If you are familiar with our work, read our blogs, or listened to our podcast, you may know that I didn’t grow up speaking my heritage language, Spanish, even though it was the first language of my parents and the only language my grandmother spoke. Now I have two children who speak three languages. This was a hard-fought journey for our family.
Just two generations earlier, my parents were physically beaten in school when they were heard speaking Spanish. As a result, I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish and struggled for years to learn the language. In addition to conjugation and grammar, studying the Spanish language intersected with my identity, historical traumas, and relationship with my family. This was always ignored in my Spanish classes.
When I had my firstborn, I knew that connection was critical to his bilingualism. He carried it in his bones. But for generations, families like his, and other immigrant and indigenous communities were made to feel like outsiders, less than, and unsafe because of their heritage language, and culture.
It’s no surprise that despite our rich diversity, only 20% of Americans can converse in two or more languages, compared to nearly 50% of the world. What we are doing with language learning in the US is not working. What we are doing now is blind to, at best, and hostile to, at worst, the nearly 350 spoken languages in our country. We have an incredibly rich linguistic diversity, but that doesn’t translate to a very bilingual country. And that has a lot to do with generational language wounds.
What are Generational Language Wounds, and Why Does it Matter?
Generational language wounds speak to this idea that languages aren’t lost just by chance or by accident across the generations. Rather, there was some sort of trauma, discrimination, or deficit narrative that caused this language loss that ties back to colonialism. Across the world, colonists used language as a tool for conquest.
On October 11, 1492, Columbus’s ships landed on the island that he named San Salvador, and he recorded the following in his journal, “With God’s will, I will take six of them with me for Your Majesties when I leave this place, so that they may learn Spanish.” According to the historian Zenha de la Rosa, “language was used by the Spanish to consolidate political power, to spread the Catholic faith, and unify the empire”. The world is estimated to have 560 languages spoken in Latin America, but some studies show that before Spanish colonization, the continent was home to over 2000 in the US. This can also be seen in our history with Native American boarding schools, English-only policies, and the general lack of bilingual programming for a student population with the foundations for bilingualism.
While we may not be aware of the history that caused our generational language wounds, we can see the manifestation of these wounds through the shame we feel about not speaking or how we speak our heritage language, as well as the anxiety or pressure we feel around our language and the feeling of not being enough and even through the desire for perfection around our heritage language. Simply put, our relationship with our heritage language is not without context or complexity. And often, to heal our relationship with our heritage language, we need to work through this stuff.
How to Heal Generational Language Wounds
Healing generational language wounds is not easy. I am trained in early childhood education, I have my doctorate in education and know a lot about child development, and I also know the benefits of bilingualism. Despite all of this preparation, I struggled to raise a bilingual child. Not for lack of tools or knowledge, but for lack of healing.
During those first few days, I tried hard to create a language-rich environment, which I know as an early childhood educator, is incredibly important for language development. Even in those first days, it’s really important to narrate everything you’re doing so that your child can start hearing language and process and mimic and be encouraged to make those sounds and words.
Inside my home, I was using Spanish quite often and creating this Spanish environment, narrating every little thing…even the process of changing the diaper. However, when I put all of his clothes on, strapped him into his stroller, and made it outside the house for our walk, I found myself nearly mute.
Once outside of the house, I couldn’t narrate in the same way. Every time I tried to speak Spanish in public to my newborn son, I felt this wave of shame. When someone walked past me in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I worried that they would hear me speaking Spanish and judge me. Were they thinking, “what is she doing speaking that language to her kid?” Or maybe, “What a funny accent.” Possibly, “That’s not how you say that…she must be a ‘No Sabo’ kid.”
Through these walks with my son in my neighborhood, I realized that there was so much that I needed to unpack to pass on this language to my child. I could stay silent, give in to this fear and desire for perfectionism and pass that oppression and wound on to my child….or I could lean into the discomfort, push past it, and pass on my liberation to my child. I could help him understand that our language and culture are about connection and not perfection.
Whatever our relationship to our language and culture is, our relationship doesn’t have to look any particular way. It is unique, and it is enough.
