What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

a note on bilingual consent

Whenever I take my son to his favourite park, the one closest to our house, he often ends up playing with bilingual kids, whose supervising parents just as often have English as a second language. This means their kids - who are, like my son, younger than school age - automatically switch back and forth between English and a different language during play, just as their parents switch back and forth while talking to them. I’ve attempted to learn a number of languages over the years, and while I’m not proficient in any of them - I was a lazy student who struggled with grammar, though my pronunciation and vocabulary were always decent - the one thing I have remembered is how to say a smattering of basic words, including yes and no.

Right now, my son is three and a half. He’s big for his age and enthusiastic when playing, and the thing we’re trying hardest to teach him is respect for the word ‘no’. (That thing about teaching consent to kids at a young age? Absolutely matters. The parallels between childhood and adult behaviour become clear *really quickly* when you’re constantly saying stuff like “just because he said yes to sharing before doesn’t mean he wants to share now”, “she’s allowed to say no to playing with you”, “stop if the other person isn’t having fun”. BUT I DIGRESS.) And what I’ve noticed is that, when he’s playing with bilingual kids, they’ll often say 'no’ - a very popular word among toddlers, for a variety of reasons - in a language other than English.

So what I’m trying to do, with my very limited knowledge of other languages, is to listen for when that happens and translate it for my kid, so that he understands it, too. “If he says la, that means no, and you have to stop. If she says iie, that means no, and you have to stop. If he says bu, that means no, and you have to stop.”

This last came up at the park today, with a mother who was alternating between Mandarin and English with her three-year-old. I only ever took about three very basic Mandarin lessons more than five years ago, and I wasn’t sure I’d remembered the word correctly, so I asked her if I had it right, and explained why I wanted to know. She confirmed that I did, and we continued a pleasant conversation about our respective offspring, who were happily smearing each other with bark chips and dirt.

The point being, it’s not something I’d have thought of independently before the first time it came up in practice, and if the kid in question had been speaking a language I didn’t know, I might not have noticed. But it strikes me as a potentially useful etiquette, in the context of bilingual toddlers, to consider politely asking their parents or guardians what others words they might use for yes and no, to make sure they’re being understood by both children and adults alike.

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