Deb's 'say thank you...' suddenly reminded me of...How many of Your Parents Spoke in their Other Language so you...

[electric_blue68]

wouldn't understand. 😄

I remember at our extended family get togthers on my mom's side (dad was an only child): we'd be sitting on our aunt's house's stairs (often at Christmas or New Year's) sometimes eating our buffet diner, and they'd be pattering away in Greek in the dining, or living room, etc! 😄

[FadedMullet]

1. My parents both spoke Slovenian, as did my grandparents and both of their extended families. So if they switched....

......to that language we knew that it was something they didn't want us to hear. This was in the 50's and 60's in Cleveland and was not uncommon.

[Diamond_Dog]

3. Lots of Slovaks and Hungarians in Cleveland back then!

[FadedMullet]

5. Yes there were. Drive a few blocks and you'd go from a Polish neighborhood, through a German one, then Italian.

[Diamond_Dog]

6. So true.

[electric_blue68]

12. Often true in NYC, too. Batches of majority ethnic neighborhoods...

Last edited Sun Nov 23, 2025, 08:33 PM - Edit history (2)

Hispanic, Irish, Jewish, and African-American, German in uppermost through Mid Manhattan.. Chinatown, Little Ukraine, little Italy in lower Manhattan.
Amongst others ther were Arab-American, and Carribean neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

[electric_blue68]

10. Ty....

My mom, her sister & bil, her 2 brothers, and one brother's wife, and our grandma (.mom's side).

[Diamond_Dog]

2. When my sister and I were kids

and we were at my Polish grandma’s house, she would converse with her Slovak neighbor in Polish when they didn’t want us kids to understand. Apparently Slovak and Polish are very similar??

[electric_blue68]

11. TY. I guess...enough?

One brother's wife (my aunt) was Polish but no one else. Idk if she picked up any Greek.

[MIButterfly]

4. My mother and grandmother would speak Polish in front of me

when they didn't want me to know what they were talking about. My grandmother always wanted to teach me Polish but I didn't want to learn. I regret it to this day.

I did pick up a few phrases, though.

[electric_blue68]

13. Ty. Hmmm, probably my mom and her mom occasionally spoke Greek in front of us.

I just picked up a few words, and phrases

[soldierant]

17. My mother and vrandmother sis the same with German.

That lasted until I got to high school and started earning German.

[electric_blue68]

20. Aha!

[skylucy]

7. My grandparents immigrated to America from Spain. My parents, aunts, and uncles spoke Spanish to one another.

[electric_blue68]

14. TY. I took Spanish in HS.

[Srkdqltr]

8. My mother could speak Polish with her sisters and parents. My dad could speak Italian.

So English was spoken in our house.

[electric_blue68]

15. Ty.

Greek my mom, and her mom. My dad and his dad - Ukrainian.

[CrispyQ]

9. No secrets in my family.

Both sides hail from Great Britain.

[electric_blue68]

16. TY. 😄

[ProfessorGAC]

18. Wouldn't Have Worked

My grandparents tried it until my dad told them I understood more Italian than my mom!
Not that I was ever fluent, but I always got the gist.
By the time I was 5 or 6, talking in Italian only stopped the other kids from knowing what they were saying.
Oops!
When in HS my dad's uncle would send letters from California. He spoke fluent English but never adapted to writing in English so the letters were in Italian.
I'd get home from school & my mom would hand me the letter and say "Read this so I know if it's important before dad gets home." Typically it was no big deal, just catching up but if was serious she wanted my dad to know as soon as got home.
My mom probably only knew 20 words in Italian that weren't food.

[electric_blue68]

21. That's pretty funny. You probably had some natural ability.

[ProfessorGAC]

23. Don't Know

Probably just surrounded it by it at a very young age.
I could spell & read at 3, and a kids mind is pretty absorptive so I probably just started piecing things together because my grandparents would actually speak Italian to the kids. Things like "in Italy we would say...".
I still remembered enough that as an adult I could communicate with folks that didn't speak English.
My most commonly used phrase though was "Si prega, ripetta lentamente" which means "Please repeat that slowly".

[electric_blue68]

24. Still, natural ability. I was often hearing my mom, and her relatives speaking Greek but didn't catch it....

Well, if you grandparents were saying things like "I Italy we would say...", then you were at times getting a guidance from them.

"Please repeat that slowly". 👍

As for spelling and reading at 3? Wow.
I don't have that many memories before about 4. At the more typical age I have some memory of the "how to" chart of upper and lower case letters in school. And the Dick and Jane books.

[ProfessorGAC]

25. Yeah, I Don't Remember It Either

I'm going by what my mom & dad said.
My dad was one of the guys that delivered milk to the supermarkets, so I apparently started reading the milk carton out loud at breakfast time.
I probably didn't have the slightest idea what "homogenized" meant, but could sound it out.
My earliest clear memories coincide with having the daily routine of kindergarten. That's probably common.

[debm55]

19. My gradeparents did. But I spent alot of time with my grandparents and understood Ukrainian some Yiddish.The swear words

I was never taught. I still remember some of the nicer words.

[electric_blue68]

22. Good for you. Hahaha - tbe swear worlds... I only know one mild one in Greek...

which means "Go to the devil ".

[rampartd]

26. sometime around the teddy roosevelt administration

my great grandfather changed his name from raul to ralph and declared that the family would no longer speak french at home.

i see it as a business decision during the peak jingo era, but bilingualism would have been a great family asset.

[DFW]

27. My sister-in-law and my son-in-law COULD have done that

And they SHOULD have.

Had they spoken their native languages with their kids, I would have had two nephews fluent in Japanese and two grandsons fluent in Russian. Instead, I have one nephew who can read and write Arabic (learned in college) and four grandchildren who speak both German and English, same as our daughters. Because we raised our daughters bilingually, one of them now earns seven figures a year, a job she got because she was the only candidate who had that last qualification (total fluency in German and English) on top of the other candidates.
She didn’t earn that in the beginning, but within ten years, she did—a salary I’ll never touch in my lifetime, and I speak nine and a half languages (it helps that she’s also a workaholic genius).

Rather than get frustrated, when I’m frequently somewhere where everyone speaks a language I don’t speak, I say, don’t get mad, get fluent. It’s very rewarding to watch their jaws drop when they realize how busted they are

[samnsara]

28. all my family has been here for generations so no other strange language besides my

grandmas Oklahoma accent

[SheltieLover]

29. My mom spoke Polish to her sister over the phone & dad sure let the Serb swear word a fly

[yellowdogintexas]

30. I am umpteen generations away from the first ancestors who arrived here.

Our language is Central Kentucky English, with all the hilarious idioms, so there is no special 'thank you' - just the accent.

My daughter married into a Persian family - Kurdish to be specific. Her inlaws speak English, Farsi, Arabic and two dialects of Kurdish. When his sisters and their mother get into mother/daughter/sister spats my daughter and I just duck and run! We have no clue what is going on. All the kids speak perfect English; the parents speak it fairly well and her mother in law has her own tailoring business. The big roadblock in talking to them is all the idioms in American English; I have had to explain a few of them from time to time.


Mr YD has a niece in law who emigrated from Mexico and a sister in law who is first generation born here Mexican. When we are all together the side conversations in Spanish get pretty wild. Makes me wish I had worked harder in Spanish back in the day.