What I Learned About Preserving Family Languages

By Masha Rumer

Growing up as an immigrant teenager in America, I used to take bilingualism for granted. I would do homework and listen to grunge music in English, then switch to my mother tongue to discuss borscht with my grandmother. But after moving out of my multicultural enclave as a young adult and then starting a family, I was surprised to find that the majority of the country, or 80 percent, is monolingual. I also learned that passing a language down to the next generation takes effort, but that this effort is absolutely worthwhile.

Exposure

Teaching a child the family language requires regular exposure. Otherwise, English will take over. English is, after all, the tongue of the playgrounds and popular culture. It’s seductive like Coca-Cola. It has status, something immigrant kids are keenly aware of from a young age. It’s no surprise that immigrant family’s languages typically disappear within three generations.

"English will come, but it’s that other language that needs a lot of nurturing, and the earlier and the more continuously you do it, the better," says Erika Levy, a trilingual speech-language pathologist and professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Case in point: the skills of many bilingual kids improved during COVID lockdowns. Why? They spent significantly more time with their bilingual parents.

Language exposure begins at home, and one popular approach is "one parent, one language" (OPOL), where partners divvy up their respective languages and speak and read in them exclusively to the child. However, many households, including mine, find its rigidity untenable. Instead, some people might speak the language at home and switch to English outside the home, or pick specific occasions or times to do so. Or they deliver a hearty mix of both, known as code-switching. Experts recommend any approach that fits the family’s unique circumstances, as long as that exposure is high in quantity and quality. And I’d add in a third factor: fun.

Need

Having a need to use the target language is key. Why would a child put in the extra effort if they can get by without it? Language development experts recommend finding a monolingual speaker to interact with, such as a grandparent, babysitter, or teacher. Another way to create this need is to travel to the family’s birthplace and become immersed in the linguistic environment, which is great in theory, but impossible for many households because of high costs and political upheavals back home.

Practicing speaking, and not just listening, is also critical, points out Erika Hoff, a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, who studies language development among Spanish-English children. The more a child speaks the language, the more rapidly their vocabulary will develop,

Setting Realistic Expectations

Even when we have the best intentions, sometimes we’re just too exhausted to enforce rules after a long day of work. Some parents don’t want to exclude their partner from conversation. Others feel stumped when the child seems to reject their family tongue. And then, school enters the picture, where—unless one is lucky to find a bilingual option—the kid is thrust into a monolingual environment for an entire day. That’s why Dr. Hoff calls bilingual parenting "swimming upstream." "It takes longer to learn two languages than one," explains Dr. Hoff. "And chances are it’s never going to be exactly the same, as you don’t use the same languages in exactly the same amount."

Perhaps it’s comforting to realize that other families are up against similar challenges and that perfect bilinguals are rare. And yet, even while swimming upstream, there’s still so much we can do.

Finding a Community

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and it’s certainly true for language learning. Language classes, playdates, and cultural or religious events provide language support for both the parents and the children and reinforce a sense of identity and pride.

On the other hand, a community that’s hostile toward foreign language speakers has the opposite effect. When a child feels like their culture or way of talking is maligned at school or in the news, they’re likely to shy away from it and strive to assimilate, something immigrants in America have experienced time and time again for generations.

A friend of mine was fully bilingual in Spanish and English when she moved from Central America to California as a child, at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment ran high. Her parents stopped using Spanish around her because of the "looks they got from other people," she remembers. "I forgot everything. I wish I hadn’t lost that early start."

In the end, a slow and steady approach goes a long way, even with detours and accents. The ability to share our cultures and languages with our children is a gift. It will nurture their empathy at a time when the world so sorely needs it and strengthen family bonds for years to come.

This post has been adapted from Masha's book, Parenting with an Accent (Beacon Press). For more information about Masha and her work, please visit her website.