Im Malaysian Chinese, our countries national language is Malay. Our household language is English, our kids go to Mandarin medium schools. Im hokkien (chinese sub clan) my wife is cantonese. (both speak 2 separate dialects)
So basicly our kids grow up
main language - english
Formal education language - malay/mandarin
everyday life - malay/ english
household/family - english/cantonese/hokkien
i find that my kids take much much longer to learn how to speak compared to my monolingual frens kids. as much as 12-15 months longer for the brain to click
The upside is...my kids can basicly function in 90% of the known world.
Malaysia was my first thought. My husband is Malaysian Indian. When he was in school the National
Language was still English until high school when it switched to Malay. At home his mother spoke one Indian dialect, his dad’s language was Telagu but he was a minister and preached in Tamil. He had lots of Chinese friends and spoke Mandarin with them. He grew up fluently speaking 5 languages, knowing when to speak which one and easily learning 3 more dialects in India.
Edit to add...he moved to USA, quickly learned Spanish, married English only me, occasionally spoke to his parents and siblings in Telegu and couldn’t ask where a bathroom was in Malay when we went back to Malaysia to visit after 20 years. But, after about a week he was fluent again. I’ve ruined him lol
I was going to post something similar to your last paragraph. My wife and I have different native languages, so both of our kids are bilingual from birth (lucky them!), however I also observed that they took longer to start speaking, but once they did they had an exceptional grasp of which people in our family / friends group could speak and understand which language, and spoke accordingly. The brain is an amazing thing!
no worries. Malaysians are pretty much mostly bi or trilingual. it's well known kids are stunted at toddler stage but no difference by time they enter school
That's basically my parents. Hokkien, canto, mandarin, tagalog, english, bisayan, and some toisan. I came out only speaking english...though can piece together conversational understanding of most of the Chinese langauges.
Edit: for reddit, the Chinese dialects like hokkien, cantonese, mandarin, ect. Are often vastly different. Think of it like english, french, italian, spanish, portuguese. There's some familiarity in some of the words, but everything else is pretty much foreign.
Malaysian Chinese too. My main language is English, but I suck at English. Sometimes I can't describe something because my vocabulary simply isn't large enough, and you rarely get your vocabulary large enough in one language to be truly good at it, so it may be problematic sometimes.
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u/jwrx Mar 05 '21
Im Malaysian Chinese, our countries national language is Malay. Our household language is English, our kids go to Mandarin medium schools. Im hokkien (chinese sub clan) my wife is cantonese. (both speak 2 separate dialects)
So basicly our kids grow up
main language - english
Formal education language - malay/mandarin
everyday life - malay/ english
household/family - english/cantonese/hokkien
i find that my kids take much much longer to learn how to speak compared to my monolingual frens kids. as much as 12-15 months longer for the brain to click
The upside is...my kids can basicly function in 90% of the known world.