This subreddit was recommended to some users asking questions in a different community I'm in, and after reading some posts here, I figured I could provide valuable input about the experience my family has with being raised in a multilingual household and environment.
Background Information
I am 22, and I have two brothers. One is 19 and one is 16. We grew up together in Ontario, Canada — we primarily speak English to each other.
My parents are both 43. They speak Russian to each other. My mother only speaks Russian to the three of us. My father's first language is the Afghan dialect of Persian (often called Dari), and he only speaks it fully with me. He mixes it with English with my middle brother, and only speaks English with my youngest brother.
How It Worked For Us
Multingual households are extremely common in Central Asia and it's not usually a big topic of discussion. It certainly isn't usually planned in advance strategically like people here are discussing, although some parents will specifically choose to have one parent speak Russian and the other speak the ethnic language.
My mother learnt Dari to basic fluency from both friends and my father, though she has since forgotten most of it. She was never worried about him using it to communicate in secret with me.
My father learnt Russian after living in Uzbekistan and Ukraine. After settling in Kyrgyzstan he met my mother, and I was born here. When I was 2 we left for Canada. My brothers were both born in Canada.
My parents both did not speak good English until after I started school. They figured I would pick it up quickly and did not bother to teach it to me. They were right and within one month of starting Kindergarten at age 4, I was fluent. Until I was about 7, when my other brother started school and also picked up English in this way, I only communicated in Russian with him. My parents tried to enforce us to speak only Russian with each other and with our youngest brother, but it failed and they eventually gave up.
My father worked a lot and because of this, my two brothers never picked up Persian as well as I did. This led to him giving up and using either entirely English or mostly English with us. When I was 12 I asked him to stop using English with me and my Persian got better ever since then. I taught myself to read and write since he would not do it.
My mother made an effort to have all of us literate in Russian but all three of us were disinterested. When I was 11 and later when my youngest brother was around this age, we both became interested and learnt it on our own with her help. The middle brother did not care to do so, so he is not literate in Russian.
I don't have any noticeable issues from learning English later. I speak at a completely fluent level, but I do sometimes make mistakes that do not inhibit people from understanding me. My brothers seem to speak it at a totally native level and never make any mistakes.
In the end, we almost never had other Russian or Persian friends to talk to, and this was the main thing my parents should have tried to do differently if they wanted to preserve the languages more. I speak Russian fluently but I am not sure if I could say proficiently. I moved back to Kyrgyzstan for a year right now and have no difficulty here but do have a noticeable accent and odd way of forming sentences.
If anybody has questions please ask. Otherwise, I hope this helped!
