people to read a whole thread before replying my op but I did say a few posts back that I had no idea about how parents bring up bilingual kids and that on reflection this was prob more about our flagging acquaintance/friendship than anything. I don't know this person well, we met through work and kind of got thrown together as people with similar aged kids do. I am sure you and your friends have a much stronger relationship.

Some people are saying as the child is only 2, its ok. What conversation would you want to hear anyway?
The thing is, she is teaching her DC that it is ok to talk to her in a language which excludes others in their company.
Would this be ok at 6, 8, 12 years old?
Is it ok (in a group situation) for her DC and her to hold conversations only they can understand at an older age?

I wonder how many of you, who say YANBU, would speak to their children in foreign language if they ever moved abroad? Or do you simply think that English trumps other languages?

I don't talk to my son in English because It would be silly and confusing for him. He really doesn't like it anyway and corrects me if I drop a word of English while talking to him. It's bloody hard work to maintain minority language and I've seen enough children who are not able to communicate with their extended family to not be bothered about friends who 'have to' know what I say to my toddler. Luckily my friends take it as an opportunity to pick up some of my language.

I don't think she was being rude but, may I highjack this for a moment?
Ds is 13mo and dh and I both speak to him in both our languages, although I speak more Spanish and DH speaks more English, are we seriously messing up his little brain? He understands both languages and will for instance say the correct animal noise when you ask him what does the cat/ dog/cow... Do? In either language. He also follows simple instructions in both languages. Will he end up speaking Spanglish?

OP, sorry some posters are being a bit OTT, but as you can see, this is a highly emotive subject!

Like I said, there are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about language, it would be good if this thread helped to clear up some of them

Actually I always try to learn the local language when we go away on holiday let alone if we were living abroad.

Kitty - and that can be tackled when the child distinguishes between languages. At 2.5 that's not the case. Do you really think a toddler understands that they can speak a different language to another toddler? When they acquire control over both languages then you can teach them that it's impolite to exclude people from conversation. As you do with many other things that are tolerated with young children but considered rude in older ones.

Kitty - once a child is secure in both languages and they can understand that it is polite to talk in a language everyone can speak. 2 year olds aren't at that stage, 6 year olds probably are.

A good friend hasn't been using OPOL with his kids because of attitudes like these on the thread - he didn't want to be different or seen as rude and saw assimilation into the dominant culture. It's a pretty old fashioned attitude to culture and immigration.

Now, his kids can't speak his language and are missing out on a relationship with their relatives as they can't communicate.

As others have said, she is not excluding you from the conversation, she is speaking directly, probably about something inane, to a small child.

MeeWhoo Tue 30-Oct-12 22:02:29
"I don't think she was being rude but, may I highjack this for a moment?
Ds is 13mo and dh and I both speak to him in both our languages, although I speak more Spanish and DH speaks more English, are we seriously messing up his little brain? He understands both languages and will for instance say the correct animal noise when you ask him what does the cat/ dog/cow... Do? In either language. He also follows simple instructions in both languages. Will he end up speaking Spanglish? "

My dc haven't. They may have mixed languages for a bit when they were about 2- simply because they could then access more words at a stage when their vocabulary was limited- but they were never confused. Dd has always got A*s for her English at school and when she speaks Swedish she sounds just like a Swedish teenager to me. Little brains are cleverer than you'd think.

Ds did go through a phase of rejecting English altogether but he was never confused about which words were English- he just refused to speak to English speakers full stop (I think it was about starting school angst rather than about bilingualism per se).

They always thought about their two languages as English and Swedish rather than daddy language and mummy language. They knew that most people in England only spoke English and that people in Sweden would speak Swedish but in our family we were bilingual and could speak anything we liked to each other. Worked well for us.

That's where maybe we differ in opinion then riksti
2.5 is the perfect age to teach good manners. 'Tolerating' behaviour in very small children in the hope that by 4/5 they will suddenly come of age, ready to be taught social etiquette is nonsense.
They will continue to behave in the way they have become accustomed to.

I can understand why you might think its rude given you don't understand how difficult it can be to teach a child to be bilingual. My friend is German and only speaks German to his DC. Trust me, the conversation isn't that interesting! Much along the lines of dont eat that, point to the cow, did you do a poo. You're not missing much.

I think you perhaps could have phrased your op a bit better because it doesn't come across nicely. Perhaps given you're lack of understanding, maybe you could of just asked is this normal rather than coming across quite so snidey.

I did however run an NCT group for foreign parents when ds was little for precisely the reason of providing a safe space where parents didn't have to hide their foreign-ness. We could quite happily sit and talk Swedish, Spanish, Bulgarian, Korean and Persian at the same time without fear of upsetting anyone. It was good.