Tearlach61 wrote:I have a co-worker. Her father moved to the U.S. in his twenties. He has only ever spoken to his children in English. It is a very common decision made by immigrants here in the U.S.: in this house we speak English. Why can't that work the other way in favor of Gaelic?
You yourself said it:
You know, over the years, there's been a lot of Gaelic parents who speak to their children in a non-native language i.e. English!
Because this is a strategy for abandoning languages, it works when you drop one language in favour of the locally dominant language. As Alasdair said:
AlasdairBochd wrote:Ann a sheo, bhios na cloinne mar sin a dol dhan a sgoiltean agus cluinneas iad Beurla a-mhàin fad an latha. Mar eiseimpleir, tha blas trom Albanach aig m'athair, ach blas trom Astràilianach agam fhìn. Ionnsaich cloinne cuid as motha na chànain aca am measg na chairdean aca. Gu dearbha fhèin, tha faclan agam nach do ionnsaich mi às mo phàrantan !
Your coworker's parent's "English at home" policy may actually be irrelevant when it comes down to it -- perhaps the majority of your friend's childhood learning of English occurred in the community. In fact, there's an argument that English-at-home among immigrants actually is an impediment to the natural acquisition of English -- the parent's flaws interfere with the natural English of the community. The English-at-home policy robbed your coworker of her family tongue -- how can she visit the relatives back in whatever "old country" her folks were from? -- just as the English-as-the-language-of-progress is robbing the children of Gaels of their local language.
I believe, like many, that regardless of the local language, the mother should always speak her mother tongue -- "mother's tongue is mother's milk", as Gandhi said.
Tearlach61 wrote:My point and Fionnlagh's is there are people, learners, who are fully capable of speaking to their children in Gaelic who aren't. We're not talking about those who are not capable and aren't.
I've not met them -- and my experience of English speakers abroad says that it's a vanishing minority of statistical insignificance. What I'm saying is that the number of learners capable of doing it is not enough to "save" the language, but the number of well-intentioned learners
not capable of doing it is more than enough to do irreperable damage to the language.
I've heard the following from a few parents:
"Och, I make mistakes, but that's OK, as children are better at picking up languages than adults."
There seems to be some misapprehension that this means that children don't pick up their parents' mistakes. That's nonsense: there's nothing to tell the child that these are mistakes as there is no universal "truth" in language that can be independently discovered -- a language is whatever you hear around you, and it doesn't matter how good you are at learning: if you hear it wrong, you'll learn it wrong.
Pushing non-native parents to speak to their children in Gaelic just strikes me as an extremely dangerous thing to do. Even more dangerous is encouraging new parents without Gaelic to learn the language "with" their children. Selling this by pointing out the benefits of bilingualism is totally disengenuous, as most studies of bi/multilingualism have focused on naturally bilingual environments with fluent models of the languages involved. Children brought up in non-fluent models suffer from problems in expression. This is documented the word over, yet many parents the world over ignore their native tongue and try to teach their kids English (or some other dominant tongue) that they themselves haven't mastered. In attempting to give their kids an advantage, they leave them disadvantaged: unable to get jobs locally due to a lack of the local language and unable to get jobs elsewhere because of their heavily accented and idiomatically and grammatically incorrect English.
