To ask a friend to stop speaking her own language?

[jujujbel]

I have a very dear friend who is from another country but has lived in the UK for 20 years. Her DC are bilingual. Often, when we are together, she will break off the conversation to speak to her DC in her own language. This makes me uncomfortable and I find it rude but I have never mentioned it. However, a few days ago my DD came home from spending the day with my friends DD (they spend a lot of time together). She talked about how she hated it when they talked in a different language in front of her as it made her feel excluded. I explained that i had felt the same way and that it was actually considered bad manners to do this. I told my DD that if she felt uncomfortable she should say to her friend in as nice a way as possible and that I would do similar with the mum. The very next day, my DD did do this when the situation arose again and explained how it made her feel. She came home quite upset as she had argued with her friend about it.

We were all meeting up later anyway. When we got together my friend immediately said to me 'have you hear detox?' She then went to say, I'll speak to your dd to explain that I'm not talking about her it's just how we speak. I then said that I agreed with my DD and it made us both uncomfortable. My friend was shocked that I found her rude. I explained that it was only in the context where we are all having a conversation in English and they then break away to speak in a different language. Although I know they are not saying anything bad about us it is a horrible feeling and I don't understand why they feel the new to do it. I compared it to whispering. I have been very clear that it is only in the context of a group conversation being started in a shared language and then being continued in a language that not all of the group can understand.

My friend has now told me she will not speak her own language in front of my DD but that she will distance herself from us. She feels I am the inconsiderate one and that I am discriminating against her.

I am so hurt and confused. I guess I am just looking for a bit of MN perspective.

Sorry for the essay.

Thank

Everyone in our bilingual family can understand both languages perfectly. It doesn't matter that DD and I speak to one another in English as DSS1, DSS2 and DP all understand.

I have colleagues that do it, I find it really annoying, I do feel excluded so I don't think you're being unreasonable at all.

i think if she doesnt do this, then her children will be strongly at risk of losing their family language in favour of the dominant community language, so i wouldnt so much say youre being unreasonable, as uninformed and underestimating just how hard it is to keep a child speaking a non-community language.

One parent -one language, is strongly recommended as one of the only good ways of raising bilingual children. If english is the community language and she lives in england, then only speaking her mother tongue when not around engish people, will not be enough to promote the childrens language.

i have several friends that do it, and tbh, I neither feel included or excluded.

I am however part of a family that were always supposed to be dual language, but English very quickly took over when dp didnt prioritise making sure the children responded in french. Its damn hard.

Can I just reiterate something I said further up thread?

Please, please, please, believe me when I say that the overwhelming majority of bilingual people do not switch to their language to exclude you. They do it because it is utterly natural and they are probably not even aware that they are doing it.

And to add something:

Conversations between parents and children are totally different from conversations between colleagues or a social setting with adults.

And finally:

Please try to understand that it is sometimes hard to bring up bilingual children when your language is not the community language and / or it is not a socially valued language. Please give us a little leeway when talking to our kids. All we are trying to do is the best for our children and to retain our cultural and linguistic identity.

"Please try to understand that it is sometimes hard to bring up bilingual children when your language is not the community language and / or it is not a socially valued language. Please give us a little leeway when talking to our kids. All we are trying to do is the best for our children and to retain our cultural and linguistic identity."

This. I do think that the "rules" are different in the case of parent/child conversations.

For example: I live in Japan. My husband and I speak both Japanese and English. If there are Japanese people in the room who don't speak English we would usually stick to J out of courtesy, but I only speak to my daughter in English, ever. It's important. If I don't she may well lose her English as she gets older.

I think that it is rude to break off a conversation to speak in a language that not everyone in the group understands, if there is a common language within the whole group. I think it's tantamount to whispering in company. It's different if there is not a common language, or one person who is not fluent and needs a little translation. My BIL and SIL are bringing up their DC bilingual, and at first would often speak to him in his original language. Now that he is near-fluent in English, they still speak the other language at home, but always in English in company. It is important to them that he speaks his first language as much as possible, but not at the expense of courtesy to those of us who do not know the language!

Sorry, to clarify, they would often speak to him in his original language when we or other family members were there. They still, and always will, use the other language at home alone. I think it is important that people who live away from their home country retain their cultural identity, including their language. My point is that this can be done while still being courteous towards others. Apologies, I appear to be rubbish at marshalling my thoughts today...

It isn't rude though! It's entirely unconscious!

I really hate the fact that how I speak to my kids is getting me judged and thought of as rude. I'm not rude. I'm trying to ensure that my language gets passed on.

I think YABU. I'd have asked them to teach the language to me.

i think its good for children to hear other languages spoken too, even if they dont understand them. It gives them much more of a sense of the diversity of the world.

What Galens said. I'm not bringing up a bilingual child, but lots of my friends are, and I'm well aware of the issues and wouldn't dream of feeling slighted if one of them switches into a language I don't speak with a child.

And I reiterate that it's entirely unconscious to drop into the language you always speak with a particular person. I have Francophone friends I know from our shared university days, and although I speak French, we only ever speak English together, because we 'know' one another in English. Likewise, I have other French friends I only ever speak French to, because we met in France in a French speaking environment, although they speak english.

Obviously we switch if someone who can't speak one or the other is around, but the parent-child situation is different.

