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It’s hard to generalize about the immigrant experience. While there are indeed many cases where immigrant children benefit from continuing to speak their mother

It’s hard to generalize about the immigrant experience. While there are indeed many cases where immigrant children benefit from continuing to speak their mother tongue at home, there are also families who want to integrate with their new home countries quickly and aren’t interested in maintaining their earlier language and culture. People who were members of an oppressed ethnic minority in a country that they had to flee as refugees, for example, might prefer to focus on settling into their new country rather than trying to maintain the language and culture of a country that they may never be able to return to.

btilly 5y ago
The issue isn't one of preference, it is one of intellectual development. When you speak your native language to your children, it is easier for you to teach them how to think. And if they can think in your native language, they can transfer that skill to a new language. By contrast if you speak a language that you struggle with, your lack of fluency gets in the way of supporting your children's cognitive development. And a child who has never learned to think in any language, has a cognitive deficit that is hard to fix.
- darkerside 5y ago
  As someone who falls into that bucket, I like to think I don't have any (abnormal) cognitive deficits. I do regret not learning the language of my parents, but I have friends who are much less adapted to western culture than I am because their parents weren't so keen to assimilate. But who knows really? Perhaps I'd be even smarter if I were trilingual?
- II2II 5y ago
  Sometimes I feel like a broken record for saying this, but know the individual child and decide upon a course of action from there. I have seen everything from the heartbreaking circumstances of the author, where the child is unable to communicate with their own parents, to children who steadfastly refuse to learn the language of their peers. Both extremes result in social and intellectual development being stifled. In both cases, there is a need to help the child navigate a middle road in order to aid their social and intellectual development. That is before you even consider the typically cited benefits of being multilingual since it is only considering being functional in their communities.
- lhorie 5y ago
  The thing, though, is that "nativity" can get fuzzy depending on a variety of circumstances. I think a lot of new bilingual parents assume that all bilingual parents are like them: strong speakers of a native tongue who had kids shortly after a recent move to a new country. That's not always the case: there are bilingual parents that moved to the new country as children and may have varying degrees of mother tongue attrition, there are second/third generation parents and there are multilingual parents (e.g. immigrant parents whose parents speak a dialectic variation of the official mother tongue, or even completely different languages altogether) For many parents, the primary goal for promoting bilingualism is purely practical: speaking w/ grandparents and other family. For the most part, the child will still need formal complementary studies later in life if they want to truly master the parents' mother tongue to a grown adult's level of proficiency, especially for languages with little or no overlap w/ english. IMHO, the benefits of nurturing a mother tongue are largely coincidental: e.g. romance language learners get an advantage over pure english speakers from understanding latin-based radicals (especially for stuff like scientific nomenclature). But for many languages, maintenance comes with an opportunity cost aspect: my wife speaks Mandarin and actively maintains it, but that comes at a cost that her English vocabulary is not as well developed/polished as mine (as a romance language speaker who doesn't need to do virtually any upkeep wrt writing/reading skills and who enjoys vocabulary overlap between english and latin-originated words, etc)
roywashere 5y ago
For some years I trained with a man in his 60s who fled from Hungary in 68 to The Netherlands. He married a Dutch wife. He never learnt to speak proper Dutch, he still had limited vocabulary. In his professional life he had worked as a sailor, which means he would work with people from all over the world speaking a little English. And he also was no longer able to speak Hungarian anymore as he was no longer using that language. So he spoke many languages, but none fluently. I thought that was really depressing!
- HKH2 5y ago
  Language is just a tool, not an end goal. There is no perfect language or end state. I'm sure he was quite fluent in the basics. Language is to serve people, not people a language.

btilly 5y ago

The issue isn't one of preference, it is one of intellectual development. When you speak your native language to your children, it is easier for you to teach them how to think. And if they can think in your native language, they can transfer that skill to a new language. By contrast if you speak a language that you struggle with, your lack of fluency gets in the way of supporting your children's cognitive development. And a child who has never learned to think in any language, has a cognitive deficit that is hard to fix.

darkerside 5y ago
As someone who falls into that bucket, I like to think I don't have any (abnormal) cognitive deficits. I do regret not learning the language of my parents, but I have friends who are much less adapted to western culture than I am because their parents weren't so keen to assimilate. But who knows really? Perhaps I'd be even smarter if I were trilingual?
II2II 5y ago
Sometimes I feel like a broken record for saying this, but know the individual child and decide upon a course of action from there. I have seen everything from the heartbreaking circumstances of the author, where the child is unable to communicate with their own parents, to children who steadfastly refuse to learn the language of their peers. Both extremes result in social and intellectual development being stifled. In both cases, there is a need to help the child navigate a middle road in order to aid their social and intellectual development. That is before you even consider the typically cited benefits of being multilingual since it is only considering being functional in their communities.
lhorie 5y ago
The thing, though, is that "nativity" can get fuzzy depending on a variety of circumstances. I think a lot of new bilingual parents assume that all bilingual parents are like them: strong speakers of a native tongue who had kids shortly after a recent move to a new country. That's not always the case: there are bilingual parents that moved to the new country as children and may have varying degrees of mother tongue attrition, there are second/third generation parents and there are multilingual parents (e.g. immigrant parents whose parents speak a dialectic variation of the official mother tongue, or even completely different languages altogether) For many parents, the primary goal for promoting bilingualism is purely practical: speaking w/ grandparents and other family. For the most part, the child will still need formal complementary studies later in life if they want to truly master the parents' mother tongue to a grown adult's level of proficiency, especially for languages with little or no overlap w/ english. IMHO, the benefits of nurturing a mother tongue are largely coincidental: e.g. romance language learners get an advantage over pure english speakers from understanding latin-based radicals (especially for stuff like scientific nomenclature). But for many languages, maintenance comes with an opportunity cost aspect: my wife speaks Mandarin and actively maintains it, but that comes at a cost that her English vocabulary is not as well developed/polished as mine (as a romance language speaker who doesn't need to do virtually any upkeep wrt writing/reading skills and who enjoys vocabulary overlap between english and latin-originated words, etc)

roywashere 5y ago

For some years I trained with a man in his 60s who fled from Hungary in 68 to The Netherlands. He married a Dutch wife. He never learnt to speak proper Dutch, he still had limited vocabulary. In his professional life he had worked as a sailor, which means he would work with people from all over the world speaking a little English. And he also was no longer able to speak Hungarian anymore as he was no longer using that language. So he spoke many languages, but none fluently. I thought that was really depressing!

HKH2 5y ago
Language is just a tool, not an end goal. There is no perfect language or end state. I'm sure he was quite fluent in the basics. Language is to serve people, not people a language.