Re: Bilingualism in 'migrant' children

From: mb (azythos2_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/06/05 

Date: 5 Jan 2005 19:04:50 -0800

quote 李守敦
"In some families with well educated parents in Hong Kong, the
situation is quite opposite. Although the parents are both native
Cantonese speakers and both grew up in HK, they speak English at home.
Their rationale: have the children exposed to English -- the
"prestigious" language -- as early and as frequently as possible, so
that their children can speak English well. But these parents do not
do it well. They don't speak English that well, and they do have an
accent. So, how can the children pick up good English pronunciations?
Worse still, being not native speakers, these parents often lack
expressions that they want. So, they occasionally switch back to
Cantonese to say certain things for convenience. Even worse, many of
them often uses a mix of languages. A family conversation can switch
between English and Cantonese without any predictable patterns.
Result? The children suffer. They can't speak either language
competently.
--------------------------------------

Nice description of the horrors of children growing up with no one's
mother tongue.
But of course there is no clear-cut line: many of the "educated" will
do that, and many of the less educated will do the right thing and
stick to mother tongue. Out of different reasons. It's just that on the
whole there seems to be some kind of a pattern, at least in Western
Europe, a pattern that possibly wouldn't even register on a statistical
test (in fact, the very few studies I'm aware of did not).

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