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Having a "default" language with someone | ||
Tags: Code-switching | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Tally Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Israel Joined 5613 days ago 135 posts - 176 votes  Speaks: English*, Modern Hebrew* Studies: French | Message 9 of 20 04 May 2010 at 5:23am | IP Logged |
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Oh yeah definitely. I always speak to my dad only in English, and If suddenly I start
speaking Hebrew, it's so strange! Also to a friend of mine, speaking a different language other then what i'm used to speaking is weird. To my siblings I speak Hebrish, being bilingual I always speak both of them in a mishmash, I've got to stop doing that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ennime Tetraglot Senior Member South Africa universityofbrokengl Joined 5909 days ago 397 posts - 507 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, Esperanto, Afrikaans Studies: Xhosa, French, Korean, Portuguese, Zulu | Message 10 of 20 04 May 2010 at 12:26pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, when I'm speaking in a certain language when I meet someone for the first time I
usually stick to it, kinda goes automatic. Like one Korean friend I have here, we speak only English with each other since that was the language that was being spoken when we met. Then another Korean friend here I speak mostly Korean with since we met just the two of us and started speaking Korean. Kinda the same with French speaking friends here and Xhosa friends... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g.polskov Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5257 days ago 37 posts - 50 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 11 of 20 22 January 2011 at 8:11pm | IP Logged |
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I knew a guy from the UK that I met through Argentinian friends. As these guys did not speak English, we would always speak Spanish together. We eventually hung out without these guys once, and thought about switching to English (which is his native and my strongest foreign language) because it made more sense. But it felt too awkward; we did not keep it.
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| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5068 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 12 of 20 23 January 2011 at 6:06am | IP Logged |
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I've always talked Spanish with my sister, never English. During college, she met a man from Taiwan, and of course, they had to communicate in English because his native tongue is Mandarin. She went to live with him and his Taiwanese roomates, so she was speaking more English than Spanish. After they got married, they moved away to live in their apartment. When I went to visit her this past August, she would end up switching from Spanish to English when we were talking. I found it so alien and jarring that I would just gape and continue in Spanish.
I also find it hard to respond to my mom's friend in Spanish when she suddenly speaks Spanish to me. Most of the time I reply in English. As for my friends, who all know Spanish except one, it's pure English. It would be way too weird to suddenly change to Spanish. O_o Oh, and I always speak Spanish to our pets. I don't think they would listen in English anyway. :P - Kat Edited by Phantom Kat on 23 January 2011 at 6:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6664 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 13 of 20 24 January 2011 at 1:10am | IP Logged |
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My college had a dormitory where students took a pledge to speak only French in the building. After the first few days, almost nobody spoke French. We all spoke English unless someone from the faculty was around. It just wasn't natural for us as English speakers to use any other language with other speakers.
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| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5771 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 14 of 20 24 January 2011 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
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Definitely. My default language with my girlfriend (who speaks Belgian French natively) is German, and speaking English to her feels very weird for me and consequently my efforts to revive my French also hit a wall because of her own difficulties in switching "default language" with me - we can't speak French together, it always ends up switching back to German - which is great now that we're spending a week in Vienna together, but a pain in the neck when we're at home. My girlfriend can also not speak English to her best friend, who is French, even when we are all together with our monolingual friends, which excludes some of them from their side of the conversation somewhat and frustrates a lot of them - but it is truly very difficult to do anything about it; old habits die hard. Another example is within my own family. Since meeting my half brother, I have always spoken German with him - it feels weird to even hear him speak English. Another example is my dad, who is Italian. He never spoke Italian to me as a kid but I have been making attempts to "activate" my pretty good passive Italian in the last couple of years, but it's proving really difficult because we are both so used to speaking English together - even when he, my half-brother and I are having a conversation, my brother and I will speak Italian to our dad, dad will reply to my brother in Italian and to me in English - and he says he can't help it.
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| alys.d'orival Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 5324 days ago 14 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2, French Studies: Latin, Nepali | Message 15 of 20 11 February 2011 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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My partner is German and my native language is English, yet our default language was originally French since we were living there at the time. Our focus switched to English partly because I was away at the time with a bad internet connection and couldn't understand his French as well as I could his English over skype and because I was starting to learn German and he found it easier to explain in English rather than French. So we started speaking English most of the time until I moved to Germany and started speaking more German.. So now it's a mix mainly of English and German and often French as our 'private language'. Hearing him speak both English and German was very strange after getting to know him in French, but I got used to it.
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| Felipe Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6035 days ago 451 posts - 501 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Italian, Dutch, Catalan | Message 16 of 20 12 February 2011 at 12:53am | IP Logged |
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I speak only Spanish to my kids. They know that they should only speak Spanish back. Sometimes I catch my daughter saying something in English, and I make her restate it in Spanish. The house rules are that we speak either Spanish (to me) or Portuguese (to my wife). The interesting thing is that my kids will speak Spanish to each other when I'm around and Portuguese to each other when my wife is around. If we're both around they usually go with Portuguese, since I work and they're around Portuguese more. Edited by Felipe on 12 February 2011 at 1:25am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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