When Grandkids and Grandparents Don’t Share a Language

If your children can’t talk to their grandparents, your family isn’t unusual, and it isn’t too late. In immigrant families, the family language usually fades within two or three generations. Fixing the gap has two halves:

• a way for them to talk now, which is either you interpreting or a translation app that speaks out loud;
• a plan to keep some of the language alive, which matters just as much.

How common this is

Very. Pew Research Center’s 2015 National Survey of Latinos found that 97% of immigrant Hispanic parents speak Spanish to their children. Among Hispanic parents whose own parents were born in the US, it was 49%.

Researchers who followed immigrant families in Southern California found the same pattern. Spanish lasted longer there than the other immigrant languages they studied, but by the third generation it had largely given way to English (Rumbaut, Massey and Bean, 2006). The other languages faded faster.

It’s rarely a decision. School is in English, friends speak English, and the kids start answering in English. A tired parent stops insisting. Then a grandparent visits, or calls on a birthday, and the grandchildren can only smile and wave.

What the gap costs

The cost doesn’t show up all at once:

• Grandparents can’t tell the stories only they know, about the village, the war, the first job, or what your mother was like at seven.
• Children miss the jokes, the songs, and the sense of where they come from.
• Grandparents start to feel like visitors in their own grandchildren’s lives.
• Whoever speaks both languages, usually you, becomes the switchboard for every call.

None of this means you’ve failed. It means the family needs a bridge.

Ways to help them talk now

You interpret. This works for a quick hello, and it’s how most families start. It wears everyone out on a longer call. The kids end up talking to you instead of to their grandmother, and you inevitably edit what each side says.

Typed translation in a chat app. This is good for photos, birthday wishes and “we miss you” messages. It’s too slow for a conversation, and it’s no use for children who can’t read or type yet.

Spoken translation on a video call. The child talks, and the grandparent hears it a few seconds later, in their own language, spoken out loud. Then the other way round. Nobody needs to read, so it works for small children, and nobody has to interpret.

Be realistic about little ones, though. Speech recognition copes better with adults than with small children, who mumble, invent words and talk over each other. Older kids do well. Toddlers do best saying one thing at a time, close to the phone.

In person. When the grandparents visit, or you visit them, the same kind of app works across the kitchen table.

Making calls work for kids

Children are a different audience from adults, so plan calls around them:

• Keep it short. Five to ten minutes is a good call for a young child. Let them leave while it’s still fun.
• Show, then tell. A drawing, a lost tooth, a new pet, a dance from school. Show and tell is easy across any language.
• Give them a question. “Ask Grandma what she did after school when she was your age.” Kids are good at asking a question when they’ve been handed one, and the answer is usually a story.
• One at a time. Give each child a turn, so the translation isn’t untangling three voices.
• Make it regular. The same time every week, chosen around the time difference, becomes a ritual that grandparents look forward to all week.

Keep the language alive alongside

Translation should be a bridge, not a replacement. The goal is still for your children to have some of the language, and the two can work together:

• Open every call in the family language, without any translation: hello, how are you, I love you. Then switch translation on for the real conversation.
• Make the grandparent the teacher. One new word per call, taught by Grandma and repeated by the kids. The call becomes the lesson, and grandparents love the job.
• Add small, daily exposure. Songs, cartoons, bedtime words and food names in the language all count.
• Look for a community class. Many communities run weekend heritage-language schools for exactly this.
• Don’t shame mixing. A child who answers in a mix of two languages is using both. Partial skills are still skills, and they’re the ones that grow.

What to expect from the translation

• It’s a sentence at a time. Translation waits for the speaker to pause. With VivaLingua, the other person hears it about 2 to 3 seconds later, with captions on screen at the same moment. Leave a beat before answering.
• Names and nicknames trip it up. So do children’s made-up words. Laugh about it, and spell out the important ones.
• Regional dialects can do less well than the standard language, because speech recognition is trained mostly on standard varieties. If a grandparent speaks a strong dialect, choose the closest supported language and expect the occasional miss.
• Check the language is covered before you plan around it. VivaLingua handles 41 languages, and the list is on the languages page.

Using VivaLingua with grandparents

• Grandparents don’t install anything. You send a link by WhatsApp, text or email. They open it in the browser already on their phone and wait with you in the waiting room; when they turn on “Available to talk now”, you tap “Start call”. There’s no account and no password for them. For a grandparent who’s wary of new apps, that’s the difference between a call happening and not. Do a short test call first, or ask a relative nearby to help with the first one.
• The kids gather round your phone. A video call takes one guest by link, so the call is your household’s phone or tablet with theirs.
• Only you pay. You buy prepaid minutes, with no subscription. Grandparents always join free.
• When you’re together, in-person mode works at the table. In person, more than one person can join, each on their own phone.

New accounts get 60 promotional minutes, which is a few weeks of short Sunday calls. Get VivaLingua and send Grandma the link.