So I grew up in an English-dominated country and an English speaking school. My dad is an ethnic Konkani who speaks English and Hindi and a little bit of Arabic (not much at all) and my mom is an ethnic Konkani who speaks English and Kannada fluently, as well as Konkani and Hindi at about a B1 level (can think and express herself fluently in the language but doesn't have a very high vocabulary). My dad can fluently understand Konkani but doesn't speak it often because his parents and my mom would make fun of him for doing so.
My mom only raised my in English, despite my pleas when I was younger to speak to me in at least Konkani and English so I could be multilingual. She said that "it wouldn't work" and I "wouldn't learn anything so there's no point" etc. I think she is extremely self hating in actuality, and wanted to raise me monolingually in the prestige language of English. Nevertheless, through my grandma (my mom's mom) I picked up enough Konkani to be able to understand about 80-90% of it. I also picked up a fair amount of Hindi through having to deal with people who didn't speak English but did speak Hindi (for example, a Nepali who only knows Nepali and Hindi, a Tamilian who only knows Tamil and Hindi, etc).
I have no idea why people are so aggressively skeptical here about passive fluency when it's so extremely common among children of immigrants, often called "heritage languages". Perhaps they are people who grew up monolingual? I mean, aren't many learners of languages able to listen at a higher level than they can speak?
With Hindi I know enough to get the gist of what goes on in a Bollywood film and can watch children's TV shows (Doraemon, Hindi) easily. I can understand Hinglish when spoken on the news or in conversations easily too.
Konkani somehow simultaneously brings both warmness and hostile anger to my heart, however. Whenever I hear it I remember both the warm memories I've had in Mangalore, the safest city in India and with my grandparents, but also the anger inherent in my mom having never taught it to me, and the sadness in the fact I can't communicate with my grandma in it. She speaks to me in Konkani and I respond in English... but it's just not the same. Sometimes it makes me physically aggressive when I think about this, too.
At the same time, however, I just feel like I have untapped potential in these two languages. I can already understand both of them quite well and becoming more or less fluent wouldn't take more than a year or two in either of them.
With Konkani there are very few resources. My brother mocks me and whatnot if I try and speak it with my family, and my grandma is going to pass away soon. I would have wanted to be fluent in this language and pass it on to my children a few years ago, but I don't think I'm ever going to have any (in part due to this) and I really struggle with finding native speakers to practice the few basic sentences I can form. It just makes me think that I'm never going to use this language anyways, and seeing as people have such little motivation to pass it onto their kids, it should probably die out anyways.
This is a stupid thought too though, but is it possible that the remnants of Hindi and Konkani in my brain might be further confusing me as I'm currently trying to learn Spanish and after that will probably continue learning Japanese? Is it possible I might accidentally confuse the languages or their vocabulary? I already confuse Hindi and Konkani sometimes. Should I actively try to forget them then, and how can I go about doing so?
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