lingua franca

September 29, 2006 - 8:30 AM by

RR in Raanana has a new post that touches on, well, a somewhat touchy subject: When English-speakers move to Israel, how long can they keep up talking to their children in English, thereby passing down a useful language, when slowly the whole family is picking up more and more Hebrew?

My husband has a work colleague who was born and bred in the US and moved to Israel with her Israeli husband (kind of like what I did) several years ago.

Today she stopped by our house for a few minutes to leave something for my husband, and her children were with her. Imagine my surprise when I heard her speaking to them in Hebrew. Not English. Hebrew.

I didn’t say anything about it, but at one point she looked at me and said, “You must think I’m awful for speaking to them in Hebrew, huh?”

Before I could say anything she went on. “It’s just that my husband and I speak Hebrew to eachother (his English isn’t good) so I got in the habit of speaking to them in Hebrew, too.”

“Well, whatever works for you,” I answered.

I didn’t want to tell her that I think she’s making a big mistake. She’s passing up a chance to ensure that her kids will be fluent in a foreign language- and not some obscure little tongue spoken by only 500 people in the world. She’s blowing a fantastic opportunity to get them fluent in the language of the world, which can only be an advantage to them, in so many ways- school, career, etc.

Back when I worked for the English edition of an Israeli paper, I had a copy editor who had been raised in Israel, but her American parents had been so insistent on speaking only English in the house that even words pertaining to the Jewish religion had to be said in their English versions (eg “The Sabbath” instead of “Shabbat”). She said that it was often frustrating for her, but hey, now she works as a top copy editor at an English newspaper.

But it’s tough. I have friends with small children, and when the oldest first started going to nursery, I caught my friend asking the daughter “Would you like a prussah?” because it was just so much easier to use a word the child understood already, from school, than to offer a sandwich. You can’t blame her . . . but now the child isn’t learning the English word. It’s a tough call.

Tags: • Category: Immigrant Moments 

Comments

One Comment on lingua franca

  1. Tif on Sun, Oct 1st 2006 9:22 AM

    2. It’s difficult, of course, but it can be done. I was raised in the US, by an Israeli mother and an American father (whose Hebrew wasn’t great), and my siblings and I all speak fluent Hebrew, with no accent. It required some strictness from my mother – no English was allowed in the house except when there were non-Hebrew speaking guests – but all three of us are really grateful she didn’t give it up.

    Now that my husband (also a child of Israelis raised in the US) and I have made Aliyah, we’re slowly getting used to the idea that we’ll have to do exactly the opposite of what our parents did – speak only English with each other and our kids. It’s hard raising your kids not in the language your parents spoke to you, and there’s something funny about our kids growing up speaking English after all our parents and us went through to preserve the Hebrew and to make Aliyah, but native knowledge of English is one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids, and we know we owe it to them to do that, after all our parents did to give us native knowledge of Hebrew.

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