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The Importance of Maintaining Native Language

The United States is often proudly referred to as the “melting pot.” Cultural diversity has become a part of our country’s identity. However, as American linguist, Lilly Wong Fillmore, pointed out in her language loss study, minority languages remain surprisingly unsupported in our education system (1991, p. 342). Although her research was conducted more than twenty years ago, this fact still rings true. Many non-minority Americans are not aware of the native language loss that has become prevalent in children of immigrant parents. While parents can maintain native language, children educated in U.S. schools quickly lose touch with their language heritage. This phenomenon, called subtractive bilingualism, was first discovered by psychologist Wallace Lambert, in his study of the language acquisition of French-Canadian children. The term refers to the fact that learning a second language directly affects primary language, causing loss of native language fluency (Fillmore, 1991, p. 323). This kind of language erosion has been integral to the narrative of this country for some time. Many non-minority Americans can trace their family tree back to a time when their ancestors lost fluency in a language that was not English. Today, due to the great emphasis on assimilation into the United States’ English-speaking culture, children of various minorities are not only losing fluency, but also their ability to speak in their native language, at all (Fillmore, 1991, p. 324).

The misconceptions surrounding bilingual education has done much to increase the educational system’s negative outlook on minority languages. In Lynn Malarz’s bilingual curriculum handbook, she states that “the main purpose of the bilingual program is to teach English as soon as possible and integrate the children into the mainstream of education” (1998). This handbook, although written in 1998, still gives valuable insight into how the goals of bilingual education were viewed. Since English has become a global language, this focus of bilingual education, which leads immigrant children to a future of English monolingualism, seems valid to many educators and policymakers. Why support minority languages in a country where English is the language of the prosperous? Shouldn’t we assimilate children to English as soon as possible, so that they can succeed in the mainstream, English-speaking culture? This leads us to consider an essential question: does language loss matter? Through the research of many linguists, psychologists, and language educators, it has been shown that the effect of native language loss reaches far. It impacts familial and social relationships, personal identity, the socio-economic world, as well as cognitive abilities and academic success. This paper aims to examine the various benefits of maintaining one’s native language, and through this examination, reveal the negative effects of language loss.

Familial Implications

The impact of native language loss in the familial sphere spans parent-child and grandparent-grandchild relationships, as well as cultural respects. Psychologists Boutakidis, Chao, and Rodríguez, (2011) conducted a study of Chinese and Korean immigrant families to see how the relationships between the 9th-grade adolescences and their parents were impacted by native language loss. They found that, because the adolescents had limited understanding and communicative abilities in the parental language, there were key cultural values that could not be understood (Boutakidis et al., 2011, p. 129). They also discovered there was a direct correlation between respect for parents and native language fluency. For example, honorific titles, a central component of respect unique to Chinese and Korean culture, have no English alternatives (p.129). They sum up their research pertaining to this idea by stating that “children’s fluency in the parental heritage language is integral to fully understanding and comprehending the parental culture” (Boutakidis et al., 2011, p. 129). Not only is language integral to maintaining parental respect, but also cultural identity.

In her research regarding parental perceptions of maintaining native language, Ruth Lingxin Yan (2003) found that immigrant parents not only agree on the importance of maintaining native language, but have similar reasoning for their views. She discovered that maintaining native language was important to parents, because of its impact on heritage culture, religion, moral values, community connections, and broader career opportunities.

Melec Rodriguez, whose parents immigrated to the United States before he was born, finds that his native language loss directly impacts his relationship with his grandparents. Rodriguez experienced his language loss in high school. He stated that due to his changing social group and the fact that he began interacting with his family less, he found himself forgetting “uncommon words in the language.” His “struggle to process information” causes him to “take a moment” to “form sentences in [his] mind during conversations” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019). Of his interactions with his grandparents, who have a limited understanding of English, he stated:

“I find very often that I simply cannot think of a way to reply while conveying genuine emotion, and I know they feel I am detached at times because of that. I also struggle to tell exciting stories about my experiences and find it hard to create meaningful conversations with family” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019).

Rodriguez’s native language loss creates a distinct communicative barrier between him and his grandparents, causing him difficulty in genuine connection building. Although this is a relatively obvious implication of native language loss, it is nonetheless a concerning effect.

Personal Implications

Native language, as an integral part of the familial sphere, also has strong connections on a personal level. The degree of proficiency in one’s heritage language is intrinsically connected to self-identity. The Intercultural Development Research Association noted this connection, stating that “the child’s first language is critical to his or her identity. Maintaining this language helps the child value his or her culture and heritage, which contributes to a positive self-concept. (“Why Is It Important to Maintain the Native Language?” n.d.). Grace Cho, professor and researcher at California State University, concluded “that [heritage language] development can be an important part of identity formation and can help one retain a strong sense of identity to one's own ethnic group” (Cho, 2000, p. 369). In her research paper, she discussed the “identity crisis” many Korean American students face, due to the lack of proficiency they have in their heritage language (p. 374). Cho found that students with higher levels of fluency could engage in key aspects of their cultural community, which contributed greatly to overcoming identity crises and establishing their sense of self (p. 375).

Social Implications

Native language loss’ connections to family relationships and personal identity broaden to the social sphere, as well. Not only can native language loss benefit social interactions and one’s sense of cultural community, it has large-scale socioeconomic implication. In Cho’s study (2000) she found that college-aged participants with Korean ancestry were faced with many social challenges due to limited fluency in Korean. Participants labeled with poor proficiency remarked on the embarrassment they endured, leading them to withdraw from social situations that involved their own ethnic group (p. 376). These students thus felt isolated and excluded from the heritage culture their parents actively participated in. Native language loss also caused students to face rejection from their own ethnic communities, resulting in conflicts and frustration (p. 377). Participants that did not complain of any conflict actively avoided their Korean community due to their lack of proficiency (p. 378). Participants who were labeled as highly proficient in Korean told of the benefits this had, allowing them to “participate freely in cultural events or activities” (p. 374). Students who were able to maintain their native language were able to facilitate meaningful and beneficial interactions within their cultural community.

Melec Rodriguez made similar comments in his experience as a Spanish and English- speaking individual. Although his native language loss has negatively affected his familial relationships, he has found that, in the past, his Spanish fluency “allowed for a greater social network in [his] local community (school, church, events) as [he] was able to more easily understand and converse with others” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019). As this research suggests, native language fluency has a considerate influence on social interactions. Essentially, a lack of fluency in one’s native language creates a social barrier; confident proficiency increases social benefits and allows genuine connections to form in one’s cultural community.

Benefits to the Economy

Maintaining native language not only benefits personal social spheres, but also personal career opportunities, and thereby the economy at large. Peeter Mehisto and David Marsh (2011), educators central to the Content and Language Integrated Learning educational approach, conducted research into the economic implications of bilingualism. Central to their discussion was the idea that “monolingualism acts as a barrier to trade and communication” (p. 26). Thus, bilingualism holds an intrinsic communicative value that benefits the economy. Although they discovered that the profits of bilingualism can change depending on the region, they referred to the Fradd/Boswell 1999 report, that showed Spanish and English-speaking Hispanics living in the United States earned more than Hispanics who had lost their Spanish fluency (Mehisto & Marsh, 2011, p. 22). Mehisto and Marsh also found that bilingualism makes many contributions to economic growth, specifically “education, government, [and] culture…” (p. 25). Bilingualism is valuable in a society in which numerous services are demanded by speakers of non-English languages. The United States is a prime example of a country in which this is the case.

Increased Job Opportunites

Melec Rodriguez, although he has experienced native language loss, explained that he experienced increased job opportunities due to his Spanish language background. He stated:

“Living in south Texas, it is very common for people to struggle with either English or Spanish, or even be completely unable to speak one of the languages. There are many restaurants or businesses which practice primarily in one language or the other. Being bilingual greatly increased the opportunity to get a job at many locations and could make or break being considered as a candidate” (M. Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2019).

Rodriguez went on to explain that if he were more confident in his native language, he would have been able to gain even more job opportunities. However, as his language loss has increased through the years, Spanish has become harder to utilize in work environments. Thus, maintaining one’s native language while assimilating to English is incredibly valuable, not only to the economy but also to one’s own occupational potential.

Cognitive and Academic Implications

Those who are losing native language fluency due to English assimilation are missing out on the cognitive and academic benefits of bilingualism. The Interculteral Development Research Association addresses an important issue in relation to immigrant children and academic success. When immigrant children begin at U. S. schools, most of their education is conducted in English. However, since these students are not yet fluent in English, they must switch to a language in which they function “at an intellectual level below their age” (“Why Is It Important to Maintain the Native Language?” n.d.). Thus, it is important that educational systems understand the importance of maintaining native language. It is also important for them to understand the misconceptions this situation poses for the academic assessments of such students.

In Enedina Garcia-Vazquez and her colleague's (1997) study of language proficiency’s connection to academic success, evidence was found that contradicted previous ideas about the correlation. The previous understanding of bilingualism in children was that it caused “mental confusion,” however, this was accounted for by the problematic methodologies used (Garcia- Vazquez, 1997, p. 395). In fact, Garcia-Vazquez et al. discuss how bilingualism increases “reasoning abilities” which influence “nonverbal problem-solving skills, divergent thinking skills, and field independence” (p. 396). Their study of English and Spanish speaking students revealed that proficiency in both languages leads to better scores on standardized tests (p. 404). The study agreed with previous research that showed bilingual children to exceed their monolingual peers when it came to situations involving “high level…cognitive control” (p. 396). Bilingualism thus proves to have a distinct influence on cognitive abilities.

