I sat on my hands to stop the fidgeting. My sweaty palms stuck to the leather car seat the whole hourlong drive to Miami Beach. South Florida’s chaotic freeways and shirt-soaking August humidity are enough to make anyone squirm, but the source of my discomfort was the impending family reunion. I stared out the back window of my parents’ sedan and mentally rehearsed discussion topics — my graduation from college, career plans, thoughts on global affairs — all soupy and uncertain in my head as I tried to translate between my mother’s tongue and my own.
My mom gave my sister and me the customary parental spiel when we arrived outside my aunt’s house: make sure to act polite, say thank you, engage in conversation. The last one especially. Our grandfather had come to visit from Brazil that summer of 2022, and we didn’t get to see him often. There are certain subtleties that don’t translate over text messages and phone calls. Like the way he tilts his head back when he laughs, or how he smells like the same aftershave he’s used since before I existed. He’s one of the kindest men I’ve ever known, and I can see parts of his face in mine, but I was still nervous to talk to him that night. Mostly because I’d never really had a conversation with him before.
I grew up around three languages: my mother’s native Portuguese, my father’s Hungarian and our shared English. They each sounded like home to me — hers was nasal and musical, his was sharp and taut — but neither of my parents could speak the other’s. We resorted to speaking only English in our household, which left my Portuguese rudimentary at best and my Hungarian nonexistent. “Language is a proxy for identity and access,” says Betty Yu, a professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Francisco State University. “When children are younger, the family language is a connector, it’s a glue.”
For the first two decades of my life, I didn’t have that glue. I missed out on moments with my grandparents, second cousins, great-aunts and great-uncles who lived abroad and spoke limited English. I couldn’t joke with them, tell them about my day or discuss my hopes for the future. I felt two-dimensional to my relatives. It forced a wedge between us. I even began to see myself that way. How could I develop my own sense of self if I couldn’t understand or connect with my family? The answer I eventually settled on — which predated the reunion in Miami Beach, as well as several life-altering decisions to come — was simple: I couldn’t.
Between tongues and ties
Linguists define a heritage speaker as someone who grew up with exposure to a family language that’s different from the dominant or official language in their home country. Spanish and Chinese are the most common heritage languages in the United States, but in a nation where upward of 400 languages are spoken daily, that calculus varies wildly from home to home.
Globalization and immigration have made this mishmash of language and culture more common than ever. Immigrants make up 14 percent of the population, the most in the recorded history of the United States since 1890. And second-generation immigrants — the children of immigrant parents — number around 18 million nationwide, accounting for almost 25 percent of all children stateside. Many, like myself, find themselves floating somewhere between being secured to their family’s culture yet unmoored from the tongues that create it.
I grew up around three languages: my mother’s Portuguese, my father’s Hungarian and our shared English. They each sounded like home to me, but we resorted to speaking only English.
Heritage speakers are often more adept at conveying emotion, understanding tone and pronouncing words than someone learning a language for the first time in an academic setting. But they tend to struggle with incomplete acquisition, or a difficulty mastering technical aspects like grammar. They also commonly experience language attrition, which is the loss of language fluency over time. “You have this three-generation pattern,” Yu says. “The first generation is fluent in their heritage language. Then the second generation is passively bilingual, meaning they can understand quite a lot, but it’s hard to speak back. And by the third generation, usually in the American context, the family language is lost.”
Language may be the basis of how humans commune with their surroundings — from ordering at restaurants to sharing family histories to asking strangers for directions — but any language can disappear if it goes unused for long enough. My parents used English at their jobs, with their neighbors and with their children because it was their only common denominator for clear communication. I was raised to prioritize my English because it’s what I would need to use at school, to make friends and apply for jobs. I still heard Portuguese when I spent time around my extended family, and I could even understand them. I just couldn’t confidently respond.
There’s a unique humiliation behind identifying with a lineage and shared history that I couldn’t actually access — to be around loved ones who all spoke, thought and communicated one way when I operated in another. I felt ashamed and guilty and embarrassed all the time. I eventually stopped trying. “We have a love-hate relationship with our home language. We absolutely love it. We’re attached to it, and we have all sorts of positive feelings about it. But at the same time, there’s an insecurity there,” says María Carreira, executive director of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She was the co-organizer of the first national conference on heritage languages and co-directs the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. “It’s not just a sense of insecurity, but there’s a sense of imposter. … That can make a young kid feel very unwilling to pursue the study of their heritage language.”
