“Have you ever noticed how few of these children of Polish families actually speak Polish?”
Kinga asked — in Polish, of course — the other evening. She was speaking mainly of the children of a Polish couple who have been in America for more than twenty years, and who rarely if ever go back to Poland as a family. The children of these very nice folk usually speak to their parents in English, even though their parents often simply speak Polish to them.
Kinga and I both want our children to grow up bilingual, but that’s difficult enough when both parents are foreigners. When only one is a foreigner, it might be all but impossible. The language of society dictates what is Language One for the child, and not the language at home.
Where there is a community to support the use of the foreign language, it’s much easier. But North Carolina is no Chicago, and the opportunities to use Polish will be rare.
“We’ll just have to send the kids to Poland every summer,” I replied to Kinga. There’ll be Polish music in the house; we’ll eat Polish cuisine; I’ll try to speak more and more Polish at home; we’ll have Polish books in our library; we’ll just cram Polish culture down their throats! (That is a joke — in reality, there’d be no better way to turn them off of all things Polski.)
Will all that even be feasible, though?
One would think that instilling in them a sense of pride in and love for their heritage would suffice. But at a certain points in their lives, the “un-coolness” of being different would stifle any urge to speak Polish.
Perhaps I’m wrong? Hopefully I’m wrong. We shall just have to read a few books about raising bi-lingual children.
I went to Polish school on Saturday mornings. Polish church, Polish dance troupe, harcerstwo. (Strong community for a city pop.120,000.) Very uncool. Dance at least was fun, and school was somewhat social, but I always felt I was missing out on regular kid stuff. Turns out all I missed was Saturday morning cartoons. As a teen, I had a love/hate relationship with my Polishness, wanting to fit in/wanting to be unique. Like any teen.
Anyway, I pretty much stopped speaking Polish when I left home (not an act of defiance, just the way it is). All this to say, none of it did me any harm, some of it did good, I don’t regret it, even if I didn’t always love it, and it was years before I fully appreciated it.
I’m currently looking into sending my own girl to a Saturday Polish school, even as I worry that English, her second language, isn’t that strong. (Her “mother” tongue is French. Go figure.)
how about trylingual… ?? I just met Kinga a few weeks ago and I’m in a process of getting to know you guys better (just wrote an email to Kinga) but since this is a hot subjet for me I’m gonna say it here that we (me and my bulgarian wife) have 2 childrend and our 3-year-old simply won’t talk to us anything but english even though he understands polish and bulgarian perfectly (slacker!).. I guess it’s all because of the daycare where he spends 3 days a week also the fact that we still cannot decide what we want to speak at home – polish or bulgarian and still talk to each other in english.. really frustrating – I guess this is all to kind of defend the other polish folks and their children coz in my opinion there’s almost no other way but take your kids to Poland if you want them to speak polish (I know exceptions though so I’m not sure)… anyway.. cheers