How learning an ancestral language helps you reclaim your heritage

For some descendants of immigrants, picking up the language their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents spoke is a way of strengthening links to the old country and deepening their cultural identity.

The loss of a physical tie to a family’s homeland can stir up grief that catches people off guard, whether that comes through the death of an older relative, the sale of a house handed down through the generations or the destruction of a few surviving heirlooms.

An ancestral tongue, once learned, could open up a bundle of letters that fills in blurred passages of a family’s past.

Even basic conversational ability might result in meeting cousins in another country.

Experts say hearing stories and songs in the original language carries shades of meaning that translation frequently loses.

Passing a heritage language on matters to some parents, too.

Adults who grew up with a language besides English, perhaps because their parents were immigrants or because they were born overseas themselves, may regard that language as a means of building bonds between generations, keeping family traditions alive and widening future career options.

Whether you are a parent hoping a child will know their roots or someone keen to learn an ancestral language yourself, the advice below is aimed at claiming that legacy through language.

Linguists and educators tend to sort foreign language students into two broad groups, each with a different starting point and, often, a different motivation.

The first group covers most children and adults: second-language learners, who start formal instruction with little or no prior knowledge.

Heritage language learners are different, said Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, associate director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Most of them picked up some familiarity with a language other than English naturally as young children.

They usually heard the language at home, and they understand or speak it themselves to varying degrees.

“Heritage language speakers are home chefs,” Ivanova-Sullivan said. “They learned the language in the family kitchen from parents and grandparents rather than in the classroom.”

Experts say that early, repeated exposure tends to hand heritage language students an edge over second-language learners.

But those same students may hold back in class if their grammar feels shaky or if relatives teased them for not being fluent, the experts say.

Arturo Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Center for World Languages, said many people feel embarrassed about slipping up when speaking a language they do not know well.

He urged students to work with what they already know, saying perfection need not be the goal.

“So just remove any apprehension you may have in learning language and then just have fun with the experience,” Diaz said.

The Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit research and teacher education organization that promotes language learning and linguistic diversity, notes that some scholars and educators would count someone with a cultural or familial connection to a language as a heritage language student even if they are starting more or less from zero.

Yang Xiao-Desai, a professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University, said listening to relatives whose first language is not English is an effective route into a heritage language.

“Ask your grandparents for stories,” she said. “Ask them to share a story of a dish, a story of a recipe, a piece of furniture. Whatever you can.”

Learners may also pick up words and phrases from podcasts, music, and subtitled films and videos in the language they are studying.

Ivanova-Sullivan recommends widening the circle of people you practise with.

Some communities run programs that team an English speaker learning a foreign language with a native speaker who wants to learn English.

“When you’re expanding your network, you’re expanding the opportunities to use the language in different ways, and that’s how your vocabulary (grows),” she said.

Ivanova-Sullivan said visiting the family’s country of origin can be a valuable experience for those who can afford it.

She takes her 12-year-old to her native Bulgaria for two months every summer.

Organized overseas tours for people wanting to see their ancestral homelands have multiplied over the past decade, helped in part by at-home DNA test kits.

Travellers with limited time off from work but an interest in learning a language abroad can look at intensive options such as EF Language Abroad, which runs campuses in Spain, France, Korea, Italy, Germany, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

Before setting off, or once back home, reach out to extended family members on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Even beginners can absorb phrases and customs from relatives this way.

Community language schools, which weave language lessons together with cultural traditions, are an option for parents who want their children to learn a family language and embrace their heritage.

Volunteers and parents from local immigrant communities often run these schools as nonprofits.

Classes usually take place after school or at weekends.

Joy Peyton, president of the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools, said most are aimed at children learning or keeping up a language spoken at home, though some also serve adults.

“They use their languages with their parents, with their friends,” Peyton said. “They recognize that their language has value.”

The coalition, a nationwide initiative that connects and advocates for these schools, has documented nearly 1,000 programs teaching 62 languages across 44 states, she said.

Korean is the most-taught language, according to Peyton.

Ana Lúcia Lico, a co-founder and board member of the organization, moved to the U.S. from São Paulo, Brazil, at the age of 35.

Growing up in Northern Virginia, her two sons, now 20 and 23, learned Portuguese and were steeped in Brazilian culture, something she made sure of.

Her older son, Gabriel Lico Bickham, spent two hours every Saturday at a local heritage language school for roughly a decade, beginning at age 4.

He recalls learning grammar there, but also being surrounded by games like “Corre cotia,” similar to the American duck, duck, goose.

Lico, whose husband was born in the U.S., said she also surrounded her boys with Brazilian Portuguese through music, dance and sport.

“Soccer is huge in Brazil,” she said. “Through soccer, my kids developed a whole amazing set of vocabulary, words that I never had to teach them.”

Richard Brecht, co-director of the American Councils Research Center, a nonprofit group devoted to the improvement of language learning worldwide, said hiring native-speaking childcare providers or shopping in neighbourhoods where a heritage language is spoken are further routes for children to pick up the ancestral tongue.

Comic books about a group of children living in a fictitious neighborhood in Brazil helped Bickham learn Portuguese, a skill he says is shaping his future.

He is also fluent in Spanish and recently graduated from the University of Virginia.

In January he leaves for Mozambique, where Portuguese is the official language, to take up an English teaching assistant position through the Fulbright program.

“Growing up today, I feel very close to my Brazilian identity,” Bickham said. “And the language is probably the most important aspect out of that because the language is what unlocks all these cultural aspects.”

From letters and songs to Saturday classes and summer trips, the routes into an ancestral language are many, and the experts agree the first step is simply to start speaking.