Spanish as a First Language

So I'm here in the studio with producer and new mom. Hey Maria, So Genie, you just had a baby boy, Martine.

Yes, and Maria we talked a ton about having kids that when I was pregnant, or when I wasn't pregnant, or little did we know that I was pregnant.

And the next week you were like, uh, I'm pregnant.

Say kay. And now he's seven months and it's flown by love it.

I love it.

And he's doing a lot of bad, bad, bad, bad bad.

So what language are you speak to him in?

We are speaking Spanish immersion, all Spanish all the time.

My son. That's what we did with Raul. It was monolingual Spanish one percent all the time.

And did it stick totally? Are you kidding?

He's multi lingual now he has a facility for language and he's not afraid of it because we've spoken well. First he was monolingual Spanish, and then when his sister came and that was where it got a little complicated. It was fine with him alone, just the three of us speaking Spanish.

Does she speak now? She speaks, but it's all hard. I had this conversation a lot with my husband Ernesto. He's from Peru, and he was terrified that raising our son here in the US meant that he wasn't going to speak perfect Spanish.

And then they're going to go back to the home country, and then they're going to be teased and made fun of, and then they're not going to want.

To speak Spanish. And that is exactly what happened to my brother. He was that kid who said, I don't want to speak Spanish. My parents are from the Dominican Republic. For the most part, we spoke Spanish at home growing up, as you can hear in these adorable home recordings from my childhood practice here. But my brother and I pretty much always speaking English and have since we were kids. We lived in small towns between Georgia and Alabama, so it wasn't like there was other kids or even adults

That is so cute.

That's you, that's little Genie.

Wow.

My mom used to sing to me in Spanish, Ye God, and she used to read books in Spanish. So I speak Spanish at home with Ernesto and little Marting, but now that I'm a parent myself, it kind of got me to thinking about the decisions that my own parents made in terms of language for me and my younger brother. So I wanted to figure out why was it that I learned Spanish at home and my brother didn't.

From Futuro Media and PRX, It's Latino USA by Maria Rosa and Today Espanol Spanish as a First Language, a story about the decisions Latino parents make, like me, when we decide to raise our children speaking Spanish. We first aired this show in twenty eighteen, but it's as relevant today as it was then. So let's revisit our conversation about raising kids bilingually now.

So my name is Godless Montago. Yeah, I like long walks on the beach sunsets.

That is my brother, or as I like to call him, Nerdo. He is literally a rocket scientist. Oh my god.

What.

I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of South Alabama. I got my bachelor's, master's and PhD in aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

He's literally a genius.

I have a brother like that doesn't speak perfect Spanish, by the way, and neither does Carlos.

There were two reasons why I didn't want to speak Spanish. One, it was hard for me. I didn't have the necessary vocabulary to talk to my parents in a way that I felt I could explain my ideas correctly. Since it wasn't my first language, it was tough for me to generate sentences to reply back.

So I get it right. We all feel embarrassment when we're uncomfortable with a language, but for my brother it seemed to go deeper.

You don't want people to think that you're stupid and laugh at you. You know, do you sit there and you just say, why bother speaking in Spanish when we all speak englishless is speaking English and that I'll be much easier.

We both lived in the same house, we both grew up with the same parents. I speak Spanish since I was a baby and Carlos didn't. So how does that work? How does that happen? I wanted to really understand and get inside my brother's head, figure out what it is that kept him from wanting to be kind of like a part of that culture and understanding the language. So I asked him what he thought the difference was between the two of us.

I think one of the things, Genie was the age gap. You and I are six years apart, I think over six and a half. Yeah, And so by the time I came into the picture, didn't the family already decide to speak English at home? As far as I understand, before I was born, you three spoke into Spanish all the time, and then when I was older, the house became an English thing.

I mean, I think that's that's a question for Mummy and puppy. Mammy two Milmo Cambrangealis Okay, Okay. I talked to Carlos last week. Yes, I asked my mom if there was a conscious decision to switch to English when my brother was little. I didn't really remember that being an actual decision.

We did change to English, but the situation happened that the preschool or kindergarten teacher when he was learning English, she said that he was having a harder times. So the situation wasn't that it was our decision. The decision was kind of may florous.

When Carlos was born, we lived in a tiny town in Alabama. We were the only Latino family there, and after that we moved to a suburb of Atlanta. It was not the international metropolis it is today. So the teacher explicitly said to you, don't speak Spanish to him at home because he's getting confused.

