lancemcclain:

lancemcclain:

i asked my dad who lived in vietnam for his whole childhood up until he was about twenty and has lived in the states for 30 years and even HE told me that he doenst slip into vietnamese. he never has!!! its! not a thing!! that happens. you get phenomena like konglish and spanglish that’s born purely out of the experience of being an immigrant and having an immigrant child who mostly knows english. you have words that have clearer meaning and different imp,ications in one language than another. you have people forgetting what a word is in one language and remember it in another. but from my knowledge and experience as a bilingual person, i don’t just accidentally speak my native tongue. my native language is not an accident.

ive seen a couple ppl reblog this discussing code switching and times they Have accidentally spoken another language and here’s my Real gripe about the way this trope is played out: the language that the character, usually written as the child of an immigrant or an immigrant themselves, “slips” into is always the “foreign” one. and its always during moments of heightened emotions that they just cant seem to stay in english. i find it particularly suspect that people have built a narrative around immigrant kids “slipping into their native tongues” during moments of anger and other times they are “not in the right mind” (having sex, being drunk, etc) when the reality is that immigrant kids often struggle to speak their native language at all because of the mockery that we’ve faced in school. not only is it this implication that “foreign” languages are some kind of primal state for immigrants, it completely ignores the sheer imperialistic nature of english as a language