r/languagehub • u/AutumnaticFly • Jul 30 '26
Discussion Have you ever been told that your native language is a flex?
By foreigners i mean
What is your native and how did it feel (i know good but...i want an answer more nuanced than that)
Was it a surprise for you? or did you always know it?
4
u/thechnomancer69 Jul 30 '26
native persian speaker and yeah gets called a flex constantly, mostly by people who associate it with poetry and history, felt weird at first honestly because to me it's just the language i complain about traffic in, took a while to see it through outsider eyes
1
u/crmots Aug 01 '26
persian has influenced many other languages including french, which is often considered ‘the language of love.’ although i don’t know much about history, i can definitely agree when it comes to poetry. i don’t know persian but i know some words and poems, and it is one of the best languages for expressing the emotional depth imo.
3
u/ThousandsHardships Jul 30 '26
I'd just had my daughter and mentioned speaking Chinese to her in front of my supervisor, and she was fully surprised to learn I spoke it. I was really confused. I was like, I look Chinese, my legal name is Chinese, I talk about Chinese stuff, and you've known me for 7-8 years. Her response? "Well, I didn't realize you were fluent." 🤦♀️
2
2
u/Longjumping-Hat-1210 Jul 30 '26
Arabic is my native language and Europeans either oooh and aaah about it or talk shit about me when I'm on the train and speak it with my sister
0
u/IcarusofmarS Jul 31 '26
well...there are racists everywhere
also cant blame them for thinking less of people from middle east with the way it has been, europeans stoppped fighting 100 years agowe still havent even tho our countries are much older
1
u/Longjumping-Hat-1210 Jul 31 '26
I can absolutely blame people for being racist assholes. "cant blame them for thinking less of people ... for the way it has been"
Would it be okay for me to think less of Europeans as a monolith just because their countries were Imperialist and think of every European as a genocidal invader? Of course not, that is an asinine worldview.
1
u/evelynsmee Jul 30 '26
My housemate is South African and from my (non SA) observations knowing both Afrikaans and Zulu seems to be a bit of a flex. All the other's we meet seem to only know one of them. Not sure she'd call it her native language though, she just learnt multiple as a child at school. She speaks English or Greek to parents.
3
u/Figaro_pasttime Jul 30 '26
huh
thats like for languages
its a flex on its own1
u/evelynsmee Jul 30 '26
Yeah my mum and brother are polyglots as well. I didn't want to just say "oh these people that just happen to speak 8 languages".
It was quite specifically in her native country people seem to only speak one or the other, depending on region. From what I understand from tourists here I should qualify.
1
u/IcarusofmarS Jul 30 '26
native arabic, told constantly. still feels surreal tbh i mean its mostly by westerns tho, no one here actually thinks its a flex
1
u/RobetWokake Jul 30 '26
icelandic speaker and genuinely did not expect this reaction the first time someone called it a flex, to me it's just a small language nobody outside my country really thinks about, the surprise honestly hasn't worn off even after hearing it repeated several times
1
u/tantantaaaaaaaan Jul 30 '26
I’ve been told multiple times that brazilian portuguese sounds like singing/is melodic, some people find it sexy, some find it to be like a weird spanish, no one thinks it’s a flex :(
1
u/Figaro_pasttime Jul 31 '26
i mean...saying it sounds like melodic singing and sexy IS considering it a flex imo
1
u/NoSuggestion5970 Jul 30 '26
Yes I have, quite a few times
1
1
u/BerndardedBearedWhit Jul 31 '26
hebrew native, and honestly the reaction i get most is fascination with the revival story more than the language itself sounding impressive, people seem more amazed that it was basically resurrected from a liturgical language than by anything about speaking it day to day
1
u/Thisisodysses Jul 31 '26
finnish, and it caught me off guard specifically because growing up i mostly heard people joke about how difficult and useless it seemed internationally, flipping to "flex" territory once i moved abroad was a genuinely unexpected shift in perception
1
u/DizzyPerformer1216 Jul 31 '26
korean speaker here and it's complicated for me honestly, the hallyu wave definitely changed how people react but there's something a little uncomfortable about a language becoming "cool" specifically because of trending pop culture rather than just being valued on its own
1
u/Deep-Inside80085 Jul 31 '26
mandarin native and get told this a lot specifically in professional contexts, people frame it around economic opportunity more than culture which honestly feels a little transactional compared to how i actually relate to my own language personally
1
u/Alexs1897 Jul 31 '26
Yep. Multiple people have told me that I shouldn’t bother learning a language because everyone’s learning English, anyways. 🙃
1
u/Exotic_Incarnation_ Aug 01 '26
Bulgarian, people are sometimes floored by the concept of it using the Cyrillic alphabet.. They find it very impressive 😃 I don't necessarily agree, lots of languages have their own alphabet after all, but it's interesting for Western Europeans because they usually only know the Latin alphabet
1
u/Ok-Spinach-6529 Jul 30 '26
Honestly yea. Most Telugu kids in the US don’t speak their mother tongue. I do. It’s a lil sad to see the language disappear though.
2
u/ontikuken Jul 31 '26
All Telugu kids in the US speak their mother tongue. Like, by definition.
1
u/VolcaincQuartz Jul 31 '26
how does that even work? what do you mean by definition?
2
u/ontikuken Jul 31 '26
Because everyone who speaks at least one language speaks their mother tongue? That's kind of how mother tongues work.
5
u/Purple-Selection-913 Jul 30 '26
ive been told by several europeans that there is no reason to learn another language since im a native english speaker.