She didn't say Spanish per se, she said, don't speak two languages at home.

And what did you think about that?

Dat?

Did that make you feel?

Well? I was caring more about Carlos than anything else. In my time. You respect authority, and a teacher was authority. So if the authority said you cannot do this, we followed through.

So for her to.

Tell me that he was having a hard time, he just told me, I'm not going to make lie harder for him.

Wow.

So the teacher basically said, you're setting your kid back by raising him bilingually, which you know factually we know now is not true. I mean right, this has totally been disproven correct.

And I spoke to an expert about this.

My name is Lisa Badour. I'm a professor in Communication, scientist and disorders at the University of Texas at Austin.

I asked Lisa if she'd heard of cases like my brothers. You know, where a teacher tells the parent it's just better to speak one language.

I think that it's unfortunately a long term common practice that people do suggest to families that they speak only one language, and that's usually English, to their children, to prevent them from becoming confused.

It happens quite a bit, right, and it's not even something that's in the past, which is what I originally thought. The subject actually came up the other day in this Facebook mom group that I'm part of. One mom asked a question about her children being delayed and speaking. She was kind of wondering if it was because they were hearing multiple languages and hearing English with an accent.

But Lisa says, there's no real evidence that there's an increased risk for having language learning difficulties just because you're hearing and using two languages. We know that hearing and using two languages offers social and cognitive advantages.

So being bilingual is not related to learning difficulties. The teacher was wrong.

I think it was a frame of mind of the area. They were not exposed to seeing other people learning other languages, seeing other cultures. There was barely no immigrants in Alphaeda.

So there weren't a lot of Spanish speakers in Alpharetta, but our parents would send us to the Dominican Republic for six weeks at a time to be with our grandmother, like, go be with your family and speak Spanish.

Were you like, we're going to the domain Obama's or was it like, oh my god, we're gonna have to speak Spanish.

For me, it was like, oh, I get to go hang out with my cousins and be with family and stuff, and you know, the language was the language and you just spoken. But for him, I guess it was a little scarier.

I always told Axl your causin to speak to him in Spanish. But my sister wanted to take advantage of Carlos for Axel to learn English, and of course it was easier for Carlos to speak English, so then he just turned into English. So you know, for every angle if we went home, they were trying to use him for practicing, and then if he came here, we were in areas where Spanish wasn't that frequently spoken.

I feel your mom's pain. It is a challenge for us because the world has become smaller, and frankly, English is a very dumb language in the world exactly.

But then there's a part of speaking Spanish. That's kind of cultural right. Growing up for me, something just clicked. I started watching telenovelas, I read people in nefanol, and I got really into Latin music. But my brother was so different.

I mean, I was a metal head in high school and listened to a bunch of you know, fresh metal and metallica and all that.

Maria. It's kind of weird because it sounds like what he's saying is that a thrash metal metallic, a loving person cannot be Latino, but metal is huge in Latin America. Side note, my husband, who was born and raised in Peru, is actually a big metal fan. But that's another story. Aside from being like, you know, a metal head, skateboarding teenager, was there anything else that made you be like, I want nothing to do with this culture.

Oh that was probably just I was a lazy teenager. Probably probably I probably just didn't care. I just wanted to hang out with my friends. I mean, Bonnie when she met me in college, didn't even know that I spoke Spanish because I didn't act like it. I don't know, did you see something different?

No?

When we met it was I mean, I was just like I was dating any other American guy, and then it hid me when I walked into your parents' house and there was a lot of music playing and your parents were yelling in Spanish, and I was like, oh, oh, I mean, I didn't even know.

That's Bonnie, who is not Latina. She's white and grew up in Florida. She took some Spanish classes in high school but doesn't really speak. They've been married for ten years and have two beautiful kids, and they're living in South Alabama. So I asked my brother, you know, does he have any regrets about not speaking Spanish more when we were growing up?

What I wish something would be different?

I don't think so.

I mean, Mommy and Boppy moved to the United States to you know, to give us a better life, and that's that's where we grew up. And people speak English here. You know, I'm married somebody who only speaks English, and so I think that's just kind of how it is. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just you're just trying to convey an idea. That's what language is for, right, and so why would you purposely make it harder for yourself?

From my brother's perspective. It's kind of like English is easier, So why am I going to make my life harder by trying to speak Spanish? If I can communicate and I can convey my ideas in English, there's no incentive to speak Spanish.

Well, it seems like he just doesn't put being Latino Spanish speaker. It seems like that is not like his top three most important things in terms of his how he identifies and sees his.

