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Opol Ra
Or: Which way, Hapa parent?
I.
Have you guys ever heard of One Parent One Language? Basically, the idea is that if a parent speaks a second language that they want to pass down to their kids, they should speak to their kids solely in that language. So, for example, if you are a German/Spanish speaker and your wife is a French/Spanish speaker and you live in Spain, you speak to the kids only in German, your wife speaks to the kids only in French, and you and your wife speak Spanish to each other (and, of course, the kids learn Spanish in school). The ultimate goal is to have the kids be fluent in German and French as well as Spanish as adults.
Sounds simple enough, but there is a snag. How do you have conversations with the whole family? In the happy case, you and your wife speak, or at least understand, each others' second language (in our example, you also speak French and your wife also speaks German), and there's no problem: you understand what the kids say to your wife and she understands what the kids say to you.
However, that's rarely the case outside of highly polyglot areas of Europe (Switzerland?). In America, or at least my corner of it, the most common pairing that isn't two monoglots is an English monoglot and a diglot. So Father speaks to the kids in English and Mother speaks in, say, Mandarin, but Father can't speak a lick of Mandarin. This doesn't much matter when the kids are preverbal, but what is the future for such an OPOL family when the kids are old enough to have meaningful, grammatically complex conversations with a variety of vocabulary, spoken at normal adult velocity (or even faster, if passions are inflamed or someone is a naturally quick talker, or a mumbler)?
We can lay out a few possibilities:
A cursory perusal of threads about dinner table conversations on /r/oneparentonelanguage bears out that these options seem to be exhaustive. Tellingly, very few people discussing this problem have kids older than six or so; presumably the details of their life become too embarrassing to publicize or they compromise on OPOL.
II.
To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life. Mother addresses the kids or she addresses Father, but she does not ever address her children along with her husband. This seems to be just fine in the eyes of many women who I bin as "type A elder millenials" who seem to treat the kids as royalty and the husbands as the help. These women would trade off adult social cohesion in favor of a little more comprehensible language input for their kids all day every day. These are the women who, if their kids interrupt an adult conversation, tell the adults to wait while they talk to the kids.
A word about my own situation: my parents both speak English and Russian, which I and my siblings all learned since Russian was all we spoke at home. My sister married a man who doesn't speak Russian and had kids, and I married a woman who doesn't speak Russian either. Any time we're together and I say something in English for the benefit of all the adults present ("should we think about lunch?"), my sister badgers me about saying it in Russian unless I was specifically addressing someone who doesn't understand Russian. Meanwhile, her husband's Russian skills have been eclipsed by his kids, and I don't think he's ever going to catch up, so option 1 and 2 are basically off the table. The only remaining question is how far down the list the family is going to end up. I've seen Chinese/American couples where the parents bring kids to the park and the Chinese wife finds other Chinese women and chats with them in Chinese while the husband looks off into space (they are also doing OPOL). I expect we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future and I don't think it's going to be pretty to see the products of marriages like this. The /r/aznmasculinity poster problem is only the beginning.
III.
This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense? Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk, and my sister has never brought them up. The arguments I've seen are:
The base rates for language retention in second generation speakers (besides Spanish) in the US are quite poor. The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit. The odds of their kids speaking your language, even if it's Spanish, are effectively zero. Is it really worth splitting your family for this?
I think any reasonable person has to say no. I knew that marrying my wife meant that the odds our kids speak Russian is basically zero (at the time I didn't consider the simple solution of alienating my wife to pass on the language). If I wanted my kids to speak Russian, I should have married a Russian. If my parents wanted my kids to speak Russian, they should have stayed in Russia. This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish. You don't get both the freedom to come to this country, love a woman from a background different than yours, marry her, and start a family AND somehow pass on your idiosyncratic foreign background without compromising the relationship that is the bedrock of the family, namely, that between the wife and the husband. And I think that's basically as it should be.
I'm a little confused. At least in the Chinese case in most major cities there are "Chinese schools" you can send the kids too that are most analogous to me of the "catholic school" I attended growing up which was a couple hours a week at the catholic school. Where they learn Chinese and cultural stuff. I'm slowly learning some Mandarin and our plan is that the kid(s) will attend Chinese school and be able to speak Chinese but that the language of the household will be English. I've never heard of the concept of a one parent language and it indeed sounds like insanity.
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I speak 2 languages. My wife speaks three. We only have English in common. We tried OPOL, but as my kid learned to speak my wife's main language, she didn't know English, and so I couldn't speak to her at all. Since I was at work all day, my kid never learned English, so I insisted that OPOL stop and my kid just be taught English.
