We’re loosing it: Why immigrants’ children need Russian language

Photo: Depositphotos.com.

Let me make a reservation: “Russian language” is conditional for the purpose of this article. It might be replaced with Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, etc. Dear parents, I am speaking of your mother tongue which remained your natural language in immigration but has become a second language for your kids.

“Mummy said it was dirty, I would not like it, and we didn’t go,” a six-year-old girl and her grandma were sitting opposite me in a subway train to Brighton and discussing a foam party in Mexico in Russian.

“Pochemu?” the granny asked. “It’s up to you,” she suddenly said in English with thick Russian accent, switching back to Russian after it. “You’re the one to decide whether you like it or not.” “Do you like it?” she asked the little lady in English again, “ili ne ponravilos?”

I wonder what it was all about. Those bites of questions in two different languages. I understand that the girl goes to school and her English is probably much better than her grandma’s. The granny feels it too, and hopes to catch up with her granddaughter. But in fact, she’s lagging far behind — she has been dragged down the stream, and the distance between the two is getting bigger and bigger…

What you should do here is preserve your Russian instead of trying to catch up with her English! It’s good that the old woman is learning the language of the country she had immigrated to. But it’s bad she uses it to communicate with her granddaughter… She thus deprives the little one of the opportunity to learn one more language, a complicated one, for free. And deprives herself of communicating with her dearest one: how will she talk to the granddaughter in her primitive English when the little lady grows up? She’s now trying to make her grandma understand. For now. Some of her phrases might be a poor translation, Russian words in English sentences, a loan translation. But it’s still said in Russian. And the grandma denies her from speaking in Russian. Really soon the granny will be raising her hands and clamor: “She doesn’t want to speak Russian! No dice!”

Why should she? Why should she speak your language? You taught her to respond in the language she feels closer to.

The situation described is a great demonstration of the major reason why mother tongue gets lost: parents are afraid that their child will forget or will not be able to learn Russian/Moldavian/Chinese good enough to communicate properly in it. They worry about themselves that they will not be able to learn English and are afraid the kids will help them learn it. So they huff and puff and “speak” English. But speaking is not enough for learning — you need to do much more. And while you can’t learn English this way, you lose your Russian at the same time.

Parents are scared, and that’s the major reason why you can hear phrases like “Ti like I don’t know like stranny chelovyek!”

Sometimes this mishmash is a sign of a different situation — you have a modest vocabulary size in your mother tongue. Having left behind your verbal environment, you lost your chance to speak just one language. As long as your vocabulary was hollow, simple phrases in English have filled it. And this is not being bilingual, I will explain it later.

The gravest instance of this mishmash is RuEnglish, ridiculous and merciless. It’s a language that distorts, breaks, and shapes words in a crazy and ugly way. I’ve been writing down phrases in RuEnglish for some time. The leader in this list is a question I heard in a supermarket some five years ago:

“Ti have eaten to chto ya shopped?”

Sometimes it’s a different story: both mom and dad make efforts and speak only their mother tongue, and a child does not take it for some unknown reasons. I’m a mother myself and I know how difficult it is to raise children who speak two and more languages. But if your child does not want to speak your mother tongue doesn’t mean you have to give up immediately. He/she does not speak your language, but you can’t speak his/her language (English in this case) at home. Why not? Speak only your language. Exclusively. Respond, explain, ask questions… Even if he/she keeps speaking English in response, don’t give up. It often happens that kids get interested in their parents’ mother tongue and culture when in high school or college. Give your child a chance to learn vocabulary as wide as possible by then. Just believe me — all of it gets stocked somewhere, piled up, and waits patiently in the wings.

Photo: Depositphotos.com

Pigs say ‘Meow,’ cats say ‘Oink’

Sometimes parents cut out their mother tongues saying “He gets confused.”

True, it does happen often: a child is born to a bilingual couple, and after some time the parents realize their child speaks worse and with fewer words compared to his peers. Or he can speak but confounds words. This situation is perceived as a catastrophe: the game’s up!!!

I wish these parents new about Nabokov and his three mother tongues — Russian, English, and French. He wrote his well-known book Lolita in English, and then translated it on his own into Russian. He sometimes complained the translation was not quite good. If you’ve read Lolita in Russian, did you find it “not quite good?”

Are those parents aware that Czarist-era nobility in Russia spoke four to six languages? From an early age, they spoke Russian with servants, French with mothers, German with nursery governesses, English with nannies, and took Greek and Latin in school. It’s not two or even three languages. And oh, a little nobleman probably confounded words and, oh, the horror!, addressed his mother in Russian and servants in German. But I feel this was a) shortly, b) not vital.

Far from eye, far from heart

“He will not need it!” Every time I hear this phrase, it surprises me to the core. Are you an incarnation of Nostradamus and can see the future of your child? How can you know? Do you have any guarantees that your child will not be a translator from Ukrainian to English, or a scout (why not?), or a teacher of Tajik in an American school for Tajiks, or a reporter writing about living in the U.S. for Moldavians?

Wake up. We live in a country where speaking several languages is not a peculiarity, it’s a norm. A salesperson in the grocery store where I buy fruit and vegetables easily switches from Uzbek to English and then to Russian. With the help of several phrases, she can get a deal from Mexican workers who deliver goods to her store every morning. She can hum inshallah as a buyer wearing a hijab tells her about her son’s plans to get into a good college… My hairdresser speaks one of the Chinese dialects, French, and English. And so on.

Now tell me who’s more competitive in our complicated times — your kid who is able to speak Russian in the manner “Seryozha, it’s time poyest vareniki”, or a bilingual person who can switch between languages in a blink of an eye? Why don’t you make a gift to your child — present him or her with another language? This will cost you nothing, and will protect your child from Alzheimer’s. This is what researchers have found: speaking foreign languages is kind of a vaccination from senility.

In addition, people who can speak two languages well, are better in concentration, more attentive and alert. Bilinguals can learn new languages easier: a third one is not a problem if you speak two others. They socialize easier; they have better communication skills, and so on, and so on, and so on. There are some downsides like they start speaking later and confound words. But given the pros, this con is too unimportant, isn’t it?

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