Life, right. I mean, he might not have ever identified really with his Latino side, but now he's older and things change. Both of us have kids and we have to decide how we're going to raise them. I know what my stances on passing on my language and my heritage to my son, but I don't really know what's in Carlos's head or how he wants to raise his family. How old are the kids? Elena is four and Louis is almost two. Okay, wait a second, you noticed, didn't wait?

Okay, so I get a I have a hint, I have an idea of what happens. Do you know, dun dun dum coming up on Latino USA. Does Carlos speak Spanish to his kids? Stay with us? All right, we're back and I'm here in the studio with producer Gini Montalgo.

Hey Maria, all right, so Giny.

Before the break, we were talking about bilingualism and your brother and what his plans are for his own kids.

I mentioned earlier that Carlos didn't really like speaking Spanish when he was a kid, but he actually does speak it now. In seventh grade, you had the option to take a language, and he chose Spanish and continued on into ap Spanish in high school. He speaks it with an accent, but he's stuck with it and eventually he learned.

I think people think that bilingualism will just happen, and really it takes that kind of ongoing effort to value and you keep using your Spanish day after day so that the child understands that it's important.

I asked her about how you can get your kid to become bilingual when you have one parent who just speaks English and another parent that speaks English and.

Spanish, in many cases, it would be a matter of setting up more structured situations so that there's more opportunities to hear and use those languages. You won't be able to count as much on the naturalistic environment to provide enough input for the child to really get up and running with the first language.

Okay, so naturalistic environment could be For instance, like when I was born, my parents had just arrived to the US a year before that to study. They had tons of international friends, and little Genie arrives to two parents who speak Spanish and are surrounded by Spanish speaking friends. That is a naturalistic environment that in my case made it fairly easy to learn Spanish from day one. But when you have a home where there's only one parent who speaks.

It will probably require yet more effort on that parent's part is filingual.

Yeah, because I wonder at one point if the child then realizes, Okay, mom and dad are speaking in English, why am I bothering with this other language?

Uh?

Huh, It does happen, I think, But if you persist, you can get there.

So it's not impossible, Maria, it just takes work.

Because my husband is more dominant in Spanish, it was much easier for us to kind of be in the Spanish realm. But we never forced our kids. We never forced them to answer us in Spanish. And I got to tell you, there were times when I was like, that was a mistake. We should have been forcing them. I heard stories of some families where if you didn't speak Spanish, you wouldn't get fed if you didn't speak Spanish, No, no, no, steed, oh, you had to speak Spanish. And in our house, Hitman

It does take effort. And Maria, you know who's making an effort. Oh your brother, Oh my brother, Oh my God, making an effort.

Yeah, oh.

Huh, well so so, But Bunny, did you guys sit down and make a conscious decision that you wanted the kids to speak Spanish.

I feel like my inability to communicate with Carlos's extended family is something that I really don't like, and I don't want the kids to have to experience that. And I think that teaching them Spanish from a very young age. It just seemed like any help we could give them, would, you know, give them the courage to sort of embrace what is half of their culture and a language that's very essential to it.

Well, so, Carlos, what happens when they get to an age and they're like, well, buppy, you didn't want to speak Spanish growing up, so why do I have to?

You know, it's kind of like eating broccoli. I mean, if I don't eat broccoli, they won't do it either. So there's not really much I can say there. I think at the end of the day, I can make a conscious decision to talk in Spanish to them, and so if they want to communicate with me, they're going to have to understand it.

Whoa whoa Very different from Carlos in part one.

Yes, Carlo's Metallica. I'm going out on my skateboard and don't talk to me about Spanish.

Whoa Yeah? And Elena's favorite song is actually by Shiquita, which is super cute. So as the kids grow, the pediatrician is constantly monitoring their language development. One of the things that Carlo's talked to her about was bilingual children and.

The one thing that they said is that the reason why Elena understands me speaking Spanish, it's because I only speak Spanish to her. The reason why she doesn't talk back to me in Spanish is because I give her the opportunity to speak in English. Apparently, if I want to force Elena to speak in Spanish, I have to

I haven't been a parent for that long, but I get that a lot of it is picking your battles, kind of like, do I want to go there? My kid is throwing a tantrum? Do I really want to make them speak Spanish to me right now? But that's the thing.

Godless will have to make that decision, probably really soon before Lena gets much older, and then it's just going to have to be written in stone. And he's the one who's going to have to kind of live with that decision.

