Or: you should have made more of an effort, as if toddlers put their fingers into their ears as soon as their parents speak Spanish. The poet Noel Quiñones, who was born and raised in the US, describes the experience of having Puerto Rican ancestry yet not being fluent in Spanish: "My last name an invitation to strangers who say: your parents should have taught you". I love the poem " 8 Confessions of My Tongue". When that is not the case, the reaction can be harsh. Language was used to keep us out."Īt the same time, and rather paradoxically, for those of us who inherited our ancestors' looks and names, there is often a wider social expectation that we would speak their language. My father became a secret to me."Įmily Chowdhury, a Berlin-based artist, spoke of rejection: "When my parents discussed things we weren't supposed to hear, they switched to Bengali. "So as a child, I thought he was speaking a secret language. "My father was born in Lebanon but he spoke Arabic only on the phone or with visitors or in restaurants," says Andrea Karimé, a children's author and storyteller in Germany. Many opened up about feelings they'd bottled up all their life. Once I started thinking about it, I couldn't stop asking people how it felt not to be able to speak their family's language. And why is that? Because suddenly there is only a focus on this one part of them and children soon sense that their other language is worthless. But when they go to preschool they only continue with one. "Most babies start by learning words in both languages. The survey and later studies by De Houwer and others across different countries and languages found that between 12% and 44% of children who grow up hearing two or more languages, actually end up speaking only one language. "I discovered how often it happens that bilingually raised children don't speak two languages," explains De Houwer, who is also the president of the International Association of the Study of Child Language. In 2003, she published results from a survey of language use in 18,000 families in Flanders, a Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. What kind of child doesn't learn their father's language?Īnnick De Houwer is the director of the Harmonious Bilingualism Network and professor emerita of language acquisition and multilingualism at the University of Erfurt in Germany, and one of the world's leading experts on how and why some families lose their languages. Now, tap on the newly-created ID, and it will give you two options to proceed-the same ones you saw when you launched Speek for the first time.Up until my conversation with Jacinta I'd thought there was something seriously wrong with me. Since this is your first time creating another ID, tap on the text field at the bottom, create a Speek ID, and hit Add. If you intend to use different Speek IDs to communicate with different people, Speek offers you the ability to run multiple instances with different Speek IDs.įor this, click on the hamburger menu icon and select Open Other Identity. Here, tap on the copy icon below the Speek ID field and send it across to the other user.Īfter this, they can add your Speek ID to initiate a connection request, which you can accept to start exchanging messages and files. For this, click on the hamburger menu icon and select View Speek ID. Accept a Connection Request in SpeekĪlthough using a contact's Speek ID is one way to add them, you can also send your Speek ID across to the other person and ask them to initiate the request. Once done, you can start exchanging messages and files with the new contact, just like you'd do with most messaging apps.
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