My wife and her parents speak dialect at home. It can be off-putting to be left out at the dinner table, but I speak English with my wife, so it evens out.
I occasionally mention that she should teach the kids Hangzhou Hua, but I know that it will never happen. My sister and I also started in Chinese but migrated to English after hitting elementary school.
The other day, we tested them on the dialect. Like my halting mandarin, they have a functional knowledge of their mother’s tongue without speaking it.
Amidst the lunchtime banter, the decades collapsed into a flicker. One day, this unique set of vocalizations will disappear from the aural background of our home.
Unless we move to Hangzhou, my wife’s dialect will follow her parents. Her childhood will go mute. Like other indigenous languages, it will disappear slowly then suddenly.
Another casualty of mass culture, one more accommodation in an immigrant’s story.