Mehisto and Marsh (2011) discuss similar implications, citing research that reveals neurological differences in bilingual versus monolingual brains. This research indicates that the “corpus callosum in the brain of bilingual individuals is larger in area than is the case for monolinguals” (p. 30). This proves to be an important difference that reveals the bilingual individual’s superiority in many cognitive functions. When it comes to cognitive ability, Mehisto and Marsh discuss how bilinguals are able to draw on both languages, and thus “bring extra cognitive capacity” to problem-solving. Not only can bilingualism increase cognitive abilities, but it is also revealed to increase the “cognitive load” that they are able to manage at once (p.30). Many of the academic benefits of bilingualism focus on reading and writing skills. Garcia-Vazquez’s study focuses on how students who were fluent in both Spanish and English had superior verbal skills in both writing and reading, as well as oral communication (p. 404). However, research indicates that benefits are not confined to this area of academics. Due to increased cognition and problem-solving skills, research indicates that bilingual individuals who are fluent in both languages achieved better in mathematics than monolinguals, as well as less proficient bilinguals (Clarkson, 1992). Philip Clarkson, a mathematics education scholar, conducted one of many studies with students in Papua New Guinea. One key factor that Clarkson discovered was the importance of fluency level (p. 419). For example, if a student had experienced language loss in one of their languages, this loss directly impacted their mathematical competence. Not only does Clarkson’s research dissuade the preconceived notions that bilingualism gets in the way of mathematical learning, it actually proves to contribute “a clear advantage” for fluent bilingual students (p. 419). Clarkson goes on to suggest that this research disproves “the simplistic argument that has held sway for so long for not using languages other than English in Papua New Guinea schools” (p. 420). He thus implies the importance of maintaining the native language of the students in Papua New Guinea since this bilingual fluency directly impacts mathematical competency.

Both Garcia-Vazquez et al. and Mehisto and Marsh reveal how proficiency in two languages directly benefits a brain’s functions. Their research thus illustrates how maintaining one’s native language will lead to cognitive and academic benefits. Clarkson expands on the range of academic benefits a bilingual student might expect to have. It is important to note that, as Clarkson’s research showed, the fluency of a bilingual student has much influence on their mathematical abilities. Thus, maintaining a solid fluency in one’s native language is an important aspect of mathematical success.

Suggested Educational Approach

The acculturation that occurs when immigrants move to the United States is the main force causing language loss. Because of the misconceptions of bilingual education, this language loss is not fully counteracted. Policymakers and educators have long held the belief that bilingual education is essentially a “cop-out” for immigrants who do not wish to assimilate to the United States’ English-speaking culture (Fillmore, 1991, p. 325). However, bilingual education is central to the maintenance of native language. Due to the misconceptions and varied views on this controversial subject, there are two extremes of bilingual education in the United States. In Malarz’s (1998) curriculum handbook, she explains the two different viewpoints of these approaches. The first pedological style’s goal is to fully assimilate language-minority students to English as quickly and directly as possible. Its mindset is based on the idea that English is the language of the successful, and that by teaching this language as early as possible, language- minority children will have the best chance of prospering in mainstream society. However, this mindset is ignorant of the concept of subtractive bilingualism, and thus is not aware that its approach is causing native language loss. The second approach Malarz discusses is the bilingual education that places primary importance on retaining the student’s heritage culture, and thereby, their native language. This approach faces much criticism ,since it seems to lack the appropriate focus of a country that revolves around its English-speaking culture. Neither of these approaches poses a suitable solution to the issue at hand. Maintaining native language, as we have discussed, is extremely valuable. However, learning English is also an important goal for the future of language-minority students. Thus, the most appropriate bilingual educational approach is one of careful balance. Native language, although important, should not be the goal, just as English assimilation should not be the central focus. Instead, the goal of bilingual education should be to combine the two former goals and consider them as mutually inclusive. This kind of balanced education is certainly not mainstream, although clearly needed. In Yan’s research regarding parental perceptions of maintaining native language, she found that parents sought after “bilingual schools or those that provided instruction with extra heritage language teaching” (2003, p. 99). Parents of language-minority students recognize the importance of this kind of education and educators and policymakers need to, as well.

The ramifications of native language loss should not be disregarded. Unless bilingual children are actively encouraged and assisted by parents and teachers to maintain their native language, these children will lose their bilingualism. They will not only lose their native fluency and the related benefits, but they will also experience the drawbacks associated with language loss. As the research presented in this article illustrates, there are several specific advantages to maintaining native language. The familial implications reveal that native language loss is detrimental to close relationships with parents and grandparents. Maintaining native language allows for more meaningful communication that can facilitate respect for these relationships as well as heritage culture as a whole. Native language maintenance is also an important factor in the retainment of personal identity. In regard to the social sphere, isolation and a feeling of rejection can occur if native language is not maintained. Additionally, it was found that maintaining native language allows for greater involvement in one’s cultural community. Other social factors included the benefits of bilingualism to the economy as well as the greater scope of job opportunities for bilingual individuals. A variety of studies concluded that there are many cognitive and academic benefits of retaining bilingualism. Due to the many effects of native language loss and the variety of benefits caused by maintaining native language, it can be determined that native language retainment is incredibly important.

Boutakidis, I. P., Chao, R. K., & Rodríguez, J. L. (2011). The role of adolescent’s native language fluency on quality of communication and respect for parents in Chinese and Korean immigrant families. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 2(2), 128–139. doi: 10.1037/a0023606.

Cho, G. (2000). The role of heritage language in social interactions and relationships: Reflections from a language minority group. Bilingual Research Journal, 24(4), 369-384. doi:10.1080/15235882.2000.10162773

Clarkson, P. C. (1992). Language and mathematics: A comparison of bilingual and monolingual students of mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 23(4), 417.

Fillmore, L. W. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(3), 323–346. doi: 10.1016/s0885-2006(05)80059-6

Garcia-Vazquez, E., Vazquez, L. A., Lopez, I. C., & Ward, W. (1997). Language proficiency and academic success: Relationships between proficiency in two languages and achievement among Mexican American students. Bilingual Research Journal, 21(4), 395.

Malarz, L. (1998). Bilingual Education: Effective Programming for Language-Minority Students. Retrieved November 10, 2019, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/curriculum_handbook/413/chapters/Biling... n@_Effective_Programming_for_Language-Minority_Students.aspx .

Mehisto, P., & Marsh, D. (2011). Approaching the economic, cognitive and health benefits of bilingualism: Fuel for CLIL. Linguistic Insights - Studies in Language and Communication, 108, 21-47.

Rodriguez, M. (2019, November 3). Personal interview.

Why is it Important to Maintain the Native Language? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.idra.org/resource-center/why-is-it-important-to-maintain-the... language/.

Yan, R. (2003). Parental Perceptions on Maintaining Heritage Languages of CLD Students.

Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe, 27(2), 99-113. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25745785

The UNESCO Courier

Indigenous languages: Knowledge and hope

By Minnie Degawan

The state of indigenous languages today mirrors the situation of indigenous peoples. In many parts of the world, they are on the verge of disappearance. The biggest factor contributing to their loss is state policy. Some governments have embarked on campaigns to extinguish indigenous languages by criminalizing their use – as was the case in the Americas, in the early days of colonialism. Some countries continue to deny the existence of indigenous peoples in their territories – indigenous languages are referred to as dialects, and accorded less importance than national languages, contributing to their eventual loss.

But today, the major influence on the sorry state of their languages is the fact that indigenous peoples are threatened themselves.

Grave threats

The biggest threat comes from climate change, which is gravely impacting their subsistence economies. So-called development projects such as dams, plantations, mines and other extractive activities are also taking their toll, as are government policies that minimize diversity and encourage homogeneity. There is an increasing propensity of states to criminalize any dissent, resulting in more and more rights violations. We have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the number of indigenous peoples harassed, arrested, imprisoned, and even summarily executed for daring to defend their territories.

What is often overlooked in discussions on these concerns is the impact of these threats on indigenous cultures and values. Indigenous peoples derive their identities, values and knowledge systems from their interaction with their territories, whether forests or seas. Their languages are shaped by their environment – it is their attempts to describe their surroundings that forms the bases of their unique tongues. Thus, when the territory is altered, changes also occur in the culture and eventually, in the language.

The Inuit, for example, have more than fifty terms for snow, each appropriately describing different types of snow, in different situations. Snow is a prime element that the Inuit live with, and therefore have come to know intimately. The same is true with the Igorot of the Cordillera in the Philippines when describing rice – from when it is but a seed ready for planting to when it is fully ripe and ready for harvesting, to when it is newly cooked and ready to be eaten and when it takes the form of wine.

While new information and communication technologies could be used to enhance the learning process and provide tools to preserve indigenous languages, this is sadly not the case. Because indigenous peoples are considered minorities, their languages are often overlooked in positive efforts by governments to protect languages. For instance, in the Philippines, the government has launched the use of mother tongues in schools, but no resources are available in terms of teachers and learning materials to allow for indigenous children to be taught in their mother tongues. As a result, they end up mastering another language and eventually losing their own.

Notions and values lost

In addition, because of years of discrimination, many indigenous parents choose to teach and talk to their children in the dominant languages – in order to create optimal conditions for their social success. Since their mother tongue is often used only by older people, an entire generation of indigenous children can no longer communicate with their grandparents.

In my community, the Kankanaey Igorot, we have the concept of inayan , which basically prescribes the proper behaviour in various circumstances. It encapsulates the relationship of the individual to the community and to the ancestors. It goes beyond simply saying “be good”; it carries the admonition that “the spirits/ancestors will not approve”. Because many of the young people now no longer speak the local language and use English or the national language instead, this notion and value is being lost. The lack of dialogue between elders and the youth is exacting a toll, not just in terms of language but in ancestral ethical principles.