Galens, I'm not trying to be judgemental, and I do understand that people don't always realise that they have slipped back into their native language. But the effect on the person who is now excluded from the conversation is not pleasant. Unconsciously slipping back into another language is far less rude than an example on this thread of someone enduring hours in the company of people of people who refuse to speak a language that everyone present can speak, or another of people using a language to have a private conversation about someone else in the room! I would accept it if people speaking to me unconsciously reverted to their other language, realised what they'd done (you must do at some point!), said 'oh sorry, done it again' and went back to English.

It's worth saying that there is an important distinction between types of bilingualism which most of the monolingual people on this thread don't seem to appreciate.

Where both parents speak the minority language at home, but the child is educated in the community language, bilingualism is easy to achieve and maintain, so one parent one language isn't too much of an issue. I'll mostly talk to my kids in French in public, although they will often reply in English.

However it's much harder where only one parent speaks the minority language, and if you don't stick to one parent one language, you are basically screwed. I don't think I've ever heard my trilingual German friend address her kids directly in any language other than German, unless she is also addressing other non-German-speakers at the same time, in which case she'd use French or English depending on the situation.

And I'd reiterate what has been said about language choice often being almost automatic in bilingual people. There's a big difference between swapping in and out of different languages depending on the context (normal, not rude, you monolinguals just need to get over yourselves) and deliberately excluding people by using a foreign language.

Don't post often, but I have seen a few debates of this sort on MN. I think it is the context, in this case, that OP has given (many times) that makes me say YANBU.

"The only issue is when we are having a group discussion (usually about what we are planning to do) and they then carry on the conversation in a different language. So a group conversation about something that impacts us all is then carried on to the exclusion of some of those involved."

True, as Liara (and others) have pointed out, the mid-conversation discussions OP has (in her birth language) with her daughter, are likely completely innocuous and, while perhaps not exactly off-topic, may be an 'aside' by the friend to her daughter.

"(in English) Shall we meet up for a playdate on Thursday?"
"(in mt) Oh, but don't you have to work for that homework you have to hand in on Friday?"
"No, it's OK, I can get it done on Wednesday."
"(in english) Sure, let's meet on Thursday."
"Not sure how that is excluding your dd, as the bits in mt are completely irrelevant to her."

To that I ask, but who gets to decide what is relevant to which members of the group having the whole conversation?

In the example Liara gave, the OP's DD could have had the same homework, but unlike her friend hadn't made alternative plans to do it, so that reminder would have been very relevant to her, had she been able to understand it.

I am deaf and there are certain people who continually feel they have the right to decide that some parts of a conversation (that we are mutually involved in) are not relevant to me! They may or may not be correct about the relevance, but (as part of a conversation that we are mutually involved in) it is not up to them to decide the relevance to me of their own (or other people's) 'asides' when within that group conversation. IMO.

Haven't RTFT yet but will do so with interest. I have a lovely friend who does this with her children whenever there is a dispute between her kids and any visitors - this happens a lot as one of her kids is a massive prick prig and tells tales constantly. I find it incredibly embarrassing as it's often very clearly about my children or other visitors and it tends to be prolonged, so I sit there uncomprehendingly like a lemon. I would like to tell her I feel this way but I don't think it would go down well.

I do wonder if much of the indignation levelled at those who do have additional languages and speak them with heir children comes from inferiority or even paranoia.

It is infernally hard to teach children minority languages and maintain and in Them. Some more than others.

If a group of adults were speaking a minority language and excluding another person who does not have any notion of the language, it's rude. My exh used to do this all the time. Note: ex!

But if we're teaching our children, it's not rude because there is no intention to exclude.

My ds attends classes for a language I speak fluently. The other parents there are either mother tongue speakers, or married to them.

Most of the parents I see there speak the language naturally, but a couple are English and aren't as fluent as the nationals. We switch to English mostly, but officials en they saysay to not do so, in order for them to strengthen their language skills.

That said, if there is a situation where it's blindingly obvious that someone is belling spoken about as described in the post above mine, then that is rude, and I would switch to English so that everyone understands, and a massive tell tale would be left with no where to hide.

YANBU, I think it is extremely rude.

I agree with your first point, Hissy, and meant to make it myself earlier. There's such suspicion towards multilingualism shown in these threads, as if the multilingual friend was doing something very odd and untoward and should know better - whereas there are more multilingual people than monoglots in the world at large, and what the friend is doing is quite usual. I can't help but think that such levels of entitledness must come down in part to the fact that the OP is (presumably) a native, monoglot speaker of English who feels that people should adapt to her, rather than it being two-way.

Weirdly, it's one of the attitudes that an increasingly multicultural Britain doesn't seem to have changed much, despite cities teeming with, say, British Asians who slip naturally between, say, English, Gujarati and Hindi.

Second what GalensOyster said.

I spoke German to DC when living in England and now that we are living in Germany try to stick to English as much as possible.

People probably think I'm odd and rude, but I don't care as I know that this is the only way to raise a truely bilingual child as I was brought up in a bilingual household myself.

I also posted on the 'speaking a foreign language at work' thread the other day and agreed with the OP that it's rude to speak a foreign language in front of work colleagues who do not understand the language.

Fluffytheevilone - you said it is like whispering and this is the point (though not your point) as parents whisper/talk v softly to their dc in public all the time and it isn't thought of as rude.

YABU. I can't really imagine being bothered by not understanding random snatches of conversation between a mother and her children. I think it's a shame you encouraged your daughter to sabotage a friendship rather than teaching her to get on with different kinds of people.