You’re not alone if you’re feeling some of these same things. There is a way through it. Here are the four steps on how to begin to heal these generational language wounds
4 Steps to Heal Generational Language Wounds
1. Recognize that the language wound was caused by systemic oppression.
For many years (and even in current contexts, in some instances), it was illegal, punishable, or taboo to speak a language other than English in public spaces, including schools. This systemic stripping of our languages and cultures in immigrant and indigenous communities is important to understand because it allows us to release internalized and misplaced shame.
For many years, when I was learning Spanish and trying to pass on the language to my son, I felt this incredible personal failure. I felt that I wasn’t learning it fast enough and that I shouldn’t have to try so hard to learn the language; it is something that I should have already known.
Placing myself within this larger context of linguistic oppression and understanding the history of language attitudes and policies in the US helped me understand that I was up against a lot. It wasn’t just me; it was much bigger than me. Any movement I made forward with my heritage language was positive, no matter how small. It was an act of resistance.
2. Situate yourself and others within that context.
When we understand the origins of our language wounds, we can understand that our language learning and our language speaking is an act of resistance. When I had my firstborn, I had a lot of doubts and thought, “Am I going to be able to pass on Spanish even though it’s not my first language and I’m not totally fluent?”. To get past this doubt, I had to reevaluate my relationship with the Spanish language.
Growing up, I used to get upset with my parents for not teaching us our heritage language. I remember thinking, “I wish they just would have spoken to us in Spanish, then we would have learned the language.” This type of thinking did not take into account the oppressive language environments that my parents faced and the unfair expectation that the development of my Spanish language had to fall on their shoulders, alone. As I grew older, I realized that while my parents didn’t speak to us directly in Spanish, we were surrounded by the language. I actually was bilingual! I was passively bilingual, understanding a lot of the language. What they did pass down was better than nothing because it helped me learn the language faster when I decided to jump into language learning.
I took this newfound realization and applied it to my parenting with my son: I knew that whatever I did pass on to my son was better than nothing. Any exposure to his heritage language would be a gift to him and an act of resistance; it would help our family language stay alive across the generations.
3. Take a strength-based approach to language learning.
For generations, our heritage languages and cultures were framed as a deficit. When I went to school as a young child, my parents were told by teachers not to speak to me in Spanish because that would confuse me. My heritage language was seen as a distraction to be overcome, and not critical to my academic success. My parents also experienced this deficit-based narrative of their culture and language when they went to school. It was seen as such a deficit that they were punished when they were heard speaking Spanish.
Both my parents and I internalized this narrative around our language and culture being a barrier to success and it impacted our relationship with our language. We are working on healing that now. We have to take a strength-based approach to our language learning and be gentle with ourselves, knowing that what we do is enough for our children and is a gift to them.
4. Remember that language is about connection and not perfection.
Our society can be steeped in perfectionism, particularly in a school environment where you want to strive to get all the right answers, meet all of the requirements, and pass the test. We have to remember that language is a tool for communication and communication requires connection. The best thing that we can do for ourselves and our children is to ground our language learning in a sense of connection. This will help give us a sense of belonging and positive feelings about the language; it will motivate us to learn the language and continue to use it in meaningful ways. This approach, one that is grounded in connection, is much more beneficial and efficient to language learning than other approaches that are steeped in perfectionism and a “one right way” mentality.
Remember that our language is about connection, and we can center connection in many different ways. For me, grounding my language learning in connection was about speaking to my children in Spanish, learning alongside them, and helping them to feel connected to the language through positive experiences (making friends who speak predominantly in that language, communicating with my grandmother, their great-grandmother, in the language, communicating with my mother in that language).
We’d love to hear from you all. What do you think of this concept of generational language wounds? Have you experienced that? How has that shown up in your life? Have you taken any steps to begin healing those generational language wounds within yourself, your family, or your community? Please let us know. Share your thoughts with us via email or Instagram. Check out our podcast Talking to Grandma to listen to us chat about topics like generational language wounds and more!