When I started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop asking people how it felt to not be able to speak their family’s language. Many voiced feelings that they had been repressing all their lives.
“My father was born in Lebanon, but he only spoke Arabic on the phone, with visitors or in restaurants,” says Andrea Karimé, a children’s book author and storyteller in Germany. “As a kid, I thought he spoke a secret language. My father became a mystery to me.”
Emily Chowdhury, a Berlin-based artist, spoke of rejection: “When my parents discussed things we shouldn’t hear, they switched to Bengali. The language was used to keep us out.”
At the same time, and paradoxically, for those of us who have inherited the looks and names of our ancestors, there is often a broader societal expectation that we would speak their language. If this is not the case, the reaction can be harsh. I love the poem 8 Confessions of My Tongue. American-born and raised poet Noel Quiñones describes the experience of having Puerto Rican ancestry but not being fluent in Spanish: “My last name is an invitation to strangers to say, ‘Your parents should have taught you.’ Or: Man should have tried harder, like toddlers sticking their fingers in their ears as soon as their parents speak spanish. Studies show that non-Spanish speaking Latinos often feel shame or question their identity because of their language loss.
I consider these lost languages as our “other languages”. They are present in our ancestry and childhood memories, yet oddly unattainable because we have never learned them ourselves or been encouraged to forget them.
In my case, there were actually two losses. I also didn’t learn my mother’s native language, Polish. When I was growing up, my parents were warned against teaching me Bengali or Polish. They have been told that children who learn more than one language at a time will not learn any of them properly. As if their languages could contaminate the “real” language – in this case German.
“Unfortunately, that is not a thing of the past,” says De Houwer, referring to the long-debunked notion that bilingualism can hold children back or confuse them. Indeed, research has shown that bilingual children’s speech is not delayed and their tendency to sometimes mix their languages (known as code-switching or translanguaging) does not mean they confuse the two. Rather, it’s a sign that they’re making imaginative use of their double vocabulary, choosing the words that work best for the context at hand.