Because of my wife, my social exposure to immigrants and their children is extremely high. Furthermore, I have learned 3 living and 2 dead languages, am employed as a French immersion teacher. For all these reasons, I question the value of kids learning domestic Mandarin or Japanese or whatever. OPOL usually doesn't lead to kids speaking the language the way I speak English. It leads to them knowing all the language you need for home life ("bedtime," "toothbrush," "clean your damn room!"), in a slang frozen in whatever era the mom left the old country. So if the kid ever wants to do business in China, or watch Chinese movies, etc, he's going to need focused study, or he'll speak Mandarin the way Tony Soprano speaks Italian. The choice ends up being between "limited communication with one parent and you never really reach fluency in Mom's language unless you buckle down and study" or "as much communication as possible with both parents and you never reach fluency at all in Mom's language to fluency unless you buckle down and study."
Option 2 has a much better cost/benefit ratio.
Yeah. I'm in Malaysia where my wife's family speaks a mix of Mandarin and Hokkien. They did Mandarin schooling and consume enough mainlander media that they're comfortable talking with Mainlanders, but a lot of Malaysian Mandarin speakers I know feel quite uncomfortable speaking with mainlanders due to the accent and word choices being different.
Likewise my 2 year old speaks a pidgin of Malay, Mandarin and English presently. I've got a bit more than her in both non-English languages, and it's fairly normal for Malaysians to learn this way as it's one of the most multi-lingual countries in the world and it seems to work for them. In an affluent Chinese household typically it's sort of an OPOL setup, albeit with the maid/nanny speaking Malay or Indonesian to the child, family speaking Mandarin and school/online sources trending more English.
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A lot of wall of text and speculation abut something that is usually a non-issue.
Point of the practice is to ensure that the kids learns the Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent's language in the age and by same process everyone learns their native language. My personal theory is that the point of one parent one language is not necessary, having constant and separate contexts for different languages is. ( “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.”) Purpose is to avoid kid learning a creole when he/she is a toddler, and one parent one language is a clear and relatively easy rule to stick with. However, it isn't usually sufficient. If the language learning is carried by parents only, the common occurrence is that kid never learns anything beyond kid level vocabulary and is likely to actively forget it in teenage because it's not cool and appears useless. This is the process how minority languages die in larger empires. Successful Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent supplement it with some Mandarin kindergarten, later hopefully some Mandarin school or other classes, perhaps spending some time in the native country, hopefully establishing a friend circle in the relevant language, and most importantly, access to Mandarin/whatever-speaking media that seems cool.
By the age kids are old enough for substantial family discussions over dinner table, yeah I suspect the common experience is that everyone speaks in the common language. By that point experiment has been proven successful or not, the kid already should have plenty of other spaces to keep up the Mandarin use than one parent only.
E: I should add, all of this is kinda irrelevant if you want your kids to integrate to American mainstream culture, whatever it is and will be. Described practice can work, but these days very point of it is to pass on some sort of hyphenated multilingual, possibly multi-ethnic heritage. Historically some other purposes are attested, too, odd eccentrics have done it with classical languages or Esperanto or otherwise languages considered high status (19th century Russian aristocrats apparently spoke French to each other because of the coolness factor), and Russian probs don't have such status in the USA in foreseeable future.
I'm not sure why you say it's a non-issue after I laid out how the cases I encounter IRL keep having this issue.
You can probably make this work for Mandarin in areas of the country that have a lot of Chinese people and if the home languages are Mandarin and English. But if you don't have those things, or you are trying to raise kids trilingual with a third language that doesn't have schools nearby, you are going to have to make some tough choices. As far as I can tell, the choices usually involve fracturing family communication for uncertain benefit.
Sorry, I admit that I got bored reading because what you describe in part I did not match the IRL people I know. It sounded like there was going to be several paragraphs about some ludicrously overcomplicated hypothetical issue. But I guess I have to admit it is totally possible people tie themselves to knots about language at home.
e: And yes, my sample of people is heavily conditioned on the expats and kids of expats whose parents switched countries once or twice. One of the people I am thinking of is son of expat parents, he keeps touch with friends in various countries over Discord and so. All tri-or-more-lingual people I know are language nerds who have learned the 3rd and others languages the traditional way.
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I think you (and apparently a lot of OPOL devotees) are overthinking it.
The research does generally support OPOL theory, in terms of being the most effective way to raise bilingual children. But it is not the only way. The idea that "Mom speaks to the kids in English, Dad speaks to the kids in Russian" is well and good, but it doesn't mean that if Mom and Dad talk to each other in English in front of the kids that you've ruined their bilingual education.
I don't know how strong the evidence is for "cognitive benefits" of multilingualism (though I've seen enough anecdotal evidence to believe it) but I do know a lot of kids grow up regretting that their parents never taught them their native language.
I'm rather skeptical of the claimed cognitive benefits. Much like learning a musical instrument, it seems like more of a proxy for having highly motivated, involved parents who are providing general intellectual enrichment. It's quite difficult to separate out the effect of a specific activity.
