Afraid of English

Lilian’s Ambivalent feelings about the influence of the majority language.

Before I came to live in this country, when I first visited it back in 1993, I noticed something interesting in the Brazilian expatriate families that we visited all over the East Coast. The young children spoke very little Portuguese and mostly English, and I noticed that this brought about a significant separation between the children and the parents, since many of the latter spoke very little English. The children seemed fully immersed in the culture because most of them went to day-care or to school; the parents, on the other hand, seemed to be struggling to adapt to many aspects of life. More than ten years later this has become a key element in my decision to focus on one language in our home even though we first started speaking both languages. Of course in our case, the gap between the children’s mastery of the dominant language and culture and the parents would not be an issue, but I confess that I still fear that once my sons go to school and realize that English is the language with more “prestige,” that they will start speaking it between themselves and with their friends, even Brazilian ones, and that Portuguese will be left aside. Every time we meet new children of Brazilian parents that tend to speak mostly in English, I shudder, thinking about the future. Because of this, I started to pay close attention to my older son’s interaction with other children.

Once a week, we get together with our Brazilian friends. There are two children, Maria Julia, who is 5 years old, and Matheus, who is 3, who play a lot with my sons. They were both born here and have never been to Brazil, so although they (especially the girl) can communicate in Portuguese, they make several mistakes and sometimes use an English word here and there. They do not have an accent, though, as I have seen in a few children of Brazilian parents who are born here, but maybe they will have it when they are older, as is the case of another friend’s teenage children. Matheus has never talked much, but he recently started going to a day care center daily instead of staying home with his dad or with a sitter, and all of a sudden he’s speaking much more – mostly in English, though. Maria Julia has always spoken to Kelvin in Portuguese because she knows that he cannot speak English yet, but lately she has been speaking more to her brother in English while they play. This has fed on my son’s growing interest in the English language, although sometimes he’s still torn between the two languages. I have started to pay close attention to their interactions so I can see how my son reacts.

A month ago the three of them were pretending that they were in a restaurant. One of them would order and the other(s) would serve the “food.” I noticed that Maria Julia started speaking English and was amused to see Kelvin respond (in English): “Speak Portuguese, please!” (Quite the opposite of Geno Steaks’s request for customers to speak English that I wrote about in my last column!). She complied and they continued playing. Last week, my sons were at the playground with Matheus and I noticed that Kelvin was speaking in English to him and everyone else. “Excuse-me” he’d say if there was someone blocking the passage on his way to the slide. “I am going there,” he said once to explain to a boy that he wanted to take his place, and “I’ll go first,” when he wanted to be the first in the slide. I was very surprised at his quick progress, and I actually felt a bit nervous about this.

It has been over a week since he last interacted with his friends, but now I noticed that he has been practicing his English as he plays on his own. He adores Thomas The Train and his friends, and has two DVDs as well as toy trains that he plays with quite often, and takes everywhere. Yesterday I was working on my dissertation when I heard him talking to himself while playing with his trains in the hallway just outside my home office:

“Faster. My train is going faster,” he said.
I asked him (in Portuguese) “Do you know what faster means?”
“Yes, of course!” He replied, also in Portuguese, “It means ‘fast’ [rápido].”
I corrected him saying it meant faster (mais rápido), or literally “more fast” in Portuguese and then he asked me how he could say “less fast” (menos rápido) in English – I asked whether he meant “slower” (mais devagar) and taught him the word slower.

A few minutes later, he started talking to himself again in English: “Gordon is blue and James is red, but the caboose of my train is black is not red, it is black.”
“Who’s red?” I asked.
“Mama,” he answered, slightly exasperated, “I said, James is red!”

Sometimes, he wants to know what we are talking about, yet he does not want us to speak English. Later in the day, when we were in the car and my husband and I were talking about a news story we heard in the radio and started speaking English, Kelvin said: “Papi, please speak Portuguese with me!”
Today I was very amused to hear Kelvin, who was playing with trains in the living-room, teaching a new word to his brother (who is 26 months and speaks a lot – all in Portuguese): “speechless” – in English! He was teaching each syllable of the word with a bit of a Brazilian accent, like this: “ees-pee-chee-less,” but when he pronounced the whole word, it sounded perfect. Then he said: “I am speechless.”

At this point I was burning with curiosity to know whether he knew what he was saying and how he had learned to say it. I ran downstairs and asked if he knew what speechless meant and when he did not know, I explained it to him. He also told me he had heard that sentence in the Thomas DVD. After I came back upstairs he kept on repeating “I am speechless” to his brother, and I heard him say (in Portuguese, except for the word in question): “Not talking,” Linton, “speechless means not talking.”

I hope that in the months and years to come I learn to relax and enjoy their English acquisition process, because there is no denying it will happen, even if they have very limited interaction with English-speaking children and only listen to English on television or when we go out to the store and playground. I have to admit that find it hard not to be afraid of English and my older son’s fascination with it only reinforces my qualms. However, I have to keep in mind that we as a family have already ensured that my sons have a firmly established mother language, Portuguese, and now we have to allow them to continue expanding their universe to include English and other languages, so they can become truly multilingual children.

Lilian would love to hear your stories and opinions about these issues. You can email her at: lilianpw@gmail.com.

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Lilian W. is a monthly contributing editor and columnist for the Multilingual Living Magazine. She is a foreign student from Brazil currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in the humanities. She and her husband speak Portuguese at home with their sons, but she is hoping they will start learning English soon. Check out her family’s journey in her One Family One Language column each month. You can learn more about Lilian at her blog: http://mamaintranslation.blogspot.com.

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