Hello, Bonjour and Ni Hao
Can you still speak your mother tongue?
I was born in an Asian household and to the best of my blurry knowledge, I don’t remember speaking anything other than my mother tongue, Cantonese. My parents, who had probably been in Canada for less than 10 years at that point, would most likely have been speaking Cantonese as well. And when they dropped me off at my grandparents’ place, I’m pretty damn sure they would’ve spoken to me in Cantonese too. At that point in my life, I’d say I could probably go toe to toe with a native speaker in Hong Kong and sound just like them. Then pre-school started.
Growing up in Montreal, French was the default language to learn in school. You could go the English route, but you had to satisfy certain requirements from either yourself or from your parents in order to attend (which in my opinion seems ridiculous since Canada has two official languages). My parents wanted me to attend an English school, (I mean they could barely handle basic English, French would’ve been Greek to them) however, I had to attend a French school first. Thus, from pre-school until grade 2, my education was completely in French.
These years were difficult for my parents as they couldn’t really help me in school. I still remember when I had to study for Dictées (a spelling test in French) and my mom would attempt to help me. She couldn’t even pronounce the words for me to spell. I basically memorized the entire sheet of words and I’d be telling her what words I’m spelling (while she’s comparing the words I’ve spelled to what she has on her sheet). The only subject which helped slightly was Math since that was numbers, but even then, there were issues. The biggest issue (and something I didn’t know till later when doing Math in English) was that the decimal sign is a dot in English but a comma in French. So 13.50 vs. 13,50. This understandably led to some confusion later in school.
Starting in grade 2, I qualified for English schooling but by this time, my parents were like screw it, might as well keep going on with French. So I did and from grade 2 all the way through university, I was in full bilingual. Somewhere in between, I started losing my Cantonese.
I had been going to Chinese school since I was young to learn the basics of reading/writing but by the time I reached grade 5, all my friends spoke English. I was watching English programs and reading mainly English. French was still communicated daily in school as it was part of my curriculum, however, Chinese was only once a week on the weekends. In a couple of short years, I had already lost most of my mother tongue. At home, I started speaking Chinglish, a form of English mixed with Cantonese to my parents (I’d like to say I probably taught them more English doing that than them attempting to learn). By the time I started university, I knew less of my mother tongue than before I started pre-school. University changed all that.
I started meeting many Asian students from Hong Kong and we all naturally bonded due to our heritage. But because their English wasn’t that great, I was forced to speak Cantonese with them and went on a linguistic-cultural adventure. From slowly ordering on Chinese menus to watching Chinese DVDs to singing karaoke. In the span of a few short years (again), I had evolved back to trilingualism.
Since university, my French has now suffered as Calgary, a majority English speaking city, doesn’t have many French speakers. I try to read French books here and there but I can feel it slowly starting to ebb away…ahhh the struggles of maintaining your “linguistic” identity.
It’s funny how things go, I know many people who have lost their mother tongue and I’m grateful that somehow, through some lucky experiences, I’ve been able to retain mine. Now if I could only get practicing on that French again…