Keeping languages alive

However, with the growing global recognition of indigenous knowledge systems, the hope that indigenous languages will thrive and spread in spoken and written forms is being rekindled. Many indigenous communities have already instituted their own systems of revitalizing their languages. The Ainu of Japan have set up a learning system where the elders teach the language to their youth. Schools of Living Tradition in different indigenous communities in the Philippines similarly keep their cultural forms, including languages, alive.

This edition of the Courier is a welcome contribution to the worldwide effort to focus more on indigenous languages. It is a valuable companion to the UNESCO-Cambridge University Press book, Indigenous Knowledge for Climate Change Assessment and Adaptation , published in 2018. The book illustrates the importance of indigenous knowledge in addressing contemporary global challenges.

Photo: Jacob Maentz

Minnie Degawan

A Kankanaey Igorot from the Cordillera in the Philippines, Minnie Degawan is Director of the Indigenous and Traditional Peoples Program at Conservation International, based at its international headquarters in Virginia, United States. She has years of experience advocating for the greater recognition and respect of indigenous peoples’ rights, and has participated in various policy-making processes, including the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ( UNDRIP ).

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Definition and Examples of Native Languages

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Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
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B.A., English, State University of New York

In most cases, the term native language refers to the language that a person acquires in early childhood because it is spoken in the family and/or it is the language of the region where the child lives. Also known as a mother tongue , first language , or arterial language .

A person who has more than one native language is regarded as bilingual or multilingual .

Contemporary linguists and educators commonly use the term L1 to refer to a first or native language, and the term L2 to refer to a second language or a foreign language that's being studied.

As David Crystal has observed, the term native language (like native speaker ) "has become a sensitive one in those parts of the world where native has developed demeaning connotations " ( Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics ). The term is avoided by some specialists in World English and New Englishes .

Examples and Observations

"[Leonard] Bloomfield (1933) defines a native language as one learned on one's mother's knee, and claims that no one is perfectly sure in a language that is acquired later. 'The first language a human being learns to speak is his native language; he is a native speaker of this language' (1933: 43). This definition equates a native speaker with a mother tongue speaker. Bloomfield's definition also assumes that age is the critical factor in language learning and that native speakers provide the best models, although he does say that, in rare instances, it is possible for a foreigner to speak as well as a native. . . . "The assumptions behind all these terms are that a person will speak the language they learn first better than languages they learn later, and that a person who learns a language later cannot speak it as well as a person who has learned the language as their first language. But it is clearly not necessarily true that the language a person learns first is the one they will always be best at . . .." (Andy Kirkpatrick, World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching . Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Native Language Acquisition

"A native language is generally the first one a child is exposed to. Some early studies referred to the process of learning one's first or native language as First Language Acquisition or FLA , but because many, perhaps most, children in the world are exposed to more than one language almost from birth, a child may have more than one native language. As a consequence, specialists now prefer the term native language acquisition (NLA); it is more accurate and includes all sorts of childhood situations." (Fredric Field, Bilingualism in the USA: The Case of the Chicano-Latino Community . John Benjamins, 2011)

Language Acquisition and Language Change

"Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed. Though we know intellectually that the English we speak today and the English of Shakespeare's time are very different, we tend to think of them as the same--static rather than dynamic." (Casey Miller and Kate Swift, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing , 2nd ed. iUniverse, 2000) "Languages change because they are used by human beings, not machines. Human beings share common physiological and cognitive characteristics, but members of a speech community differ slightly in their knowledge and use of their shared language. Speakers of different regions, social classes, and generations use language differently in different situations ( register variation). As children acquire their native language , they are exposed to this synchronic variation within their language. For example, speakers of any generation use more and less formal language depending on the situation. Parents (and other adults) tend to use more informal language to children. Children may acquire some informal features of the language in preference to their formal alternatives, and incremental changes in the language (tending toward greater informality) accumulate over generations. (This may help explain why each generation seems to feel that following generations are ruder and less eloquent , and are corrupting the language!) When a later generation acquires an innovation in the language introduced by a previous generation, the language changes." (Shaligram Shukla and Jeff Connor-Linton, "Language Change." An Introduction to Language And Linguistics , ed. by Ralph W. Fasold and Jeff Connor-Linton. Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Margaret Cho on Her Native Language

"It was hard for me to do the show [ All-American Girl ] because a lot of people didn't even understand the concept of Asian-American. I was on a morning show, and the host said, 'Awright, Margaret, we're changing over to an ABC affiliate! So why don't you tell our viewers in your native language that we're making that transition?' So I looked at the camera and said, 'Um, they're changing over to an ABC affiliate.'" (Margaret Cho, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight . Penguin, 2006)

Joanna Czechowska on Reclaiming a Native Language

"As a child growing up in Derby [England] in the 60s I spoke Polish beautifully, thanks to my grandmother. While my mother went out to work, my grandmother, who spoke no English, looked after me, teaching me to speak her native tongue . Babcia, as we called her, dressed in black with stout brown shoes, wore her grey hair in a bun, and carried a walking stick.

"But my love affair with Polish culture began to fade when I was five--the year Babcia died. "My sisters and I continued to go to Polish school, but the language would not return. Despite the efforts of my father, even a family trip to Poland in 1965 could not bring it back. When six years later my father died too, at just 53, our Polish connection almost ceased to exist. I left Derby and went to university in London. I never spoke Polish, never ate Polish food nor visited Poland. My childhood was gone and almost forgotten. "Then in 2004, more than 30 years later, things changed again. A new wave of Polish immigrants had arrived and I began to hear the language of my childhood all around me--every time I got on a bus. I saw Polish newspapers in the capital and Polish food for sale in the shops. The language sounded so familiar yet somehow distant--as if it were something I tried to grab but was always out of reach.

"I began to write a novel [ The Black Madonna of Derby ] about a fictional Polish family and, at the same time, decided to enroll at a Polish language school.

"Each week I went through half-remembered phrases, getting bogged down in the intricate grammar and impossible inflections . When my book was published, it put me back in touch with school friends who like me were second-generation Polish. And strangely, in my language classes, I still had my accent and I found words and phrases would sometimes come unbidden, long lost speech patterns making a sudden reappearance. I had found my childhood again."

Joanna Czechowska, "After My Polish Grandmother Died, I Did Not Speak Her Native Language for 40 Years." The Guardian , July 15, 2009

Margaret Cho, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight . Penguin, 2006

Shaligram Shukla and Jeff Connor-Linton, "Language Change." An Introduction to Language And Linguistics , ed. by Ralph W. Fasold and Jeff Connor-Linton. Cambridge University Press, 2006

Casey Miller and Kate Swift, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing , 2nd ed. iUniverse, 2000

Fredric Field, Bilingualism in the USA: The Case of the Chicano-Latino Community . John Benjamins, 2011

Andy Kirkpatrick, World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching . Cambridge University Press, 2007

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Reading, Writing and Preserving: Native Languages Sustain Native Communities

MAGAZINE OF SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

From Issue: Summer 2017 / Vol. 18 No. 2
by John Haworth

“Most people know that we are losing species. Ask schoolchildren, and they’ll know about the panda or the orchid…but ask someone if they know that languages all over the world are dying, maybe one in 10 might.”

These are the words of Bob Holman, poet and expert on oral traditions, sounding the alarm on an impending Extinction Event in indigenous languages. Holman played a key role in the PBS documentary Language Matters with Bob Holman , produced by David Grubin. Scholars estimate that there are more than 6,000 languages spoken throughout the world, but we lose on average one every couple of weeks and hundreds will likely be lost within the next generation. According to Holman, “By the end of this century, half the world’s languages will have vanished. The die-off parallels the extinction of plant and animal species. The death of a language robs humanity of ideas, belief systems and knowledge of the natural world.”

two women photographing and discussing cultural artifacts

Karis Jackson (left) and Nina Sanders (right) discuss the evolution of Crow beadwork while studying historic beaded martingales at the Cultural Resources Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, 2016. Photo By Zach Nelson, Recovering Voices Project, Smithsonian Institution

Ke Kula ‘o Na-wahı-okalani‘o-pu‘u is a Hawaiian language immersion school with grades K–12 on the Island of Hawaii, also known as Big Island, Hawaii. All the classes at Nawahi are taught in Hawaiian. Image Courtesy David Grubin Productions From The Film Language Matters With Bob Holman

The volcano at Kilauea on Hawaii Island. The volcano is called Pele by Hawaiians after the Hawaiian goddess who, according to legend, lives there. Image courtesy David Grubin Productions From The Film Language Matters With Bob Holman

screenshot from the animated short film Fireflies

Still image from The Fireflies that Embellish the Trees , (2015, 1:05 min. Mexico), an animated short fi lm based on a tradition from the Matlatzinca people. The story tells of resuming a Saint Peter’s Day tradition in which people and fireflies took care of trees so they bore more fruit. The film short told in the Matlatzinca language is part of the 68 Voices, 68 Hearts project, a featured partner of the 2017 Mother Tongue Film Festival.