Some of my cousins live in Canada, and there it is also subject to an interesting selection effect. French immersion programs are, on paper, intended to make more Canadian students able to communicate in both official languages. In practice, it's how the upper-middle class gets their kids placed in better public schools. Generally ESL students are not eligible for French immersion, since they are receiving supplemental English lessons. This makes the pool of French immersion students significantly higher SES and less "diverse".
Yeah I live in a country with very high multilingualism rates and there are plenty of people I know who speak 3 or 4 languages that I wouldn't exactly call Intellectual Titans otherwise. IMO it's really down to neuroplasticity when the languages get picked up, and I'm also probably overestimating how good they are at their non-primary languages since I don't think they'd be capable of writing a dissertation in them even if they can get by colloquially.
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That's not the salient question. The question is how Mom and Dad have a conversation with each other and the kids at the same time. Clearly such conversations are a significant fraction of language use in the home and having these conversations in English is compromising on the amount of language practice that the kids get, as well as encouraging the kids to be lazy in talking to Mom in Russian. There's no free lunch here.
UMC children of immigrants who grew up in a weird halfway culture and never developed their identity as Americans hold all kinds of regrets about their parents. They forced them to learn an instrument, or they didn't send them to music classes, or they didn't teach them their native language (despite fighting tooth and nail as children to speak English), or they taught them their native language but they didn't pass down the secret cooking techniques, or they taught them the native language and passed down the secret cooking techniques but didn't cultivate a relationship with the extended family, etc etc. These are mostly window dressing around the anomie of not fitting in.
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The simple solution to multi language social spaces is that in any shared space where there is the potential for a person who doesn't know language X, you speak the universal language regardless of if they are there or not.
The idea that one wants to teach the kids a different language is fine. Teach them. But as soon as it starts creeping into situations where not everyone can understand you have a discipline problem. No swearing at the TV in Russian and no Chinese in the kitchen!
The problem of doing things this way is that the parents actually have to take responsibility. It's much easier to not have to put in effort, and just talk to your kids in this language whilst the other parent does it in another, rather than actively sitting your kids down every evening and doing some genuine teaching. But it's a recipe for negative social structures within the home, like you overview.
All in all it's a problem of low agency parenting in a low stakes environment. To veer slightly off topic:
Parents want 'good things' like their kids knowing multiple languages, being pitch perfect and doing well in school or sports, but they don't know why. You hit on this in portion III. It becomes harder and harder to justify teaching your kids a language or otherwise doing hard things when in practicality it is only used to impress grandma and grandpa, who might quickly turn to the universal language when they hear how poorly their studies have been going. There are no real stakes, no weight. This is because fundamentally there's no vision for the future. The kids don't actually have a purpose. The family doesn't exist in a serious context.
People like to blame the 'economy' for the downwardly mobile, but it's practically always the parents that failed. They were disinterested in securing a prosperous future for their children because they themselves are not serious. There's no identity, no ego, no belief, no nation and no border. It's all up in the air, to be discarded at whatever convenience.
I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with you there. They maybe can't exactly articulate it, but I think the fundamental reason, at least in the circles I'm in, is status. Very original take, I know. But the fact is that having multilingual kids "in touch with their culture" is high status among the generation having and raising kids today (I'm thinking basically people in their 30s and early 40s).
Same goes for perfect pitch. Are they ever going to need it? Maybe not, but it impresses others (and it preserves some optionality, what if Sally does want to become a musician after all? Of course, it would be better for her to be a surgeon). It's not just Grandma and Grampa that are being impressed, it's also your friends with kids, with whom you (as a mother) are trapped in a bitter status war in which quarter is neither asked for nor given. It's absolutely critical that you have the most well rounded little angels in the mom group. Husbands are typically dragged along and are happy to just grill.
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I think that the "each parent pretends to only understand a single language" thing is a bit silly if carried to extremes.
The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions, but the bilingual parent talks with the kids in the non-shared language on other occasions. If the kid replies in the shared language, she can tell him how to phrase that sentence in her language. "Can I stay up and watch a TV show" -- "Du meinst, kann ich laenger auf bleiben und Fernsehn schauen?"
Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay. If an US expat and a German raise a few kids in Germany, teaching them English from age zero will enable the family to move to an English-speaking country without too much trouble. By contrast, if their monolinual son is in seventh grade when they want to move, the first year of school will likely be very difficult for him, because two years of English is unlikely to be enough to follow the lessons.
I have not found many OPOL followers who do this.
Fair, though this is not a consideration in the cases I've seen (basically zero chance my sister moves to Russia or these WMAF couples move to China).
Would not be surprised if American / reddit OPOLers are unhingedly overboard with this. European expats and like that I know from work seem to have it more like quiet_NaN describes.
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