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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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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:

  1. Father learns Mandarin and we're back to the happy case. The US foreign service estimates 2200 class hours to learn Mandarin. Father doesn't need to speak Mandarin, he only needs to comprehend it, but he's also not taking classes, he's trying to pick it up from "immersion" that happens whenever the family is all together. This is rare. Mandarin is among the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, so maybe this could work for, say, Spanish, but I doubt that this works in the long run. It's easy enough to pick up ve a bañarte ahora but I doubt that you can work your way up to actually substantive conversations as an adult with such minimal exposure.
  2. Mother and the kids say everything twice, once in Mandarin and once in English. This is an unbelievable pain in the ass and completely destroys conversational flow. I seriously doubt that anyone can keep this up over a decade and a half. I suspect that this scenario degenerates into one of the following.
  3. Father guesses what Mother and the kids are talking about based on picking out a few words he knows. This is only practical for the most basic conversations ("baño! I know that one!").
  4. Father checks out of the conversation when Mother and the kids are talking.
  5. The family avoids having any substantive conversations when together.

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:

  1. This allows them to have a shared language with their grandparents. I think this is fair, certainly our parents are less comfortable in English than Russian. Of course, my sister is constantly on the outs with our parents, so I'm not sure how practically useful this is. Even so, it seems insane to prioritize the kids' relationship with their grandparents over your relationship with your spouse.
  2. It's a matter of passing down the heritage. This one I find objectionable. I do not see much value in possessing "Russian heritage" and I hope that my kids see themselves as Americans rather than Russian-Americans or whatever. Our family came to this country because it is better than the place we left, why do we want to preserve the vestiges of the bad old country?
  3. Access to Russian culture. I'm glad I can read Russian literature in the original and I get a lot out of it, but I don't know that it's worth torpedoing my family life so that my kids can get the same benefit.

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.

The biggest difficulty with pushing a second language is that non-English second languages are mostly useless: everything interesting in the world happens in English. Yes, if you live in a non-English-speaking country, you need to communicate with the locals in the regional language (e.g., Russian), but even in Russia, every intelligent person under 40 speaks English, and even many of the intelligent people over 40. Even in countries like China, where there is the most cultural and technological independence from the Anglosphere, a large chunk of the interesting conversation and research happens in English among the under-40s.

That said, regarding local languages, even for English itself there is the emergence of an "International English" which is distinct from native English dialects. American English is already kind of like this compared to British dialects, but the mass influx of ESL speakers across the globe into public and business discourse has rendered even native American English a regional dialect rather than a de facto international standard. Key changes are dropping the arcane rules over auxiliary verbs like "do" ("I do see the benefit of that" -> "I see the benefit of that.", "How do you start a business?" -> "How to start a business?"), dropping the redundancy in continuous verb conjugations ("I'm using Arch Linux" -> "I use Arch Linux"), use of formal verbs over colloquial constructions using "get" ("My cough got better" -> "I recovered from my cough"). Revealingly, all of these represent a move from informal to formal constructions. In fact, this is consistent with the trajectory of English since the early modern period. Most languages feature some form of T-V distinction or similar formality management, but English has lost this distinction, and in exactly the opposite direction of the stereotype: English has lost the informal form and retained only the formal form! It's not that Anglos began classifying foreigners as family: it's that they began classifying their own families as strangers. In fact, informality has been so lost that even native English speakers often perceive the T-V formality backwards: "thou" is often perceived as formal!

Even in countries like China, ... a large chunk of the interesting conversation and research happens in English among the under-40s.

Definitely not true. In china they may publish papers and stuff in English for bragging rights, but all work is done in Chinese. Chinese is still useless to learn though, because as a foreigner you have no value to Chinese.

Most languages feature some form of T-V distinction or similar formality management, but English has lost this distinction, and in exactly the opposite direction of the stereotype: English has lost the informal form and retained only the formal form! It's not that Anglos began classifying foreigners as family: it's that they began classifying their own families as strangers.

The same thing happened with Colombian Spanish. I like to think of it as politeness inflation.

In fact, informality has been so lost that even native English speakers often perceive the T-V formality backwards: "thou" is often perceived as formal!

Well, yes. Most people these days encounter thee/thou/thy in either Shakespeare and or the King James Bible (early modern English), which makes it sound more formal.

Most people these days encounter thee/thou/thy in either Shakespeare and or the King James Bible (early modern English), which makes it sound more formal.

For Shakespeare, you're going to get a severe misreading of the text if you conflate these!

Regarding the King James translation, any distinction here is chosen by the translators rather than the authors, as Koine Greek does not have a T-V distinction, and neither does ancient Hebrew afaik.

The same thing happened with Colombian Spanish. I like to think of it as politeness inflation.

“Usted” replacing “tu” in familial situations?

When chicks address me with “usted” while I in turn address them with “tu,” I’ve always mentally chuckled about it as the power dynamics necessary for a heterosexual relationship being reflected linguistically.

Well, yes. Most people these days encounter thee/thou/thy in either Shakespeare and or the King James Bible (early modern English), which makes it sound more formal.

Yeah, most people have no idea that "thou" is informal. They just think of it as old, and used in religion a lot, and therefore invoke it to bring the gravitas those things lend.

Also some centraco dialects use usted for everyone.

"How do you start a business?" -> "How to start a business?"