Harvest, 1992 by Michael M. Chiago (Tohono O’odham/Piipaash/Akimel O’odham), b. 1946. Paper, watercolor. Donated to NMAI by Ms. Patricia R. Wakeling in 2001 in memory of Dr. M. Kent Wilson. 25/8464

In some ways, the loss is even greater than the loss of an animal or plant species. According to Joshua A. Bell, anthropologist and curator of globalization at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, “Language diversity is one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements.” Indigenous people are the greatest source of this diversity and have the greatest stake in its preservation. Natives who can communicate in their own languages have an even richer appreciation of their own heritages and command a deeper understanding of their culture and communities. For the Native communities themselalves, fluency in Native languages complements efforts for greater social unity, self-sufficiency and identity. And for those outside these communities, sustaining this cultural diversity enriches all of us and helps greater cross-cultural understanding.

Declaring Emergency

International organizations recognize the crisis. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publishes an Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger , edited by Christopher Moseley, and now in its third edition. UNESCO estimates that there are about 3,000 endangered languages worldwide, and the Atlas lists about 2,500 (among which 230 have become extinct since 1950). The interactive online version of this publication uses intergenerational language transmission to measure degrees of endangerment.

The U.S. government, major Native organizations and the Smithsonian itself have long been part of the fight to save Native languages, where possible marshaling resources to support tribes and Native speakers. Congress passed the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act in 2006, providing support for Native language immersion and restoration programs. The Native American Languages Act of 1990 recognized that “the status of the cultures and languages of Native Americans is unique, and the United States has the responsibility to act together with Native Americans to ensure [their] survival.”

In late 2012, the Department of Health and Human Service’s Administration for Native Americans, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Education and the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on promoting instruction and preservation of Native American languages. A Native American Languages Summit met in Washington, D.C. in September 2015, to celebrate 25 years of the Native American Languages Act. The Summit discussed long-term strategies for immersion language programs, trumpeted the work of youth-led efforts to revitalize languages and encouraged evidence-based research, education and collection of language documentation.

American Indian organizations are increasingly active. In 2010, The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) declared Native languages to be in a state of emergency. This leading Indian advocacy organization declared that the crisis was the result of “longstanding government policies – enacted particularly through boarding schools – that sought to break the chain of cultural transmission and destroy American Indian and Alaska Native cultures.” Tribes understand that tribal identity depends on language and culture.

Other Native groups, such as the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM) and the American Indian Language Development Institute, also play a key role. ATALM convenes tribal cultural organizations in conferences and workshops, teaching Indian Country grassroots the importance of preserving historical documents, records, photographs, cultural materials and language materials and recordings. It values tribal librarians, archivists and museum specialists as guardians of “memory, language and lifeways.”

Recovering Voices

The Smithsonian itself has launched the Recovering Voices Initiative, one of the most important language revitalization programs in the world. As a collaborative program of the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Recovering Voices partners with communities worldwide. Its research links communities, museum collections and experts. In collaboration with communities, it is identifying and returning cultural heritage and knowledge held by the Smithsonian and other institutions

Smithsonian geologist and curator Timothy McCoy gives an example. “In the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, our language is being reintroduced to the community using written documentation collected a century or more ago. Language revitalization goes hand-in-hand with cultural revitalization, strengthening traditional ways of thinking about our people, place and relationships.”

The Recovering Voices Initiative ( www.recoveringvoices.edu ) also hosts film programs through its Mother Tongue Film Festival , an annual program now in its second year. Beginning on United Nations Mother Language Day in February, this year’s festival presented more than 30 films representing 33 languages from around the world. Films about language revitalization and efforts to teach younger generations their “mother tongues” are also part of this festival.

Teresa L. McCarty, a scholar who has taught at UCLA and Arizona State University, has written extensively about indigenous language immersion. She is deeply informed by an understanding that the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity is endangered by the forces of globalization, “which works to homogenize and standardize even as they segregate and marginalize.” Language immersion helps counter the pressures on children to communicate exclusively in English.

Although establishing immersion schools – along with the ongoing work required to operate them – requires resources often beyond the capacities of many tribes, there is a growing appreciation that language and cultural immersion approaches are necessary for Native communities to have fluent speakers in their own languages. NCAI has urged the federal government to provide funding, training and technical support.

Many approaches support cultural immersion in communities, from language instruction in early childhood education to bilingual and multi-lingual instruction in schools, to language camps and classes and childcare provided by speakers of the language. Programs include teacher training, family programming designed to support Native language use in the home, development of educational resources (e.g. lesson plans) and creative uses of technology on the Internet and social media. Use of Native languages in local radio, television and in local publications also helps. Some local efforts focus on novice learners, others on learners with prior language knowledge and proficient speakers. Many tribes have found creative ways to advance this work and engage their communities.

One of the most significant federal programs that support this work is a program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Their Native American/Native Hawaiian Museum Services program provides funding to Indian tribes, Native Alaskan villages and corporations, and organizations primarily representing Native Hawaiians. These grants sustain heritage, culture and knowledge, including language preservation work.

Here are three programs supported by IMLS:

In Neah Bay, Washington State, the Makah Cultural and Research Center is working to preserve oral histories and facilitate access to archival collections by digitizing and indexing fragile audio reel-to-reel tape, cassettes and handwritten transcriptions. These transcripts of the Makah language recordings originally created by elders and fluent speakers, provide avenues for tribal members to learn more about their history, culture and tradition.
In Taholah, Wash., the Quinault Indian Nation is working to digitize a dictionary, complete with audio recordings and a searchable database, a comprehensive digital repository of their language. This work is critically important to preserving the extinct Tsamosan (Olympic) branch of the Coast Salish family of the Salishan language.
In Salamanca, N.Y., the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum is developing a permanent, interactive exhibition titled “Ganönyö:g,” commonly referred to as the “Thanksgiving Address,” for its new Seneca Nation Cultural Center building. “Ganönyö:g” will visually represent each section of the speech with corresponding audio recordings featuring local Seneca Nation members speaking in the Seneca language. Through the exhibition, museum visitors will gain a deeper understanding of contemporary Seneca cultural beliefs, philosophy, origins and language.

The Modern Language Association gave strong support to the effort in its annual conference, honoring Ofelia Zepeda, the Tohono O’odham poet and scholar and other leaders in indigenous language research. Scholars presented papers and panels informed by a scholarly commitment to indigenous worldviews. The Association unveiled a Language Map aggregating data from the American Community Survey and the U.S. Census to display the locations and numbers of speakers of 30 languages commonly spoken in the United States. Their Language Map Data Center provides information about more than 300 languages spoken throughout the country.

Though the challenges can be overwhelming, Native languages are being preserved, and becoming part of the daily life of Native communities. As indigenous peoples communicate in their own languages, they honor their rich heritages and cultures.

John Haworth (Cherokee) is senior executive emeritus, National Museum of the American Indian – New York. He has taken a leadership role in the development of the Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Cultures and Infinity of Nations (a major long-term exhibition currently on view at the GGHC), and serves on the advisory boards of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums.

Two young Native students reading a book during class.

Preserving Native Languages in the Classroom

How native educators are creating immersive learning experiences that connect students with their indigenous language, culture, and lifeways..

Laura Zingg

Editorial Project Manager, One Day Studio

Andy Nez taught his Native language, Diné, for two years as a corps member in New Mexico, not far from where he grew up. He says the language represents much more than words—it’s a window into a uniquely Navajo worldview. Words, concepts, and ways of phrasing questions are rooted in relationships between people, land, and all living things.

Līhau Godden is the first in several generations in her family to speak fluent Hawaiian, ever since her mother and grandmother were required to learn English as the dominant language in school. As a 2015 Hawai’i corps member, Līhau returned to the same Hawaiian immersion school that she attended as a student, to help high schoolers gain mastery of their Native language.

These are just two examples of Teach For America alumni who are dedicated to preserving their Native languages for future generations of Indigenous students, in the classroom and beyond.

The most recent American Community Survey data collected from 2009 to 2013 found that there are 150 different Native North American languages collectively spoken by more than 350,000 people across the country. Native languages account for nearly half of the 350 total languages spoken in the United States. Yet, many of these languages are at risk of becoming extinct with only a small number of speakers remaining.

The reasons for this decline are complex and impact nearly every Indigenous language spoken in the U.S. They trace their origins back to when the first European explorers came to North America and the events that unfolded over centuries as Native peoples were displaced from their land by colonists and settlers.

The harmful effects of policies enacted during this time—such as requiring Native students to attend English-only boarding schools and the forced relocation and assimilation at the expense of eradicating Native language and culture—are still playing out today.

While there is still much work to be done, there have been great efforts since the Civil Rights era and over the past decades to restore Native languages and preserve Indigenous culture, specifically in the classroom—a place where Native children often feel invisible. This includes local and national efforts, such as the recent Senate approval to reauthorize the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act , which supports language preservation and restoration programs for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students.

The vast majority of this work has happened at the grassroots level, led by Native leaders, activists, and educators who are most directly impacted by the loss of their language. Native communities are still working to undo laws enacted long ago, establishing community-based immersion schools, and partnering with education agencies to offer Native language in public schools.

Children who learn their Indigenous language are able to maintain critical ties to their culture, affirm their identity, and preserve important connections with older generations. There is also an additional benefit for students who learn their Indigenous language from a teacher who shares the same background, history, and culture.

Teach For America’s Native Alliance Initiative partners with Native communities across the U.S. to recruit more Native teachers into the classroom, particularly in the communities they are from. TFA alums, Līhau Godden and Andy Nez are part of a community of over 300 Native alumni who are helping Native students feel seen by reinforcing their language, culture, and stories in the classroom.

Nurturing the Next Generation of Navajo Speakers

One of the greatest Navajo teachings that Andy follows is, K'ézhnídisin dóó dadílzinii jidísin . It’s a Diné phrase that means “admire all living beings and respect all that is sacred.”

