Those of us who are second-generation Americans can relate to Julian Castro being unable to speak Spanish. The experience of a conflicted monoglot like me is indeed an authentic and “uniquely American” thing.

@garciabuxton This was a good read, and it’s interesting to see that it fits into the larger tapestry of immigration here. It matches, in broad strokes, with the turn-of-the-last-century story of my own Italian(-American) ancestors that my great-aunt relayed, wherein my immigrant great-great-grandparents, though they themselves retained their native language and cultural elements, raised their children as Americans, with English as their first language, whose own children (my great-aunt’s generation) then felt this loss and disconnect with a culture they at least partly identified with (this branch was also half Italian and half Slovene) and a language they were not able to speak.

@Miraz @smokey @garciabuxton Makes me think of Welsh Not.

Honestly, I have such pride in being English. 😐

@simonwoods @Miraz @smokey Wow. So much for being "uniquely American." Sad that the "embarrassment" of not knowing the language of one's forebears is a global thing. My parents still spoke their Philippine dialect at home, and my older siblings knew the dialect (but always spoke in English), but by the time I came along (born stateside), the parents decided I didn't need to know it. It's always gnawed at me, yet I never got around to learning the language -- and it's harder to do as you get older.

That said, I'm grateful that I can cling to other aspects of my culture -- values, faith, food. I wish I had the language, but trying to grasp small bits of it doesn't make me a "retroactive" Filipino-American, as that idiot congressman quoted in the article would put it. The article left me heartened that I wasn't alone in that experience in this day and age.

@garciabuxton @simonwoods @Miraz I wonder if there’s a qualitative difference in feeling between those who lost their language heritage via “state action” (in most cases, some form of colonization) and those who lost it via parental (in)action after emigration? I also wonder if we see the same things happening with, say, the Turkish community in Germany today?

The article left me heartened that I wasn't alone in that experience in this day and age.

:-) (and once again illustrating the importance of representation and community)

that idiot congressman

To put it mildly ;-) When one’s own Republican Party colleagues censor one for one’s overt and incessant racism, one knows one is the worst of the worst and a disgrace to everything….

@smokey @garciabuxton @simonwoods I would imagine that where the language has been forcibly ‘removed’ then anger would be the inevitable consequence. And colonisation also disrupted / destroyed cultural practices, religious beliefs, and of course the physical world with loss of land etc. On a different but related tack: I Iived in Edinburgh for 7 months and my flatmate had a very broad Scots accent. After a bit I had a deep problem: I sounded wrong speaking with my Kiwi accent and felt wrong and inauthentic if I attempted to sound like the flatmate.

@garciabuxton My wife immigrated with her family when she was about 5 years old. She can speak her parents’ native tongue passably thought not superbly. Her parents never became that proficient at English. I think she likes having the language connection to her country of birth though she only uses it with her parents. Most of the other cohort immigrants are strictly English speaking.

@garciabuxton I've felt this conflict even as a fifth-generation American! (Thanks to an ethnic name and then moving overseas.)

@garciabuxton @Miraz @smokey Thanks Joyce for sharing that link. It's definitely not just an American phenomenon. You're not alone!

Smokey said:

I wonder if there’s a qualitative difference in feeling between those who lost their language heritage via “state action” (in most cases, some form of colonization) and those who lost it via parental (in)action after emigration?

Yes, I'm sure there's a difference that's not limited to language. To use Southeast Asia as an example, there's a difference between being a Malaysian, living in Malaysia, rediscovering Malaysian history pre-colonization by the British.... and being a child of Malaysian emigrants who is born in Australia. On one hand, you're a part of a majority culture -- influenced by colonialism and the West, yes, but still the majority. On the other hand, you're a minority living within a majority culture. And there are differences between being an indigenous minority who is currently being marginalized by the now-majority colonists/emigrants (eg. indigenous Australians), and being an indigenous majority who is no longer directly subjugated (eg. Southeast Asian nations that were former British colonies).

I'm a third-culture kid, have been part of majority and minority cultures at different times, and I've constantly wrestled in my relationship with my mother tongue and my identity at large. I don't think I fall neatly into either category of colonized vs. emigrated. So while generalities can be helpful, I also hesitate to categorize the experiences of nations and individuals in too much detail, as they can be pretty complex.

@vega Thanks once again for your thoughtful response 🙏

@garciabuxton @smokey My grandparents and great grandparents could still speak their Low German dialect. They would switch to it whenever they wanted to speak about something not intended for my tender ears. (My mother tells me they did the same to her when she was a girl.) My grandfather was taught Low German in the one room school he attended along with English until World War I and the Zimmermann Telegram backlash against the German community. During that time the co-equal teaching of German was dropped from the schools and parents encouraged their children to speak English in public.

I don't want to get off on a tangent, but this switch was heavily "encouraged" by the local Anglo community by threat of mob violence.

Still all this did was speed up the melting-pot process of assimilation which was inevitable. The teaching of a dying German dialect would have eventually been dropped in a generation or two anyway because with each passing year it would be less relevant to their lives in 20th and 21st Century America.

@bradenslen Thanks for sharing your family's experience, I love hearing stories like that.

Your mention of "relevance" struck a chord. I find it a gnarly claim. My parents spoke English at home and encouraged me to associate with the majority cultures we lived in; my family upbringing was quite Westernized as a result. I have memories of parents saying things like: "We assimilate because we are entering the greater 'host culture', and we must be open to them just as they were open in welcoming us immigrants." That assimilation wasn't coercive, as in your family's case -- I couldn't imagine the pressure and anxiety that must cause! But assimilation runs the risk of forgetting my roots. The more I live, the more I realize how valuable my mother culture is to my identity... and they were things I dismissed as "irrelevant" when I was younger!

While I'm grateful that I can navigate Western culture quite well as a result of my upbringing, I do feel that something of my heritage had been lost along the way. It's not too late to embrace it though, even if I don't do it as well as my peers (and that's no shame!). I think it's inevitable to lose something while gaining something else, so it's a matter of holding both in tension, returning to my heritage while also valuing the goodness that Western culture has given to me (and it has, a lot).

@vega It's a tricky road to navigate with no rule book to tell us what works. My political sciance background tells me that bilingual countries tend to be unstable. My theory is that humans are hard wired to be tribal which can cause friction when two tribes try to remain distinct but share the same state. One group needs to assimilate over time within the dominant culture which is what your parents were alluding to.

We see this in Belgium, the two major language groups could hang together so long as there was a common external threat of being swallowed up by empires or tribes (most recently the USSR) but once those external threats are removed thing start flying apart.

For my great grandparents generation I don't think the switch was too traumatic. Even in Germany the local Low German dialects were being given up in schools in favor of High German as dictated by the new unified German state under Prussia. If the mother country was changing, and living in the heartland of English speaking America, I think they could see the writing on the wall. They came to the New World largely to get away from continual European wars and to make a better life for their offspring. They came here wanting to leave the Old World behind and slowly, they did, until they reached a generation that could no longer read the old family Bible brought over the seas, long ago, from Germany. That new generation was truely American, mutts now, and part of a new tribe.