I was waiting at a bus stop and overheard a conversation between a mother and her school-aged daughter about nothing particularly memorable. However the participants in the dialogue was speaking different languages; mother only spoke Yoruba (I didn’t even hear an English word escape her lips) and her daughter continued the conversation solely in English. The strangest thing about this exchange was that I didn’t find it strange at all; in fact I smiled with knowing familiarity.
Compare this to another more recent situation when I was on a bus to Stansted Airport and overheard another conversation (As linguists we are often in the business of overhearing conversations). A similar situation; a woman was speaking entirely in Spanish – which I could understand – and the man she was sitting next to was responding in what I decide to assume was Italian or more likely Catalan. I found this very strange wondering why weren’t they speaking the same language?
This latter situation prompted me to remember the first and I noticed that my reactions had been different.
Whenever I ask my Black-British peers whose parents came to the UK from an African country, whether they can speak their heritage language, I can almost predict their answer to a fault: “I can understand it but I don’t speak it”
Why is that?
I'm looking for the answer(s)