Andy is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and currently works for the Department of Diné Education in Window Rock, Arizona, as a senior education specialist. He says his grandparents played an important role in transmitting the Diné language to him. From a young age, Andy joined his grandmother and aunt in traditional Navajo seasonal ceremonies and learned Diné within the context of the changing landscape, the way his family had done for generations.

“Being able to grow up in that environment and converse with elders from 6 or 7 years old all the way into my early teenage years, that's how I picked up the Navajo language,” Andy says

Today, there are approximately 170,000 fluent Diné speakers. While Diné is one of the more widely-spoken Indigenous languages, the number of speakers has declined significantly over the last generation. Between 2000 and 2010, U.S. Census data found that the percentage of Navajos who spoke their Native language dropped from 76 to 51 percent, with younger generations among those who were least fluent.

While Andy doesn’t consider himself a completely fluent Diné speaker, he can read and write in the language and carry on conversations with the elders in his community. As an undergrad, he tutored young Navajo students and says his love of the Diné language and culture led him into teaching.

“We think about models or strategies or ways that we can pass on the language, which are important. But really, we should just speak the language whenever we can so that kids are familiarizing themselves.”

Senior Education Specialist, Department of Diné Education

New Mexico '14

Andy taught bilingual education in Diné and English for grades K-5 at Chee Dodge Elementary School in Ya-Ta-Hey, New Mexico, as a 2014 corps member. The school was named after Henry Chee Dodge, the first Navajo tribal chairman. While Andy taught primarily Navajo students, he says they had a range of familiarity with the language. Some could speak in full sentences, while others were only familiar with a few specific words.

Andy helped his students build fluency by building conversation into his lessons. Andy recalls one of his favorite projects, in which students wrote a Diné word describing themselves or their mood on a yellow sticky note. They arranged their notes to form a giant ear of corn, representing their interconnectedness to each other and the earth. They then practiced how to ask the question, “How do you feel?”

“We talked about how our identity is important, and how we are all part of a community that looks out for each other,” Andy says.

When students learned about the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. Army create secret intelligence reports during World War II, they got to practice using Diné to translate their own coded messages.

One of the biggest challenges that Andy ran into was a lack of Navajo being spoken at home, particularly among those who are bilingual, where it’s easy to fall back on English. In order to engage his students’ families in speaking the language, Andy created homework assignments that required students to collaborate with their parents, or a community member or talk with an elder in Diné.

“We think about models or strategies or ways that we can pass on the language, which are important,” Andy says. “But really, we should just speak the language whenever we can so that kids are familiarizing themselves.”

Andy says learning the Diné language helps students stay rooted in their identity and understand their place in the world. He believes that the language has the power to heal the hurts he sees in his community and restore one’s connection with the stories and traditions of the Navajo people.

“Diné language is not just words and sounds. It's teaching the child to appreciate life and to respect their surroundings and all living beings,” Andy says. “When you speak Navajo, you have a sense of respect and a sense of self, and you carry that forward.”

Andy is thinking big about the role he wants to play in preserving the Diné language in the future. He’s currently working on a Ph.D. in educational leadership at Grand Canyon University. He is looking forward to creating Navajo-related programs, teaching gender and sexuality courses through a Navajo cultural lens, and publishing articles in Diné. He says he plans to get more involved in politics and plans to run for Navajo Nation Council in 2022.

Andy has done voice-overs and translation work for various projects, such as a recent documentary called Moroni for President, about a young Navajo man who campaigns to be the first openly gay president of the Navajo Nation. In the meantime, he’s started a series of online lessons called Diné Language in 10 Seconds, in which he uploads videos of himself to his Facebook page, teaching common phrases that can be used at home or in the workplace.

“So as long as I'm on earth, there's going to be a Navajo language speaker, “ Andy says. “That's just my passion and I will continue to do that.”

Teaching Culturally Relevant Science in Hawaiian

When the U.S. government annexed Hawai’i as a territory in 1898, the Hawaiian language was banned from being taught in schools. By the 1980s, English had replaced Hawaiian as the primary language spoken on the islands. Nearly all of the native Hawaiian speakers who were under the age of 18 could fit into a single classroom.

But that all changed in the 1970s, when Hawaiian language activist Larry Kimura led the effort to convince Hawaii’s Department of Education to approve the creation of Hawaiian immersion schools. The campaign was successful, however, the government did not provide any resources or support. The work of creating the schools was left to community members

As a student, Līhau Godden attended one of these immersion schools, Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino, located in Kona. Then, in 2015 she returned to her alma matter to teach as a corps member.

Because Hawaiian language instruction was banned from schools for several generations, Līhau says she didn’t grow up speaking Hawaiian with her family at home. (Her mother is Hawaiian and her father is not). However, Līhau’s mother wanted Līhau and her siblings to grow up knowing how to speak Hawaiian. In addition to sending her children to the Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino immersion school, Līhau’s mother also joined the movement to restore Hawaiian language by helping to establish a Hawaiian immersion day-care center.

After college, Līhau returned to Kona and began volunteering at Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino, helping administer Hawaiian language tests. The school had a shortage of Hawaiian-speaking teachers so Līhau applied through Teach For America, which has a partnership with the school.

“It may seem serendipitous, but it was the perfect fit,” Līhau says.

“Whenever I meet kids who go to immersion schools, I always speak to them in Hawaiian so they can see that there are people out there who use it. It allows us to stay connected to our values and keep stories from our ancestors alive.”

Līhau Godden

Hawai'i '15

Līhau taught 7-12-grade science, entirely in Hawaiian. While Hawaiian immersion schools have come a long way, Līhau says it is still rare to find teachers who are fluent in Hawaiian and also have specific subject matter expertise.

Līhau’s students came in with a range of fluency in Hawaiian. During her first year of teaching, many students were frustrated with the steep learning curve. They were not only learning new science concepts, but they were learning them entirely in Hawaiian.

“It's a lot of new vocabulary,” Līhau says. “Even for the kids who have been speaking Hawaiian, since they were in kindergarten, if they haven't learned those higher-level science vocabulary words in Hawaiian, they're kind of lost too.”

Līhau worked to ground her lessons in Hawaiian culture, helping her students make connections between science, Hawaiian history, and folklore. When learning about the solar system, Līhau wove in traditional Hawaiian stories about the role that the moon phases play in helping people keep time and mark specific rituals throughout the year. They talked about the Hawaiian star compass and how their ancestors used stars to navigate while traveling by sea. During chemistry class, students explored the chemical compounds found in traditional Hawaiian medicine.

“There is so much science baked into the culture,” Līhau says. “You're still touching on all these different science standards and science concepts, but approaching it from a different perspective.”

Līhau says so much of the Hawaiian language and stories are rooted in the idea that everything shares a connection back to the land. The Hawaiian word for land is Āina. But it can also be broken down into words that refer to being fed or nourished, such as ʻai ʻana which means “to eat.” By learning the language, students are also able to view the world through a Hawaiian perspective.

“Through the language, you're able to access cultural protocol and stories and songs,” Līhau says. “Hawaiian is so poetic, and there are so many double meanings that you don't ever fully understand from just the translation.”

During the four years that Līhau taught at Ke Kula ʻo ʻEhunuikaimalino, she was part of a school-wide effort to focus on speaking Hawaiian throughout the school day. She helped the school implement a class in which students were grouped by speaking level, rather than grade level, and worked with her school team to fill in gaps in the school’s Hawaiian-language science curriculum. She also helped develop culturally relevant science standards for immersion schools that were grounded in Hawaiian culture.

“My students made a lot of improvement as the result of teachers and students holding each other accountable for speaking more Hawaiian,” she says. “By the third year, hardly any of my students spoke English to me.”

In 2015 Līhau traveled with her students to Washington, D.C., to perform at TFA’s 25th-anniversary summit. She and her students performed a traditional hula in front of 10,000 people. While Līhau says the experience was a bit nerve-wracking, it was an important moment for her students to be seen and to share their stories in their Native language.

Līhau now lives near where she taught and helps support her family’s business. She’s passionate about preserving the Hawaiian language and contemplating what her next steps will be. For now, she says the most important thing is to normalize the language by speaking it as much as possible in her day-to-day life.

“Whenever I meet kids who go to immersion schools, I always speak to them in Hawaiian so they can see that there are people out there who use it,” Līhau says. “It allows us to stay connected to our values and keep stories from our ancestors alive.”

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Native Language

A group of students with black shirts and handprints painted over their faces in red hit a large drum while singing.

Incorporating Students’ Native Languages to Enhance Their Learning

Teachers don’t have to speak students’ first languages to make room for these languages in middle and high school classrooms.

High school student reading in classroom

I loved my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Phillips. I will always remember how safe and welcomed she made me feel. I would watch her give instructions in English, not understanding a word of it, and I would copy what my classmates did. When Mrs. Phillips came over, I would speak unabashedly to her in Vietnamese. She would pay careful attention to my gestures to decipher my message and praise me with a smile in celebration of my work.

You do not need to speak the same language to feel someone’s love. I also don’t remember her yelling at me to speak English. What would be the use of finger waving and saying, “Speak English!” when Vietnamese was the only language I knew at the time?

As we embrace culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies , we are abandoning destructive English-only policies. Unfortunately, English-first policies often place other languages last—and, by extension, the cultures represented by non-English languages.

What messages are multilingual learners (MLs) internalizing when the only sanctioned language they hear in schools is English? With an additive approach to language , MLs can learn another language without having to subtract their existing ones.

3 Ways Multilingualism Helps Students Learn

1. Mastering content. I used to think that students had to learn content in English. However, a concept like tectonic plates remains the same regardless of the language. Now when I have my students complete a research project, I make sure to tell them that using an article or video in another language is absolutely appropriate.

