no. not many people spoke my native tongue.

when i finally did move and found more people speaking the language, we would speak our language not to hide from the teacher but just because it was more comfortable

I knew two girls who learned sign language just to gossip during class

A lot. Indonesian is the world’s biggest trilinguist country.

People usually speaks their local languages (there are 700+ of them), Indonesian, and other foreign language.

In my class alone there are probably 8 languages spoken by the student (usually Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, Banjarese, Balinese, Indonesian, Chinese, Madurese, and so on), so they can just gossiping about things and the teacher or friends wouldn’t know anything.

i speak spanish, a very common language in the us. most of my friends were also spanish speakers, so we did this a lot, especially if we were discussing something personal between us, dirty, or talking about another teacher.

obviously, we didn’t do this around a spanish teacher or a spanish-speaking one, but we did this a lot most of the time.

I fancied the opportunity, but there were no other speakers of the language at my school.

I went to an English speaking high school for a while being a native Dutch speaker. Sadly the teachers there were very aware of the Dutch students and would sternly bit politely ask to keep it in English. Now that I’m in the real world I use Dutch as a private language quite often.

Me and my sibling were tired of my mom eavesdropping whenever so we learned another language to communicate between us. It would drive her crazy but she never bothered to learn to speak said language, so that’s on her.