Even more than the internal shame, there are sociopolitical obstacles to accessing speech. Multilingualism has historically been framed as a threat to American culture and identity. Precursors to the English-only movement began more than a century ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language,” in response to a rise in immigration during the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the Progressive Era. Its modern echoes turn up in efforts to enforce English-only speaking in Arizona, mandate that all official communications and publications of the government in Tennessee be produced in English, and defund bilingual education programs across the country. “We’re among the most multilingual countries, but also one of the most ideologically monolingual,” Yu says. “There’s an expectation, whether by punishment or rewards, for people to become monolingual English speakers.”
Today, some 17 percent of foreign-born Americans speak only English at home. That means their children might not be able to access family recipes. They likely can’t listen to music or read books that come recommended by relatives. They miss getting an intimate peek into how a loved one sees the world. They could not know their relatives at all; unable to see their own family, deeply and truly, and see themselves reflected right back. As much as language can open new worlds and expand horizons, its absence accomplishes the reverse. That realization always lurked in the back of my mind, taking up a quiet corner of neglected mental real estate, but it took a quarter of my life to dawn on me.
Finding voice through language
When I set out to properly learn Portuguese, I knew I wanted (however ironically) to do so separate from my family. At least at first. The idea of trying and failing and trying again seemed significantly less daunting around strangers. So I chose to minor in the language as part of my undergraduate degree. Even just a single semester in, I found myself speaking more and for longer periods of time than I ever had in my life. I also shed a sizable chunk of the shame I’d been carrying around in the process. If I heard Portuguese outside the classroom, I now felt brave enough to approach the speaker and tell them, excitedly, that “eu também falo a língua, só com um sotaque inglês.” I also speak the language, just with an English accent.
I felt two-dimensional to my relatives. How could I develop my own sense of self if I couldn’t understand or connect with my family?
Language courses in high school and college are traditionally lifelines for students trying to reconnect with their heritage. In some cases, programs and courses are specifically aimed at the heritage speaking experience, rather than geared toward students with no exposure to their language of choice. The University of California, Los Angeles, for example, offers courses in almost 50 languages and is home to the federally funded National Heritage Language Resource Center. The center researches heritage speakers and has reported that the top two reasons college heritage language learners study their chosen language are, first, to better understand themselves, and, second, to communicate with loved ones.
Yet the ways in which we pursue language are changing. The Modern Language Association estimates fewer than 1.2 million college and university students are enrolled in a language course other than English. That share has dropped by nearly 30 percent in just over a decade. Only 1 in 5 K-12 students and 1 in 12 university students is enrolled in a language course. Meanwhile, more than 116 million users are registered on Duolingo, a popular gamified language learning app, and log on every month.
Regardless of format, we keep reaching toward language as a means of grounding, connection and challenge. This is, in part, because we reap far more than social benefits from the practice. “We know that children, when they’re in a school setting that supports their culture and doesn’t see them as inferior, are more engaged and more likely to graduate on time. So it’s a great tool for retaining language minority children in school, as well as for ensuring their success,” Carreira says. “As you are learning your heritage language, you are learning skills that will make you a better student and also, in all likelihood, you are increasing professional opportunities.”
It also makes you an arguably better and healthier person. Learning a language increases empathy and instills a sense of purpose. It can also improve cognitive skills like multitasking, as well as lower the risk and slow the effects of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. Multilingual speakers report stronger communication skills, literacy rates, self-confidence, concentration and creativity than monolinguals. Through MRI scans, researchers have even confirmed they have more neurons and denser grey matter — the goop in our brains that helps us control our movements, memories and emotions.
As much as language can open new worlds and expand horizons, its absence accomplishes the reverse. That realization took a quarter of my life to dawn on me.
I can’t yet attest to any added mental clarity or new neurons, but it’s been more than three years since I began speaking Portuguese in earnest. I’ve engaged in political debates and heartened discussions with relatives I had never even spoken to before; I’ve read the poems my grandmother sends me, noticed the type of writing that stirs her and have felt it stir something in me; I’ve read the facial expressions on each of my second cousin’s faces when they’re particularly animated about whatever subject we managed to land on. Their faces contort dramatically with every new sentence, their hands gesticulate wildly in tune — just like mine do. I am still nowhere near fluent, but I’m not afraid to speak up anymore. I can use my own words, however accurate or mangled. And I experience no shortage of self-discovery now because of that.
When I approached my grandfather that summer night in Miami Beach, I swallowed the nerves that tried to wriggle their way out of me on the way over. I smiled at him. He smiled back. Our cheeks lifted to just the same pitch and our eyes crinkled identically in the same corners. Then, in a manner of speaking, I introduced myself.
This story appears in the July/August 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.