• Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
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    6 hours ago

    Ah, well then hello fellow American! It’s great that you have retained understanding of your childhood languages. I took German in highschool and probably know about enough now to get myself arrested, or more likely just laughed at and I know none of the Irish Gaelic my family would have spoken when they emigrated in the mid 1800s.

    • Lol, it takes like just 1-2 generation for the language to be lost. I know alot of US-Born ethnic Chinese that speak very broken and heavily-accented Cantonese, zero Mandarin. These are the 2nd-gens, they still speak their ancestral language at home, but I bet by the 3rd generation, they are not gonna be able to speak it since the 2nd-gen’s primary language is already English so they’ll just be using that at home, since that is the path of least resistance.

      Idk if I’ll ever have kids, but if I do, I’ll try to pass on the language, but I highly doubt that kids growing up here would care to learn…

      Oh well… 🤷‍♂️ you can only preserve it for so long.