Adults overseas speak Taiwanese, but use Mandarin with children - why would they?

[jacho]

I was born in a Spanish-speaking country from Taiwanese parents, and, as you can see, I also know some English. Lucky to know so many languages and so different cultures, you may think. It is not that good, however, to be sitting at the table with your parents and not understanding a word of what they say. For some reason, they have always used Mandarin Chinese with me and my sisters, but they will use among other Taiwanese their natural language - Taiwanese. We can't discuss anything important with them, we can't really share with them, all our conversations are superficial, because they don't really feel comfortable at speaking Mandarin. And I am not the only person to whom this happens. There are many Taiwanese overseas descendants with the same problem of not understanding what their parents say.

Can you think of any reason for this? I was sent to the local "Chinese School" here in Chile. It's a good thing that they want us to keep in touch with our own culture, but, why not learn Taiwanese too? Is it regarded as too informal? Most importantly, why didn't they speak it from the day we were born? I haven't asked my own parents, but I don't dare either.

[Yuchi]

They probably do t because mandarin is more important to learn and is more likely to help you later in life than taiwanese.

My parents only spoke mandarin to me, but I got enough time with them to pick up the shanghainese (luckily)

[bhchao]

My father speaks Cantonese because that is his first language, but speaks Mandarin to me and my sister.

Everyone on his side of the family speaks Mandarin to their children even though the first language is Cantonese.

[wushijiao]

I'm not an expert on this, but I think there are perhaps two factors:

1) This follows the general trend of people who speak all sorts of Chinese dialects/languages speaking Putonghua to their children. It's interesting to notice how most Shanghaiese toddlers seem to speak very clear Putonghua, while the older generations speak Shanghaihua. My wife's (Vivien on this forum) mother only spoke Putonghua in the home instead of a local dialect. Most parents probably want their children to speak with the most socially valued accent in order to improve their prospects in business and education. Also, since most people (at least in the Mainland) consider all 话's to be branches of Chinese, they don't feel like they are selling out their heritage by favoring one spoken form over another.

2) Out of curiosity, I have been doing a little research on raising trilingual children. Here is a good site I came across:

http://www.trilingualism.org/

It seems that most parents who plan to raise their kids trilingually seem very nervous and anxious as to whether their children will be able to learn all the languages, whether their children will be slow in learning the main language of the environment (Spanish, English..etc), and thus consequently will have social problems and problems fitting in. I would especially speculate that any immigrant that has faced lingustic discrimination would opt to shield their kid from facing the same discrimination by making sure that the kid could speak as well as all of his/her peers.

Jacho- by the way, I used to live in Peñalolén and las Condes, next to la Escuela Militar.

[Ian_Lee]

My personal experience is a little bit different.

My father is a Chaozhouese but he just talked with me in Cantonese (I regret that I didn't pick up any Chaozhouese since it is quite popular in Thailand).

Now when I am in US, I principally speak Cantonese with my kids while they learn Mandarin at school. So when they read Chinese material, i.e. Chinese newspaper, they speak it loud in Mandarin. But when they talk to me, they talk in Cantonese with a mix of English.

I guess that is another form of trilingualism. But I don't worry about their Cantonese even though they don't study it because there are plenty of Cantonese movie videos to supplement their knowledge about Cantonese.

Another reason I insist that they know some Cantonese is because that may be the only language they can communicate with me when I am getting old.

I recently find out that my aging father has gradually lost his knowledge about Cantonese and English which he picked up in school years and only understands Chaozhouese.

Another interesting thing is that even though I can hardly speak any Chaozhouese, I can still comprehend 80% of any dialog conducted in Chaozhouese which probably I picked up from the daily conversation between my father and uncles when I was a kid.

[wushijiao]

Ian_Lee- That's too bad to hear about your father. Do you know if that is a common phenomenon?

In any case, I'm sure that your kids will appreciate being raised trilingually. Compared with 10 or 20 years ago, it is probably much easier to create a good language learning environment now that people can order all sorts of foreign-language DVDs, CDs, and books on-line, not to mention other Internet learning aids.

