Conversations in two languages
In a comment, Cougar mentioned a family where one person speaks English and the other Polish.
There are a few kinds of conversations mutually bilingual people will have. You’ll have the ones where people switch between languages whenever they feel like it — by word or by sentence. You’ll have the ones where each person just speaks in the language they’re more comfortable in. (This is, for instance, how I correspond with a friend — in speech it varies, though mostly is English, but he almost only writes me in French, and I wouldn’t dare try mine. It’s also quite common in romantic relationships and between generations in families.)
My favourite kind is one that is almost entirely limited to service relationships — an employee at a coffee shop, say. I go and order in French, and they can (usually) tell that I am an anglophone (often because I start by saying ‘uh’ instead of ‘euh’). So they respond to me in English, trying to be helpful. I can tell they’re a francophone, so I respond to *them* in French. With conversation limited to talk about coffee, it’s not really a big deal (anymore, though sometimes I forget that), but you still end up with both people speaking in their second language and having comprehension just that much harder, to be helpful.
November 29th, 2004 at 6:22 pm
There’s this anecdote that a friend told me that I just love. I used to live in Barcelona, so negotiating language is always an issue. This (Spanish) friend of mine has an American mother, a Catalan father, and for some reason, speaks to his sister in Spanish. So as he describes it, their dinnertime conversations go something like this. If the father or kids address a comment to the table, I think it’s usually in Spanish. If my friend addresses someone directly, it’s English to the mother, Catalan to the father, and Spanish to his sister. The mother, however, only contributes in English, but the father speaks English to the mother and Catalan to both of the kids.
When I’d have conversations with people, they’d usually address me in Spanish, assuming I didn’t speak Catalan. And even after many people learned that I do speak Catalan, they’d continue on in Spanish during subsequent encounters, because it’s kind of inconceivable that a foreigner would speak Catalan!