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?

Added to that I am deciphering my own toddlers speak...it's just not fun. Maybe if there were more than the four of us it would be different. But when there is just us I didn't think it was too much for us to speak English.

Thank you kitty

I still think if you would like to keep this friendship going, there must be something that can be done and of course as your children are growing up together, seeing each other regularly it will become more easy for you to tune in and probably understand lot of conversation that goes on between your friend and her dd.
I don't think that this small niggle of yours should be a deal breaker.

I haven't read any of this, but the title sounds like you need a number 2.

Then perhaps you should read it :)

LOL vintage. I'm a bit slow but omg it so does lol. Ooops.

Maybe it's a bit about being used to having friends who talk in foreign tongues. For me it's a fact of life and a motivation to learn more languages rather than any sort of inconvenience. For some reason I actively enjoy hearing other languages. It never ceases to amaze me that people can communicate in so many beautiful ways.

So do I haunted. I am surrounded by them. I have many, many foreign friends mainly from a misspent youth ;) I'm not talking about languages; foreigners; or cultures. I am talking about a specific set of circumstances which are relevant at the present moment to my son and me.

She spoke to you in English though OP?

But to her 2.5 yr old in her native tongue.

as to what the problem was.

Living, I do get your point. In a few months the kids will play with each other a lot more and bother you less. Now that my son and his friends are around four we hardly see or hear them on play dates [hgrin]

Thank you haunted. I really appreciate your understanding where I am coming from. It's so difficult to explain on these forums. You're probably right about a few years time too!

YABU. Until my DS was 8 and DD was 4 we lived in Japan. I speak Japanese, and the DCs went, at various stages, to Japanese-only play groups, nurseries and kindergartens, but our home language was English.

We had lots of Japanese friends, and if we were with non-English speakers, obviously most of the time I would be speaking Japanese, but if there was anything I wanted to say directly to my DCs (don't do that etc) I would normally say it in English, because that was 'our' language, the one that came automatically and would be instantly understood. Doing anything different would have felt confusing and self-conscious.

I don't think any of my friends ever thought I was being rude, and certainly I never thought that about friends with other home languages who used them with their children whenI was around - it is just what everyone does when you are bringing a child up bilingual.

And if I tried to have a conversation with either of my toddler-aged DCs in Japanese, they would often as not just give me a look and say, "Silly mummy, speak English".

Good grief.

Yeah, dump her, she's worth more, tbh.

I never spoke English at home. My parents were and are careful about never speaking their native languages among people who cannot understand, but I'm glad they spoke how they did in our home.

I'm Latina of Mexican origin.

That depends on how much the parent talks. grin I always thought dc's exposure to language from the 75% or so Swedish I put in must be far greater than my nephews' total exposure from their monolingual but rather taciturn parents.

Yep that is right, it also depends on how much time the child spends with the parent, for example here in Sweden it is really hard to have fully bilingual children because nearly all kids spend so much time in daycare. I have met maybe 50 families with bi/trilingual kids, the only ones that speak perfect English and Swedish to the extent that you wouldn't know you weren't speaking to a non native Swede or a child with English as a minority language are kids that have 2 English speaking parents and Swedish speaking school. I think in a culture where parents spent more time with their kids it would be easier to mix and match languges. In my opinion the problem with mixing and matching languages where the parents don't have the same mother tongue is that the child will pick up the subtle accent faults, I speak decent Swedish and my DP speaks close to perfect English but we will not mix the languages with our kids as it would feel unnatural and also I don't want our kids to speak English with a Swedish American accent and I don't want them to pick up bad pronuciation from me in Swedish. I will behave exactly the same as OP's friend.

That depends on the child. In a bilingual family where everybody speaks more than one language, the children do not grow up feeling there is anything strange about it. This is normal in many parts of the world. OPOL is a western concept which has become very popular through the influence of a few books written by families which tried this (and no other method). There is no scientific evidence that it works better than any other way.

But if a child is being raised with OPOL it can be upsetting for them to hear that parent talking another language. I never speak Swedish to the kids I work with but I will speak Swedish to the daycare teachers or to other kids if they talk to me, the shock the kids feel when they hear me speaking Swedish is sort of sad to see, they tell the teachers or their little friends that I only speak English, I was speaking to a little girl on Tuesday about it, she is 4 and I think she is old enough to understand that me and her speak English but we can both speak Swedish to other people, she just kept saying no you only speak English. I don't have experience with kids where languages are mixed by the entire family but it sounds like OP's friend is doing opol and if so I believe the child would find it strange/hard to suddenly respond to her mother in English.

Have you tried talking to her about it?

I'm not sure language is the issue. Do you like her?

No the child does not need to hear the mother speak exclusively in one language, that is rubbish.

Children can flip between languages v well both with family and friends, I see it every day in my work. There are points at which their language knowledge changes according to age, stage and what is being spoken around them, but they are not going to suffer for an hour's playdate. Infact, it can be beneficial depending on the family's attitude.

I think that if you feel uncomfortable around them for whatever reason, then probably healthy to reduce contact.

But if a child is being raised with OPOL it can be upsetting for them to hear that parent talking another language
That would have to be a very sensitive DC.

The problem that I have with that is that in effect you would be asking her to stop doing what she thinks is best for her dc just for your convenience.

Whether the OPOL is the 'right' way of doing thing isn't the issue here. And whether you are right in saying she could speak english to her lo when she is with you.
The issue is you want her to do things your way because you prefer it that way.

Would you do the same thing for other areas of parenting?

FWIW, I did exactly what your friend did with my own dcs (and thankfully, none of my friends dump me because of it. They actually all told me how amazing it was and how lucky my dcs were to be bilingual). Now they are older, they still speak to my in mother tongue and they still to each other (when they want to) in their minority language. I have quite a few friends with a similar set up and they haven't achieved that. Their dcs are speaking to them only in english and are refusing to speak the minority language. But then they were also not as consistent in asking them to speak the minority language...

I accept that for some people, who has the opportunity to go back 'home, spend long period in the other country, they might be able to afford more flexibility. I don't think it's true for everyone.

As a side question, as a child with a parent was a foreigner, do you speak that language? Do you also feel you belong, in some ways, to your mum's country too (and that you are not 'just' english)?

kitty, my dcs wouldn't have been upset but they would have been surprised. And they would (and did) still answer to me in my language, not in english. For a very long time, they though I could not speak english even though my DH is english and we only speak english together. So it's not as if they hadn't heard me speak english.

Sorry lots of spelling mistakes there....

I have the same experience as Escape.

I live in a country that isn't mine and my child is bilingual.

I tend to find I have made more friends because people (nice ones) are interested and fascinated by the fact that dd and I speak English to each other.

YAofcourseBU.

YABU and maybe she wouldn't want to be friends either if she knew it bothered you?

Btw, OP why do you need to know what your friend has said to her dc?? Why do you need to constantly ask? I mean it's very unlikely that it will be relevant to you.

I have to say, from the other side, I would find it wearing too to have someone asking me to translate all the time tbh.

op, would you do the same if your guest spoke a very different english accent?
'I can't understand glaswegian, can you speak english please?' :o