So I am still curious. What was the light bulb moment for my brother, Like what changed for him? Why all of a sudden, now it's okay to pass on your culture, when as a kid he was like, no, thank you.

What changed really was the fact that when I got older. I mean, you start to think about your heritage, and you know, you start listening to Spanish music on the radio, and you start playing this kind of music for your kids, and you want to give that heritage to your children. So I kind of just said, you know, I can't just keep being embarrassed and not worrying about it. So I just said, I'm just gonna, you know, teach this

I mean, do you recognize that you kind of like pushed it away, Like why now I want.

My kids to connect to that at least in some way, and maybe they'll do the same thing as me. I mean, they're growing up in South Alabama. So I mean, they'll probably just go to a bunch of crawfish boils and get a big truck.

But you can go to a lot of crawfish boils and own a truck and still speak Spanish, right.

You can talk about the truck in Spanish. Insightful.

I think it's because I have a family now. Before I think it was just about me. But now when you have a family, it's not about you anymore.

When I think about it, Maria, it's about fear. Right. As parents, we're terrified that our children aren't going to speak perfect Spanish, And as the child, you're terrified you're going to be made fun of for not speaking it well. And whether or not your kid learns to speak your native language and learns to speak it with an accent kind of depends on a lot of different factors that are totally out of your control.

Right, I mean, there's just so much to this issue. I mean, you know, whether or not you can get back to your home country, whether or not you have you know people who are able to speak Spanish full time at home, whether or not you have people who are able to speak really good English in the same home. So yeah, it's definitely hard, but godless.

I'm proud of him. I mean, he had a lot of fear and a lot of embarrassment growing up, but then he just kind of like had kids and was like, you know what, it's not about me anymore. So I'm going to kick the embarrassment to the curb and I'm going to speak this language because I want them to learn it. Imartin, imrting Martin. I'm going to keep singing Spanish songs to him, just like my mom sang to me. And I'm going to hope for the best, love.

You ask your.

Oh bluggy.

It kag, Oh my gosh.

So that's little Martin and he's singing Lama. He's two years old now.

Yeah, all day long he sings and he puts the words that he knows to the tune of la.

But it's all words in Spanish.

In Spanish.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's what he feels most comfortable with right now. Ya, So how's the Spanish thing going.

It's going.

The demos basubervien.

It's definitely harder than I thought because we speak Spanish at home, so that's not hard. But he's regardless getting exposed to two languages, so he's not speaking as fluidly as I see other kids doing at his age. So it's a little bit discouraging.

I mean, is that kind of like your own sense of feeling discouraged or someone telling you you should be worried?

Oh, it's my own mom guilt.

So here's the thing. There is this notion that you get really worried, But really your son is more brilliant than you can imagine because he's processing two languages at the same time. And so it's kind of like, can you just applaud yourself for doing that and for staying or attempting to stay positive?

Yeah, And I mean I definitely try to remind myself that I was kind of the product of the same kind of upbringing, and I am speaking to you in full sentences, so I guess I turned out okay.

Well, So, speaking of that upbringing, what's the latest with your brother?

Things are going good with him, he has another baby. Hey, they're still keeping up the same thing, you know, one parent, one language.

And does he feel good about the decision about making his family fully bilingual? Is he like one hundred percent?

Yeah? He says, the kids are listening to books in Spanish now too, so I'd say he's pretty committed.

Okay, Genie, So what are the next steps for you and Martine?

He just started a tooth program which we're adjusting to, but it's a fully bilingual program, so I'm very excited. I think he's going to make a lot more progress now, especially being around other kids.

But it sounds like you're doing the right thing. It's more just like, how do moms who want to teach their kids to be fully bilingual or stronger in Spanish?

First?

How do we do it in a society when all you hear is English? So kudos to you for doing it.

Kudos to you for doing it. That's it for today.

This episode was produced by Gini Montalvo and edited by Antonia Seedehidro and Marlon Bishop. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebau. Fact checking for this episode by Zoe Malick. The Latino USA team includes Julia Cruso, Jessica, Elis Victoria Strada, Rinaldo Lanoz Junior, Andreopez Brussado, Luis Luna, Johni mart Marquez, Marta Martinez, Nur Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Vanille Ramirez is our co executive producer. I'm also a co executive producer of the

Latino USA is made possible in part by the Heising Simons Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities more at hsfoundation dot org, Skyline Foundation and funding for Latino USA is. Coverage of a culture of health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

I'm not internationally known, but I'm known to rock the microphone. Sorry,