Losing the language of your heritage can leave room for regret — but that doesn’t mean you should be any less proud of your culture. BY HELEN ZHANG
I
still remember the absolute dread I felt every Saturday from age 6 to 9. I wanted to do anything but take part in a weekly occurrence I felt forced into: Chinese lessons. Every weekend, my brother and I would spend around two hours learning the language, either from our parents or our parents’ friends, whose children learned with us. I often dreamed about watching cartoons or going to a birthday party instead, and during each lesson, I would count down the minutes until I would finally be free. It wouldn’t be until several years later that I realized how much I took those lessons for granted. I am what is known as a heritage speaker: someone who has learned a language informally by being exposed to it at home. Like many heritage speakers, I am a child of immigrants, as my parents moved to the U.S. from China before I was born. Since I was a toddler, I have spoken Mandarin Chinese with my family, and in my earliest years, I was at least equally fluent in Mandarin as I was in English. Unfortunately, my fluency and comfort with speaking Chinese have weakened over the years, and most days, I don’t utter a word of it. The process of losing one’s first language is called language attrition, and issues associated with it include forgetting words, becoming hesitant and developing a for-
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OPINION APRIL 23, 2021
ART & DESIGN BY SILA DURAN
“AT TH E TI M E , TH I S CHANG E WAS A R E LI E F. NOW, I ’VE COM E TO TE R M S WITH TH E FACT THAT IT HAD A DETR I M E NTAL E FFECT ON MY ABI LITY TO SPEAK TH E LANGUAG E .”
eign accent. This experience is not unusual for immigrants and their descendants. According to Pew Research Center, as of 2018, 17% of U.S. immigrants ages 5 and older only speak English at home. Additionally, as of 2017, 32% of Asian Americans only speak English at home. During both the past and present day, the pressures of assimilating to American culture and English-only rhetoric have been prominent factors that lead foreign-language speakers to prioritize English as their primary language. For me, Chinese simply became less of a priority. After the third grade, my family stopped lessons because my brother and I became occupied with other extracurricular activities. At the time, this change was a relief. Now, I’ve come to terms with the fact that it had a detrimental effect on my ability to speak the language. I rarely practiced reading or writing it after that and never became literate. I was more comfortable communicating with my parents in English and became less and less used to speaking Chinese. It was a vicious cycle: as I continued to use Chinese only minimally, I lost my fluency, resulting in my stronger preference for English. Even though my parents continue to speak to me in Chinese, I usually reserve speaking Chinese for my extended family, mainly my grandparents. Sometimes during a conversation, I forget how to say a word or phrase, and I immediately regret