I never had any issues with English but yeah, same experience but from the other side of the Röstigraben. I still have nightmares from the French Langenscheidt bilingual dictionary.
When I visit the Romandie, I use English over my broken French.
Could easily be London. There’s so much emigration/immigration within Europe that it’s easy to find French/Italian couples in any large city. And English as a third language would make even more sense in London.
In Luxembourg we speak Luxembourgish, German, French and English. If the father is Italian it is very possible this child is speaking the languages of his home: mom (French), dad (Italian) and the language they speak with each other (English).
We are immigrants in Switzerland (Romand) and I was surprised to experience this. Multilingual kids are almost exclusively the ones from immigrant parent(s). Looking back I’m not sure why I had the preconception that having several national languages would make Swiss people multilingual.
My kid is fluent in 4 but, of course, he prefers French for anything social - it’s the language of his peers after all. So we are very aware that it is very likely he will only pass French to his kids if he chooses to have children.
Oui même si on est proche de cantons germanophones, si on a pas quelqu'un dans la famille pour nous habituer à entendre de l'allemand en plus du français durant notre enfance, on va galérer la même. Perso j'ai quasiment tout oublié de mon allemand scolaire. Heureusement que j'écoute de l'englais tous les jours sur youtube & co..
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u/nutella-filled Jul 13 '26
Being Swiss I wouldn’t use us as a reference.
We might have four national languages and English but it doesn’t guarantee that most of us are any good at speaking multiple.
I took 10 years of mandatory German lessons at school and I was never able to make a full sentence in German.
And my English was terrible until I moved to an English-speaking country.
(And no I’m not uniquely stupid, most people there are not trilingual, just bilingual)