Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, callanish wrote:
>
> > >> It can be fun to hear someone speak in one lingo, and the
> > >> person they are talking to answer in another. It can be
> > >> interesting..
> >
> > Certainly! It's even more fun to be one of the parties in such a conversation
> > ;-)
>
> I do it at home all the time.  <rueful look>  For some reason or other I
> stopped speaking Korean in the house (except "nae" for Yes, Mom, I know,
> I'll get around to it) late in 5th grade, after we'd moved back to the
> U.S.  So my mom speaks to me in Korean, and I reply in English, and
> everything works out fine.  (My dad speaks English to me and my
> sister--he's got much less of an accent, though I've had people who
> assumed my mom was stupid or just not fluent enough to understand what
> they were saying in English be unpleasantly surprised.  <sardonic g>
> I've learned *never* to assume a heavy accent/English difficulty means
> stupidity...especially with all the foreign grad students I tutor in
> writing at Cornell....)
>
> I also saw a lot of code-switching go on at my high school, which was
> international.  :-)

In my city there are substantial Hispanic and Haitian minorities, and at
my high school code switching goes on all the time, especially in my
French class, which has a really high concentration of
creole-speakers/understanders.  The only problem is, some people don't
think it's so cool to be multilingual.  At the Catholic school in my
city a kid was suspended for speaking Spanish to her mother on the phone
(the mother didn't understand English) because she could have been
saying something "bad."  Seems like the gut reaction from people is that
"if he's not speaking something I understand, he must be talking about
me" but a lot/most of the time this is just not true.

Nicole