When my 10th graders were learning about how Covid-19 impacted the Thai economy, many of them used articles written in Thai, as they provided more nuanced and relevant details. In this way, we celebrated the students’ multilingualism and dissolved the language hierarchy myth by showing students that content does not have to be learned in only one language.

2. Collaborating. Learning content by reading articles in students’ languages works for students who are literate in other languages. For students who can only speak and understand their heritage language, learning content is still possible while collaborating with classmates who speak the same languages.

For example, when I had my students read an article in English about land subsidence, I had them pause at the end of each paragraph to talk about and process what they had just read. For many of my students, it was easier to understand the article when they talked about it in their Chinese, Thai, or Korean peer groups. Since learning is a social experience , let’s have students learn using all of their languages.

3. Communicating ideas. Often, MLs have ideas swirling in their minds but struggle to formulate them in English. To support these students, we can have them first brainstorm, organize, and outline in their heritage languages. Forcing students to write or speak only in English is like putting speed bumps in their way. The goal is to have idea generation and to connect concepts at this stage, not English output. Once they have all of their ideas organized using their languages, we can support students to transfer these ideas into English.

With these three approaches to heritage language integration, we see that teachers do not have to know all of the languages their students speak. All teachers need to do is see students’ multilingualism as an asset that extends learning and sustains students’ connections to their communities. As MLs engage more through their languages, our eyes are opened to their potential.

Yes, many of us work in places that require English output on summatives, and state assessments are also in English. However, this does not mean that everything we do as teachers has to be monolingual. Think of languages as tools. If we only have a hammer, there’s a limit to what we can construct. When we are free to use all of the linguistic tools from our toolbox, imagine all of the things that we can create.

Lastly, even if we cannot speak our students’ languages, by welcoming them to use those languages we create a space where assets and cultures are recognized and honored. Years from now, when MLs may have forgotten what we’ve taught, they will still recall with affection how we made them feel. Start with embracing all languages in class.

Calgary Journal

Voices: How losing my native language made me struggle with my identity

Preserving mother tongues: Why children of immigrants are losing their languages

Losing my mother tongue has had a major impact on my life. I feel a disconnect with my family’s culture. Having meaningful conversations with family members who only speak Spanish is practically impossible.

Children of immigrants losing their parents’ language is not exclusive to me. Second generation immigrants are more likely to lose their first language than to remain bilingual, according to a study by Claudio Toppelberg and Brian Collins that looked at language in immigrant children.

Rennie Lee, a researcher at the University of Queensland who specializes in the social sciences of immigration, says maintaining heritage languages as a child is hard, especially in Canada.

“It’s really hard and I can feel those tensions, the barriers that I’m up against.” Rennie Lee, Researcher at the University of Queensland

“If their language of instruction, the kind of language they communicate with their friends, is in English, it’s really hard to maintain an immigrant language or their parents native tongue.”

Lee is a second generation immigrant herself and she is able to speak her heritage language of Cantonese. But passing on the language to the next generation has proven to be a struggle.

“I now have a son who’s three and I’m trying to speak Cantonese with him, but it is really challenging. Even I, as someone who’s studied this and really tried to preserve my parents language with him,” she says.

“It’s really hard and I can feel those tensions, the barriers that I’m up against.”

Much like Lee, my parents are able to speak my heritage language. When I was old enough to go to school, I asked for them to speak to me in English to better fit in with my peers.

I have countless memories of people learning of my heritage and attempting to speak to me in Spanish, only for me to provide nothing but a confused face and a jaded apology for being monolingual. It pains me to see their excited face slowly fade, and in some cases, even turn into something that feels judgemental.

However, I do not feel any resentment towards my parents. How were they supposed to know? With navigating having children and balancing everything that it takes to provide for your child, language is something that seems to just fall through the cracks. Despite this, there are calls from Toppelberg and Collins in their research to treat bilingualism in a child with more importance.

Benefits of being bilingual

The study states, “Educational, clinical and family efforts to maintain and support the development of competence in the two languages of the dual language child, may prove rewarding in terms of long term wellbeing and mental health, educational and cognitive benefits.”

As I got older and prepared to enter an increasingly competitive job market, I could not help but feel that an opportunity was missed in my childhood to become fluent in Spanish.

One study by Patricia Gandara on the economic value of bilingualism concluded that, “Employers increasingly prefer employees who can reach a wider client base and work collaboratively with colleagues across racial, ethnic, and cultural lines.”

Despite losing my ability to speak Spanish in early childhood, the foundations I established can help me in my attempt to relearn Spanish as an adult.

In a paper on childhood language memory in adult heritage language relearners, it says “Our findings indicate that very early childhood language memory (i.e., from the first year of life) remains accessible in adulthood even after a long period of disuse of the language.”

These findings inspire me to invest time into bettering myself and reclaiming what was lost at a young age. I am determined to find my culture and learn the language that has eluded me my entire life. I have decided to take Spanish language and hispanic culture as a minor, and I am currently enrolled in both Spanish language and Spanish culture classes at Mount Royal University.

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Teenagers on What Their Families’ Native Languages Mean to Them

“I’m not that embarrassed,” one student said of his accent, “because it’s a flex to know multiple languages.”

A photo illustration of the words klutz, galore and fiasco with many arrows curving in all directions.

By The Learning Network

Do you speak any languages besides English at home? Did your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents when they were growing up? Do you or anyone else in your family have what might be considered an accent?

In the guest essay “ ‘Don’t Lose Your Accent!’ ” Ilan Stavans urges newcomers to the United States to embrace their “immigrant verbal heritage.” He writes that “far from undermining the American experiment, immigrants enhance our culture by introducing new ideas, cuisines and art. They also enrich the English language.”

What role does your family’s native tongue play in your life? we asked students. We heard from young people who speak Russian, Telugu, Spanish, Farsi, Cantonese, Twi, Quichua, Arabic and Polish. We heard from those who took pride in their family’s multilingualism and from those who were made to feel ashamed of it, but eventually came to cherish it. We also heard from several students who never had the chance to learn their relatives’ native tongue and regretted it.

Benjamin, a student from San Jose, Calif., who grew up speaking English and Mandarin, summed up a sentiment many students expressed about their linguistic heritages: “Back in elementary school, I was often told that I had an accent, but now that I think about it, I’m not that embarrassed, because it’s a flex to know multiple languages.” Read on to see what else teenagers had to say about what their families’ native languages mean to them.

Thank you to all those who joined the conversation on our writing prompts this week, including students from Casa Roble High School in Orangevale, Calif .; Union County Vocational-Technical High School in Scotch Plains, N.J. ; and W.T. Clarke High School in Westbury, N.Y.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

I bring my culture and language with me wherever I go.

I live in the United States, but my parents immigrated here from India. My parents speak a variety of Indian dialects, and English was not a language they learned until their late teenage years.

I have been exposed to many languages from a young age and being able to pick up on these languages has only benefited me. Sure, there were times in elementary school where I would be told I had incorrect grammar, but for the most part, knowing other languages helped me connect with other children of immigrants. It also helped me connect with my older family, although I have always been aware that I am not quite “Indian” enough.

Also, because of the fact that I know Marathi and some Hindi (the Indian dialects common in Mumbai and Pune), I am able to enjoy movies and music from more than just the English streams. Some of my favorite movies are Marathi movies.

I bring my culture and language with me wherever I go. The best places to innovate are those with diverse backgrounds; I love that I can contribute to it.

— Riyana, UCVTS, NJ

My parents made my sister and me cling to our language. Now, I have learned to appreciate my Polish heritage.

When I was growing up, I exclusively spoke in one tongue: Polish. Both of my parents had immigrated from Poland only a few years before and they hadn’t mastered enough of English yet for me to pick it up, so my only real teachers for the first few years were my older sister and the cartoons I watched on Saturday mornings. As the years passed on, my sister would speak more and more English, and then I’d speak more and more English, until eventually we had a better grasp on both English and Polish. My parents knew this would happen and made us cling to the language, sending us to Polish school every Saturday and bringing us to Polish Mass every Sunday. And so we kept up this routine, but there were still some moments when I just couldn’t think of the right word. Explaining things that I didn’t know the name of because it’s a szczotka, not a brush, and no, I’m not dumb, I just can’t think of the word. To hand me those “thingies” because I know in my head that these are kwiatki, but you won’t understand that. So I got better and I read dictionaries in between Pinkalicious and Amelia Bedelia books. Then I began to struggle to think of the words in Polish rather than in English. Asking my parents where the hairbrush is and where did we put the flowers? I’d spent so long trying to be “American” that I spoke more to my own parents in English than I did in Polish. Now, I have learned to appreciate my Polish heritage and accept that it will always be a part of who I am.

— Nicole, UCVTHS, NJ

I joined Tamil classes, and they forever changed my life.

As a first-generation child in the U.S., my family has very close ties to India. So, I grew up hearing Tamil and Kannada around the house. My mom speaks more Kannada, and my dad more Tamil. As a young child, I heard much more Kannada, so I understand the language much better than Tamil. However, Tamil became more necessary to speak, to talk to family in India. I joined Tamil classes and learned reading, writing, and speaking. Although I am not fluent in the language, taking those classes forever changed my life. I became a part of a community where I met some of my closest friends and made many connections.

— Rina, W.T. Clarke High School, Westbury, NY

Seeing my family speak Farsi makes me proud.

