Question: Did anyone here grow up in a multilingual family?

[Hardrada]

Ours were Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and I threw in some Latin since I studied it for years and so had my Grandfather. Just curious. Oh and my uncles knew various entertaining dialects of Norwegian. I miss all that.

[RagingInMiami]

1. Spanish and English

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Most of my mother's relatives spoke German

since my great-grandparents, who came over in 1899, both lived to be over 90.

I grew up hearing people switch back and forth between German and English. My maternal grandmother and her siblings all spoke German at home, and when they got together as adults, the conversation would move smoothly between languages. I noticed that they tended to tell stories in the language that they had happened in. For example, a conversation about an incident in their childhood would drift into German.

Meanwhile, my Latvian grandfather seemed to know every Latvian refugee in Minneapolis. When ever we went to my grandparents' house, there were Latvians on the phone or Latvians in the living room.

My father's family, unfortunately, were the only Norwegians in their small town, and gave up the language due to peer pressure. After long association with my mother's relatives, he was able to stretch his one semester of college German into a pretty good understanding of what was going on.

When I was little, I thought everyone could speak at least two languages. I could understand German pretty well, although I didn't try to speak it until my grandmother's cousin came to stay for the summer when I was 13. She spoke no English at all, so I started trying to put sentences together.

The original Old Country people are all dead now, and the people in the extended family who are younger than me and my brothers (40s and 50s) are mostly monolingual in English. However, there is one cousin about 15 years older than me who married a German and has bilingual children who are now in their late 30s.

[Hardrada]

3. My grandparents and my great aunts and uncles

Would go into executive session in another language over serious matters we children were not allowed to understand (my brothers, my sister and I were adopted by my grandfolks, long story) so we were moved in a way into my father's generation. The older folks (I am now the age they were, around 60, when I recall all of this going on) told lots of jokes but not in Engliah and the ones in Vossing or Telemark dialect evidently were the most funny. These were quite proper people but I think the jokes had a bit of somewhat scandalous punning and double-entendres. I miss all those older relatives very very very much especially these days.