Kouritzin in the readings calls the home language the "language of the heart” and I think this speaks to how people treasure the language of your culture as it is the repository of identity, history, and belonging. In my undergrad, I studied at UBC with a Linguistics professor who was doing research on how children when born have the capacity to distinguish and learn all the languages of the world but we usually just win one language in the culture lottery.
Carmen our 5-year-old daughter swims in a sea of English all day and then comes home to a life raft of Spanish. She comprehends everything we say to her in Spanish but she chooses to answer us often in English. This battle to maintain a mother tongue at home for parents is exhausting but essential. I have had so many conversations tinged with melancholy with immigrant parents on how they mourn how they didn't teach their children their language.
Lost of language leads to a loss of cultural knowledge and this contributes to a fuzzy identity. The child grows up and says, "Oh my grandparents used to speak German but they didn’t teach me". I lost the languages of Welsh, French, German, and Scots from my grandparents. I have little idea about what I have lost as I lost the connection to these cultures: language. When I worked at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, I gained some understanding when I lost as I learned about the ramifications for First Nations communities of the loss of their languages. Perhaps, this is why I have dedicated my life to learning first French to reclaim a part of my cultural identity and then I added on Spanish and Portuguese. Language opens the magic door to a culture with a doorman gesturing you to come inside to the party. It is the golden ticket to the Willy Wonka Candy Factory!
I re-claimed French as a teenager as it was the first language of my Grandma Edith but she stopped speaking it when she moved from Franco-Ontarian town to an English-speaking village in Manitoba. It brought her and I much solace in the last years of her life when Alzheimer's was stealing her back to her past to be able to converse a bit in French.
My husband and I decided to always speak in Spanish at home and our daughter is being brought up both bi-lingual and bi-culturally. When she lost her first tooth this year, she chose to leave her tooth in her shoe for el ratoncito/the mouse from Mexico to come and get her tooth and leave her a loony. Her cultural landscape is wider than that of her English-speaking friends. Learning both English and Spanish forge pathways in her brain that hopefully will be active for other endeavors in her life. She automatically knows that there is not just one way to do something or to express an idea. This normalcy of cultural diversity is a dream of mine for everyone!
Often people who come from one place and move to another are described as caught between two worlds. I hope that one day soon we can teach our students that existing in the borderland between two cultures gives you an unique set of skills to adapt to an ever changing world. As a cultural hybrid, you can move in between these cultures and even make a home for yourself in a world that encompasses the best of both. But you can’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you have come from. A link to your heritage languages is the key to confidence to learn other languages. We can interpret heritage as “something that is inherited from the past” and I like this idea of the mother tongue being an inheritance from the past. We tend to think of inheritance as only monetary but in fact the inheritance of language and culture is priceless as it guides me in my life. Everything I do is part of my upbringing and cultural inheritance.
The readings point to the importance of heritage language maintenance and how it influences the acquisition of English so why are we as educators constantly harping "Speak English!" to our students? Why are we so threatened by the existence of another language other than English in our classes? As a Spanish teacher, I loved it when students would whisper explanations to each other in a myriad of languages. Students and parents would freak if we did not allow them to speak English in a Spanish or French class. This is accepted but subject teachers get very upset if they hear Korean, Cantonese or Urdu spoken in their classrooms. Each language that I speak informs the next one that I have learned. It gives me a language bank to pull from to compare and contrast structures, verbs and idioms. I have always viewed the home language as a positive force in the learning process of English. I model how all languages are equal; I ask questions to students about their languages and talk to students about the advantages of knowing another language for their future jobs. I do not want the learning of English to threaten a student’s cultural identity, as there is room in my classroom and my home for many languages.
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