My family speaks Farsi, a beautiful language that I have yet to explore and learn. When my grandparents converse in the language, I look at them with big eyes, hoping to catch a word or two that I know. When I was much younger, it would confuse me to hear people say that they’re embarrassed of hearing their parents or relatives speak in their native language in public for everyone to hear. For me personally, I did not see them speaking Farsi as a burden to my reputation or happiness, but as something that made me proud. I would lift my chin up high, smiling wide, observing their thick accents and crisp language … It is a gift that I have taken for granted and a mark of culture that goes back thousands of years. It’s a piece of the puzzle that makes me who I am and something I’d love to share with the rest of the world.

— Linden, Harvard-Westlake High School, CA

I pride myself in being able to keep something as important as my native tongue.

At school? I speak English. I have no accent, few grammar issues, and I can’t even read Chinese. Some could argue that English was my first language, even if it wasn’t.

After a long day at school, I’ll come home to greet my parents, speaking in only Chinese. For me, Chinese is one of the things that connects me to my culture. Although I’m an ABC (American Born Chinese), I want to be able to still experience and truly understand my culture and background. In the full article, Emily Kwong states how her father “explained how his need to integrate fueled his desire to become fluent, and he forgot how to speak his native tongue. In the process, his family lost an important part of their cultural heritage.” As someone who has not experienced much need to assimilate or integrate herself into American culture, I pride myself in still being able to keep something as important as my native tongue.

— Yolanda, W.T. Clarke High School, Westbury, NY

Try not to lose your native language because one day, you might need it.

I speak Spanish because that is the first language I ever learned. I still speak Spanish at home because my mom does not speak English. But my dad does speak a little bit of English so sometimes I speak to him in English though most of the time I speak Spanish with both of them. I feel that it is important to keep talking about your heritage, where you come from and what it celebrates and also try not to lose the language because sometime in life, you will need it and also try not to lose the language because sometime in life, you will need it.

— Lourdes, California

Growing up with English and Tagalog was both a confidence booster and a blessing.

With my parents coming from the Philippines and me being born here, I guess I could say I’ve had a unique experience. I feel like growing up with both English and the native language of the Philippines, Tagalog, was both a confidence booster and a blessing. While I can agree learning a new language has its challenges, I also believe in the importance of sticking to your roots. In other words, I believe in the importance of how powerful a culture is. While I do primarily speak English, I also am in the process of learning Tagalog. Not to brag but I feel like I’ve improved a lot, not only as a Tagalog speaker, but also within myself. From eating Lunchables at age 6 to eating halo halo, pandan, and pancit during high school. I’ve learned so much more about my culture from the food to the traditions I’ve learned to embrace it versus pretending it doesn’t exist.

— Isaiah, Glenbard West HS

I’m grateful for what little Telugu I know, as it has allowed me to feel a sense of community and comfort.

Whenever I tell strangers that my native language is Telugu, I usually get a blank look or confused expression in return. While it’s understandable that that statement may not garner the same impressed reaction as saying I speak French or Italian, I still take pride in my mother tongue. I live in an area where there are very few other Indian people, so knowing another language makes me feel more connected to my community. Being able to understand private conversations, inside jokes, and idioms that don’t quite translate to English fills me with a sense of pride and belonging. Knowing Telugu also lets me connect with loved ones outside of the United States. My grandparents aren’t fluent in English, and knowing Telugu is what allows me to converse with them, whether it’s about small details about my day at school or news of a family member’s wedding. While I’m far from fluent, I’m grateful for what little I know, as it has allowed me to feel a sense of community with those near me and feel comfort from those who are farther away.

— Aparna, Wilmington, NC

I learned that embracing my culture means embracing all aspects of myself, including my accent.

As a Ghanaian-American I am a swirl of both worlds. I am very in tune with my African heritage while being a part of the American fabric. My family speaks Twi, English, and French. Sometimes, I forget which language I should use in different settings … I think my family members and I have been pressured to assimilate with others’ ideas of what it means to be “American.” This has been perpetuated when it comes to our accents. To others, it seemed that being different was not unique, but instead, it made us “weird.” I specifically felt this way when I returned here from Ghana when I was five. The way I pronounced certain words was different because I was used to British English. I remember I got made fun of for pronouncing “water” and “Europe” differently from my classmates. I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb and I wanted so badly to fit in; I learned that embracing my culture means embracing all aspects of myself. I realized that I was every bit “American” like the next person. I think American English would not be the way it was without immigrants. Over time, certain aspects of our current dialect have been combined with words from different cultures. It is so diverse, and this should be celebrated.

— Derene, UCVTS, NJ

My family and I find so much community with those who also speak Cantonese.

My first language is English because I was born in America, and my family speaks English at home. My father immigrated to the United States when he was six or seven years old, and my mother was born in the United States. However, both of them speak Cantonese fluently, and my grandparents speak primarily Cantonese. Being a less common dialect of Chinese, Cantonese is only heard in certain parts of America. This means that my family and I find so much community with those who speak it as well. At times, I have found myself feeling like an outsider with those who speak Mandarin, which is far more common. The few friends and family who do speak Cantonese give us an opportunity to connect, allowing us to honor our linguistic heritage and ethnicity. Even the Disney movie “Turning Red,” which contains only a few lines of Cantonese, had me practically jumping with excitement. Despite feeling exiled and like an outcast for a large portion of my life, I have learned to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of my “mother tongue,” and in the future I strive to become more proficient in it so that I may feel closer to my lineage.

— Alexy, NJ

A mixture of languages is what makes my family special.

I am a Latina student with Pakistani roots. My first language is Spanish though we tend to mix it with a bit of English and Quichua. We don’t speak Arabic in our day-to-day but we do get a lot of customs from our Pakistan heritage, especially when it comes to the food. Our language plays a huge role in our bond as a family. A lot of our inside jokes are based on language or the mixture of different languages. Some people think it’s strange and often don’t fully understand what we are saying because we speak many languages at once, but I like to think that’s what makes my family special.

— Nicole, Quito, Ecuador

Speaking Spanish has allowed me to build strong relationships with my relatives.

I can’t help but smile when I talk to my parents in English. It just feels so weird.

Both of them immigrated from Colombia in their early 20s knowing very little English. Needless to say, I grew up speaking Spanish, and I continue to speak it fluently. For this, I am very thankful. It has allowed me to build strong relationships with my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and, most importantly, my mom and dad. In addition, it has connected me more to my culture. That includes music, dancing, tv shows, and movies.

So when I smile, talking to my parents in English, it is not due to an awkward sensation, but the reason why it’s there. It reminds me of the important role the Spanish language has in my life.

I don’t speak my family’s language, but hearing it encourages me to engage in my culture more.

My first language and only language is English but my family on my dad’s side speaks Spanish. Although I have never been taught it, I understand some of it and have been around the language my whole life. My dad does not speak Spanish at home but he speaks it with his parents and some of his other family … Hearing the language being used around my family reminds me of my Hispanic roots and encourages me to engage in my culture more.

— Giselle, Valley Stream North

Learning Russian, Polish and English can be stressful, but it is a blessing.

I speak Russian, Polish and English and oddly enough I don’t have an accent like my parents. My entire life, my dad has wanted me to learn more Russian even though I can already speak, read and write in Russian and having to learn that on top of all the other stuff at school is super stressful … My mom was very lax with Polish and didn’t want me to have to deal with the stress of learning it. In all, being able to speak different languages is a blessing and a great thing: it lets you socialize with new people and enjoy that culture’s food.

— Alex, Glenbard West High School, Glen Ellyn, IL

Losing my ability to speak another language felt like an entire world was cut off from me.

Before the pandemic, I visited China every summer to meet with my relatives. As a small child, though I had the ability to speak, I never had anything to say. But then, as I got older, though I had more things I wanted to say, I no longer had the ability to speak.

Sometimes I wonder what insightful conversations I missed from not being able to speak Chinese, or how many new ideas I could get from books written in Chinese.

By losing my ability for another language, it feels like an entire world was cut off from me, one that could not possibly be accessed through English. Different languages provide their own unique interpretations of the world, different concepts and different perspectives. Language should not be one road, let alone one-way. Instead, it is an interconnected network of ideas and thoughts, all encompassing the gift of human communication, and someday I hope to rejoin this network myself.

— Edward, NJ

An accent can be a barrier in America, but mine is an important part of my culture.

In my life, Guyanese Creole has had confusing connotations. When I grew up, my parents avoided speaking it near me and my sister because it was viewed as “broken English,” since the language has a distinct accent and with many foreign words mixed in with English. On top of that, it would be completely unintelligible with people who aren’t Caribbean. My mom often discusses how her “improper English” has hindered her professional advancement. My dad talks with a thick accent, he too never had the chance to improve his professional career because of this language barrier.

Despite Creole not adhering to English grammar or not sounding “proper,” it is an important part of my culture. Talking in Guyanese Creole helps me to identify other Guyanese people, or even Caribbean people, and using these words help me identify closely with my culture, which is already fragmented as it is.

— Elias, W. Tresper Clarke High School

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Why is it Important to Maintain the Native Language?

• by National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education • IDRA Newsletter • January 2000 •

Children who speak a language other than English enter U.S. schools with abilities and talents similar to those of native English-speaking children. In addition, these children have the ability to speak another language that, if properly nurtured, will benefit them throughout their lives. In school, children who speak other languages will learn to speak, read and write English. However, unless parents and teachers actively encourage maintenance of the native language, the child is in danger of losing it and with that loss, the benefits of bilingualism. Maintaining the native language matters for the following reasons.

The child’s first language is critical to his or her identity. Maintaining this language helps the child value his or her culture and heritage, which contributes to a positive self-concept.