[Gary Soup]

I was once on a gambler's special bus from San Francisco Chinatown to Reno. The tour escort was a man from Nanjing, and he would periodically address the group in Mandarin, though some of the older passengers only understood Cantonese. Finally one younger man admonished him:

"This is America," he said. "You should learn a little Cantonese!"

[beirne]

Here are some thoughts from my Chinese teacher, who asked me to post them here:

This is a dilemma parents who live in a different country go through.

There is no right answer. It depends upon how much time and energy you want to put into letting your children know English, Chinese and the parents' dialect. Compounding the challenge is when parents do not speak the same dialect or language. I do think that children can pick up the dialect or language at home if there is reinforcement at home or if they hang out with classmates or friends who also speak the same dialect or language. They don't want to be ostracized.

I always hear people say that children can easily pick up English once they are in school, but if you want them to speak their parents' dialect or mother tongue, they have to start when they are babies. One thing to consider is grandparents. It is sad when grandparents cannot communicate with their grandchildren or when children cannot even communicate with their parents!

There have been many instances when young people would comment that they wished they had learned their parents' mother tongue. Some end up taking Chinese, for example, in college. One observation--some children do not want to speak their parents' dialect or language at home. Parents who don't have the time or energy end up speaking English with their children.

Having been grown up in the Philippines, we spoke Fujianese at home and learned English, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Spanish in school. I am glad about this; however, I didn't feel that I learned Mandarin and Spanish well because there were no opportunities to speak Mandarin and Spanish except in class. School was overwhelming! I wished now that I had also learned to speak Cantonese! We also learned Tagalog for survival. One of my father's employees used to read Tagalog comics to me when I was a little kid. I came to like the language hence learned it well.

As kids, many of my classmates leaned towards either English or Mandarin. The super-achievers mastered both languages, i.e., they were the "A" students in both the English and Chinese classes, and of course, everyone hated them because they are so smart :-) The Chinese school we went to taught two sessions of classes--the medium of instruction in the morning session was English; the medium of instruction in the afternoon session was Chinese. Tagalog and Spanish were required courses in the curriculum. Then I went to school, most of my classmates preferred English. I will say that it takes a lot of discipline and hard work to do well in both sessions.

[geraldc]

I don't think dialect problems are limited to overseas Chinese, my grandfather only spoke fujianese, so my father (my dad only speaks cantonese and mandarin) was never actually able to speak to his father in law without someone translating for him. My uncle's first dialect is fujianese, and he used that to speak to my grandparents, but his wife's from Shanghai (where he studied) so he speaks to her in Shanghainese, but they both speak to their kids in Mandarin.

I think most overseas parents would prefer their kids to have good knowledge of one particular dialect, rather than passing knowledge of several, and if they know one of the major dialects, mandarin or cantonese, then so much the better.

I know in the UK there are quite a few people who were brought up speaking hakka, and they kind of feel a bit left out, as they don't really know mandarin or cantonese, so although they can communicate with their families, they can't really communicate with other Chinese in general.

[random]

I don't know if this is of any interest to anyone, but anyhow... I once attended a Chinese school with one of my friends (Taiwanese... I don't know how he dragged me into it!) The majority of the students there were Cantonese, and so was the teacher (judging by the accent). It made me curious, because, in my mind, Cantonese is perhaps the lingua franca of overseas Chinese, and yet, all the parents wanted their children to learn Mandarin.... I suppose it would be inderstandable if they were native speakers of a less prestigious or well-known dialect, but meh...

[Ncao]

I think most Chinese parents want their children to learn Mandarin because it's the official language of China.

[Ian_Lee]

Why don't overseas Chinese send their kids to learn the dialect that they speak?

The answer is very simple. Because there is hardly any Sunday school that teaches dialects. Most, if not all, teach Mandarin.

Anyway, why do their kids need to go to learn any dialect if their parents speak with them in their dialect?

That is the case with my kids. If they speak English to me, I ignore them. Then they will switch to Cantonese that I speak.

And it is a bunch of total BS that the kids cannot pick up English if they don't speak English at home. My kids score above 90% percentile in SAT English test albeit they speak Cantonese at home.

Sometimes I pity those parents who are barely able to speak English at all try to communicate with their kids in English!