Poll: Do/did you speak more than one language at home? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Do/did you speak more than one language at home?".
View the poll results »
| | | | neilmac
Spain
Local time: 21:42
Spanish to English
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When I was a child, my mother had studied French and German, and sometimes she would say to my dad "Pas devant l'enfant" ... and somehow I intuitively knew what it meant. Apart from that, no, we were a monolingual family.
However, since coming to live in Spain as an adult, there has often been a lot of switching between Spanish and English, or French, depending on the company.
| | | | Lieven Malaise 
Belgium
Local time: 21:42
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
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No, I didn't.
Interesting topic, though. Growing up learning 2 languages has advantages, the most important one ultimately being very fluent in both.
But if I'm not mistaken the big disadvantage is that most of those people end up with bad writing skills in both languages. This would be at least true in Belgium for the French/Dutch combo.
[Bijgewerkt op 2025-02-17 09:11 GMT]
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My father was born in Cape Verde but at home he only spoke Creole very occasionally. When I was living in Belgium I did a lot of switching between French and Portuguese, even now when I struggle to express my thoughts some words come into my mind more easily in French than in Portuguese…
[Edited at 2025-02-17 10:34 GMT]
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WolfgangS
France
Local time: 21:42
English to German
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I met my (French) wife in Italy where we lived for a long time. Now we're in France and speak both Italian and French, some German, too.
[Edited at 2025-02-17 13:27 GMT]
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... and it depends on the situation... while I don’t regularly speak other languages at home, working as a translator sometimes requires me to use my working languages in spoken communication.
It's more a practical necessity rather than a natural multilingual household environment.
Sometimes, I speak one of my three working languages to my cat and he picks everything 😂
Having a multilingual conversation with him from time to time is another way to keep my working language... See more ... and it depends on the situation... while I don’t regularly speak other languages at home, working as a translator sometimes requires me to use my working languages in spoken communication.
It's more a practical necessity rather than a natural multilingual household environment.
Sometimes, I speak one of my three working languages to my cat and he picks everything 😂
Having a multilingual conversation with him from time to time is another way to keep my working languages fresh! ▲ Collapse
| | | | Carla Selyer
Local time: 21:42
Member (2006)
Portuguese to English
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| Immersion in two languages | Feb 17, 2025 |
We grew up in a strict home where we were only allowed to speak Portuguese, although we were living in a predominantly English-speaking country. It was very strange to be immersed in English outside of home and then to be immersed in Portuguese at home, and the immersion extended to cultural influences, too. Nonetheless, it was fun to grow up bilingual and then to later study languages in a formal environment and it did put a love of all Romance languages and culture in me!
| | | | Juan Jacob
Mexico
Local time: 13:42
French to Spanish
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French with father, Spanish and Catalan with mother, English with The Beatles!
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Grew up mostly in Argentina so Castilian Spanish is really my native language. But my father's side of the family was all educated in British schools, and my grandfather, from Chile, would only speak to us in English.
My father and aunt who lived at home did so at least half the time.
My siblings and I did the same - mainly when we did not want our mom to know what we were planning
We were educated in Briti... See more Grew up mostly in Argentina so Castilian Spanish is really my native language. But my father's side of the family was all educated in British schools, and my grandfather, from Chile, would only speak to us in English.
My father and aunt who lived at home did so at least half the time.
My siblings and I did the same - mainly when we did not want our mom to know what we were planning
We were educated in British schools as well, and this is probably why we use a mixture of both languages in the same sentences. Either we don't remember the word in the language we are using, or our brains think the other language describes it better. Friends laugh & complain about this "quirk", and find it funny that we had a good education and still are "unable" to speak "normally".
P.S.: My dad had Alzheimer, and in the last 2 years of his life he suddenly started speaking only in English. This caused quite a bit of a problem with the nurses and doctors. Always marveled at the mystery of our brains & their relation to words & languages, probably part of why I love being a translator. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Vanessa Dias
Brazil
Local time: 16:42
English to Portuguese
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| Not as a child | Feb 17, 2025 |
But I've lived with italians for a while and felt this weirdness of, sometimes for days, using my mother tongue only in my thoughts.
[Editada em 2025-02-17 18:29 GMT]
| | | | Novian Cahyadi (X)
Local time: 02:42
Standard Indonesian and Javanese.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 21:42
French to English
Only English when growing up, then with my children there were always three different languages on the go.
We lived in a quaint little street with hardly any cars passing through, so children played in the street just like when I was growing up in the 60s. My son played with children of all sorts of different nationalities: our next door neighbours were Vietnamese, round the back they were Moroccan, opposite they were Serbs... The kids would play outdoors and sometimes go into each... See more Only English when growing up, then with my children there were always three different languages on the go.
We lived in a quaint little street with hardly any cars passing through, so children played in the street just like when I was growing up in the 60s. My son played with children of all sorts of different nationalities: our next door neighbours were Vietnamese, round the back they were Moroccan, opposite they were Serbs... The kids would play outdoors and sometimes go into each others' homes for glasses of water, plasters for scraped knees, and to raid the biscuit tin.
One day we were invited to dinner with the French couple who lived next door to the Serbs. My 4yo son heard the daughter speaking to her parents in French and asked "but why don't you speak to your parents in *your* language?"
He apparently thought that French was the lingua franca everyone used to communicate outside but at home everyone had a language of their very own. ▲ Collapse
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