What words, phrases or signs do you use and how do you get your partner’s attention?
I’ve taught my husband to speak a bit of Japanese, but we don’t use it this way because that’s extremely rude.
I wouldn’t say we speak in people’s faces, but we make comments to each other about random stuff. I would never say something rude about somebody in their faces, but my spouse might go, “Can we go back to the hotel, I really need to take a shit” or something silly and unfiltered like that.
It’s rude for spouses to have a private conversation? Would whispering be better? Would it be better if they hid in a cupboard where no one could see them?
That’s probably a cultural thing, isn’t it? In diverse areas, people don’t expect to understand what they hear others say, so there’s no “Speak ___; we’re in ___” culture.
I’d say it’s more of a context thing. If you’re hanging out in a group of people chatting together and you code switch to speak to someone so nobody else can understand, that’s rude. If you’re just speaking to someone in another language on your own, nobody cares (except xenophobic bigots).
Definitely an American thing. Wide swaths of the country have issues with any kind of diversity.
I wouldn’t even include all of America in that either. It’s really just a rural America thing. Sure 99.9% of people will speak/understand English, but in my anecdotal experience, it’s pretty common near big cities for people to be bilingual and grow up speaking a different language with their families.