I have a distinctly averse reaction to this construction in particular (although I know I'm not supposed to say that around linguists - all dialects are equally valid, yada yada, yeah I get it). It immediately signals to me that this is yet another one of those immigrant professionals I've had to work with over the years where communicating about complex subjects is going to be a struggle, but in an illegible way that's hard to really put a finger on. I think it's some combination of:

  • When I'm speaking off the cuff about something, and someone else thinks I'm wrong, I expect them to chime in to say so and explain why they think I'm wrong. In "my culture" (I would like to say "American culture", but this probably isn't true nationwide) this is how collaboration works. But if someone is a non-native speaker who's having trouble keeping up (as indicated by them saying things like "How to start a business?"), I can never really be sure what their silence means. If it's because they're in full agreement with me, great. If it's because they're deferring to my expertise, that's also fine, I guess I'm in charge now. But if they do actually have a substantive disagreement, but are quietly simmering in frustration because they don't know how to articulate it, then this is going to become a problem later.
  • I can tell that this person isn't going to be much fun to hang out with at lunch or around the water cooler. Not that I expect to be friends with my co-workers - in fact I rarely mix my social and professional life - but it's still nice to be able to share glimpses of what they're like personally.
  • English is my native language, the language of "my people", of Shakespeare and Chaucer etc., but for them it's just what they speak at work, yet another piece of generic international slop. Like, if you scoff at American cuisine as being synonymous with McDonalds and Coke, I feel like you've insulted my grandmother's cooking even though you probably weren't even thinking about that.

Such is the price of living in a global economic superpower, I guess.

Yeah, I honestly don't understand why companies are so pumped to hire this sort of person. In my experience, they contribute little, and it's all in a very metric-chasing but not-actually-value-adding sort of way. Yet people like Elon Musk are, in his own words, willing to go to war to let this sort of person in.

And Elon Musk is nowhere near the most smoothbrained capitalist out there running our world.

Here's one way to think about it: public sentiment on, say, Indian immigrants to the US is definitely affected positively by the heavy selection we put on their immigration. Now imagine the filters required to be a direct report to Elon. If Elon thinks that H1b/O1 tech workers are incredible at their jobs, he's probably inferring accurately from those he interacts with.

Part of the reason I'm so distrusting of this is that these visas are de facto Indian mass immigration pipelines. Yet if I look at the open source software I depend and use every day, it's... not built by Indians. It's built mostly by western Europeans, followed by ex-Soviet demographics and white Americans, with India being barely represented at all.

So, if we're so thirsty for talent, why aren't we mass importing the Swedes and Swiss?

I just find the whole thing extremely dishonest. The problem with the Kalergi conspiracy theory is even if it's not "true" in some sense, it's hard to find a more accurate model of the world.

And to the extent that capitalists are indeed responsible for the Great Replacement under some well-intentioned chart-maxxing myopia, well... I don't know, I'm kinda inclined to not object too hard when the commies have their way with them.

I think many tech higher-ups either don't believe or don't want to believe that, because they don't see it themselves (or they're not articulate/nuanced enough to say they want to close the fraud and keep the elite). The reason half these guys went rightwards is that they started believing their lying eyes, and their eyes are giving them very strong data about the immigrant engineers high up in their businesses/portcos. I agree that this state of affairs is utterly insane, but if you want to convince them you will have to explain how unrepresentative their personal experience is - for Elon, I'd just call it fraud, he likes that.

The emergent tech right seems to have switched sides for reasons unrelated to this: it was at best discontent with the social justice nonsense, though more likely as the leftists contend, because the left is actually somewhat capable of wielding regulatory power, while the right is basically clueless and incapable of wielding this power at all.

The reason I say this is JD Vance, the tech anointed heir, has an Indian wife and children that look far more like her than him. And the RNC featured a tattooed pornstar and an Indian praying to a Hindu god. This does not sound like "rightward drift": it sounds like a hostile takeover of the Republican party. The mass import of Indians and degeneracy promotion will continue just as it did when the Democrats were in power. All the right-wing voters got some token oppression of LatAm immigrants for a short period, and even that was executed with all the enthusiasm of a geriatric bingo club.

But hey, we got some WWE on the White House lawn. And I love WWE Smackdown!

Musk wants to cream skim the smartest people of the world so they come to America.

It just so happens that the same programs that enable that also enable migration of ZMP, or maybe even NMP, WITCH employees. Very few people seem to be interested in drawing a distinction between these groups for immigration purposes.

Because they don't distinguish between value-add and metric chasing. This makes them reliable metric pumping engines, especially if they come from a culture with normalized double-speak, e.g. "Achieve great success while adhering to the highest levels of ethics and accountability" -> "Cut every corner possible to juice the KPI as long as you don't get caught".

You're probably right.

Still, I find Elon baffling because he does sound moderately sentient when he talks. Of course, then you see his Elden Ring build and.... yeesh, one can understand why he started paying people to play on his accounts.

Musk is a goofy autist, but he's probably well-positioned to skim the cream of the crop. This is something I feel like I should just never shut up about. There's a huge disconnect between people whose experience with immigrants is massively filtered exceptions, compared to the normies. It really makes you appreciate how much a shared cultures does to smooth the friction when dealing with someone 20+ IQ points below you, much less the horror of 50+.

If he spent a week trying to help Haitians, Somalians and Guatemalans set up Starlink, he'd probably turn into Enoch Powell.

Without context I'm not 100% sure, but I believe American English has long had the first example -- "I see the benefit of that" would be the common construction, whereas "I do see the benefit of that" would only be used for emphasis. Same with the continuous verb conjugations; "I'm using Arch Linux" and "I use Arch Linux" would both be OK, though "using" would be the only correct one if you were actually sitting at your keyboard. I believe Spanish also uses those somewhat interchangeably.

Well, they're all valid constructions, at least to my ear, just like discarding T and always using V is a valid construction. Rather, I'm accenting a shift in linguistic preference toward more formal and less colloquial constructions, a shift that has been long underway but accelerated thanks to the rise of ESL.

I don't see the simple present as less formal than the present continuous. They simply mean different things. I could believe that one is being eroded by ESL speakers not using it, but it's not a question of formality.

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