When the native language is not maintained, important links to family and other community members may be lost. By encouraging native language use, parents can prepare the child to interact with the native language community, both in the United States and overseas.

Intellectual:

Students need uninterrupted intellectual development. When students who are not yet fluent in English switch to using only English, they are functioning at an intellectual level below their age. Interrupting intellectual development in this manner is likely to result in academic failure. However, when parents and children speak the language they know best with one another, they are both working at their actual level of intellectual maturity.

Educational:

Students who learn English and continue to develop their native language have higher academic achievement in later years than do students who learn English at the expense of their first language.

Better employment opportunities in this country and overseas are available for individuals who are fluent in English and another language.

Collier, V. “Acquiring a Second Language for School,” Directions in Language and Education (1995) 1(4).

Cummins, J. Bilingualism and Minority-Language Children (Toronto, Ontario: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1981).

Cummins, J. et.al. Schooling and Language-Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework (Los Angeles, California: California State University, School of Education, 1994).

Wong-Fillmore, L. “When Learning a Second Language Means Losing the First,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly (1991) 6, 323-346.

Reprinted with permission from the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education’s “AskNCBE” web site (www.ncbe.gwu.edu/askncbe/faqs). NCBE is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA) and is operated by the George Washington University, Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Center for the Study of Language and Education.

Comments and questions may be directed to IDRA via e-mail at [email protected] .

[©2000, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the January 2000 IDRA Newsletter by the Intercultural Development Research Association. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]

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Essay On Native English Language

“It is, I think, very generally assumed that a particular subset of educated native speakers in England, or New England, or wherever, have the natural entitlement to custody of the language, that the preservation of its integrity is in their hands; their right and their responsibility” (Widdowson, 1994). Discuss this view in relation to the teaching and learning of English in schools around the world. Question for Sarah: - Do I need to link back to the question more? Or does my introduction to each section suffice? Throughout this essay, my main focus will be on Quark and Widdowson’s1 views and what this suggests about the quality of native and non-native English teachers, but I will also discuss English as a global language and the possibility …show more content…

English as a lingua franca is one of the many contributors to a Global English which can be defined as ‘a single variety of English…capable of functioning as an international’ language (Mooney, A & Evans, B. 2015:217). Although it may seem that we are moving towards a global English, many Linguists argue that we will never get there, for example, Moony and Evans go on to state that ‘there is no such thing as a singular global English’, Jennifer Jenkins agrees with this view and dismisses even the ability to group people into different varieties of English, saying that each person’s English is completely different, even if they have the same first language, second language learners are exposed to a completely unique set off English-interactions throughout their life. Jenkins gives an example of two Koreans, she argues that even if the two had learnt English in the same class, after a life’s worth of experiences, they would sound very different (Jenkins, J.

Disparities And Inequalities Within The St. Louis Public Education System

As a baseline, teachers should be trained to acknowledge the resources and backgrounds all children so that they may be able to recognize the strengths of non-native English speakers. A wholistic evaluation of minority groups is necessary for their successful integration in to the education system, if traditional practices are to continue in society. Many children in poorer areas are forced to “code-switch” between their home dialect and the dialect spoken in school. Teaching one “correct” way to speak and write can have major implications for a young person’s confidence and

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Mother Tongue By Amy Tan

Mother Tongue was originally part of a speech that Amy Tan had given while she participated in a panel entitled,”Englishes: Whose English is it anyway?” in 1989. The author describes in detail how she finds herself using various forms of English, depending on who she is around. She also makes the point on how hard life can be for someone who doesn’t speak good English.

Analysis Of The Presentation By Tim Goeglein, Special Assistant

Watch the presentation by Tim Goeglein, Special Assistant to former U.S. President George W. Bush. Answer the following questions based on his message. This presentation was recorded live at a residential GOVT 220 class in 2013. Answer the questions fully and organize your answers to match the questions. Proper grammar and spelling are factors in grading.

Examples Of Conto The Wild Transcendentalism

And at last i see the light... You’ve reached your destination: the conclusion. Luckily, the conclusion is as easy as watching the floating lanterns in the beautiful celestial night sky. Conclusion: Like the introductions, conclusions for the 3 and all types of essays are relatively the same.

Veershawn Young Analysis

Review of Vershawn Young Discussion After reading “Vershawn Ashanti Young: Should Writers Use They Own English?” against Rebecca Wheeler’s “Code-Switch to Teach Standard English (Young 111. Wheeler 108)”. Each paper expresses a different opinion regarding the teaching of English in the classrooms. Each author writes with different agendas, different tones, and different purposes. Each acts upon their beliefs as they perceive them, and as a result are poles apart.

Just Bag It Speech Self-Evaluation

Eleonora Hasani Comm 145 Online “Just Bag it” Speech Self-Evaluation 1. I gained my audience’s attention through an ironic joke. By asking my audience if they hated when people answered their own questions, and then proceeded to answer my own question saying I hated it, I got them interested in what else I had to say. 2. I feel like I introduced by topic clearly by stating in my introduction paragraph that I wanted to give the audience a “glimpse of my life” and then followed it with my thesis that included the three items I was going to talk about. 3.

Shaun Tan Broken Language Summary

The article 's theme of is Language and the different forms of English’s that we are supposed to learn is well argued because not every culture speak proper English due to having to learn the English language on their own instead of getting taught the English the right way. The Author

Nt1310 Unit 1 Metacognition Research Paper

I’m thinking of my thoughts as I write my thoughts on this paper and, I’m aware of my thoughts as I imagine you reading this paper. This, in a nut shell, is what metacognition is about. This paper will formally define metacognition and give examples.

Rhetorical Analysis Of Mother Tongue

Rhetorical Precis #4: “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan Amy Tan’s purpose in her article “Mother Tongue” is to show the influence of her mother’s style of english. She also relates this to a more broad topic of the idea that there are many different types of english that people speak that are tailored to whoever they are speaking to. She begins this piece by stating plainly that she is not an english scholar. Instead of decreasing her credibility it actually increases it and paints this piece as a more personal set of observations rather than a bland overview of the entire language.

Harrison Bergeron Assignment

“Harrison Bergeron” Group Writing Directions: Complete the task according to the assignment below. Write each group member’s name next to their assignment, and turn in one assignment for your group. Answer the following prompt: How is the theme your team wrote evident in the short story “Harrison Bergeron”? Provide text-based evidence to support your chosen theme. Follow the standard conventions of American English and MLA format.

Always Living In Spanish By Marjorie Agosin Analysis

Throughout generations cultural traditions have been passed down, alongside these traditions came language. The language of ancestors, which soon began to be molded by the tongue of newer generations, was inherited. Though language is an everlasting changing part of the world, it is a representation of one’s identity, not only in a cultural way but from an environmental standpoint as well. One’s identity is revealed through language from an environmental point of view because the world that one is surrounded with can cause them to have their own definitions of words, an accent, etc. With newer generations, comes newer forms of languages.

Summary Of The Aria By Richard Rodriguez

Having the same language as others is something that brings people together-- whether it is around the dinner table, in an office, or in a grocery store. Language helps to bring people together and is a curator for community building. And in the eyes of many, this community that stems from a language is true, as long as the language being spoken is one that they prefer. For a long while there has been a “hierarchy” of language, and English sits a top of the food chain. When English is glorified, it is seen as the key to success and continuously other languages have been pushed out and looked down upon-- resulting in closed off cultures for others.

Essay On English Language Learners

The United States is a place of freedom. We are a mixing pot that unifies as one. Many religions, cultures, and languages make their home in the Unites States. Many foreigners see the U.S. as an opportunity to seek better lives and education, but when it comes to foreigners and native-born non-English speakers that do not yet know English, it becomes a little more difficult to go about an average day let alone make a better future. Children in school often become English Language Learners, or ELL, to assimilate to the American standards.

Importance Of Standardization Of English Language

Finally, for mainly historical reasons, certain English dialects or varieties have been viewed more positively than others. Thus, Standard English, because of its association with being the national English language, has been perceived as the most prestigious of English varieties. However, the fact that some dialects and accents are seen to be more prestigious than others is more a reflection of judgements based on social, rather than linguistic, criteria. As society changes, so too do attitudes towards dialect, accent and variational use of English generally.

Essay On Language Culture And Society

The Language Culture and Society programme provides us with strong theoretical and interdisciplinary foundation for the study of a range of educational practices across the human lifespan and in a range of theoretical and methodological perspective is brought to bear on studies that explore the nature of literate practices, democracy and civic engagement and participation in social life. The programme focuses on relationships between education school and the dynamics and changing structures of language, culture, and society. It examines connection between broader, social, cultural, linguistic, historical, aesthetic and political factors in education and the local context in which these issues take place. It has long been recognized that language is an essential and important part of a given culture and that the impact of culture upon a given language is something intrinsic and indispensible. Language is a social phenomenon.

More about Essay On Native English Language

Essays About Language: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Language is the key to expressive communication; let our essay examples and writing prompts inspire you if you are writing essays about language.

When we communicate with one another, we use a system called language. It mainly consists of words, which, when combined, form phrases and sentences we use to talk to one another. However, some forms of language do not require written or verbal communication, such as sign language.

Language can also refer to how we write or say things. For example, we can speak to friends using colloquial expressions and slang, while academic writing demands precise, formal language. Language is a complex concept with many meanings; discover the secrets of language in our informative guide.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. a global language: english language by dallas ryan , 2. language and its importance to society by shelly shah, 3. language: the essence of culture by kelsey holmes.

4. Foreign Language Speech by Sophie Carson
5. Attitudes to Language by Kurt Medina

1. My Native Language

2. the advantages of bilingualism, 3. language and technology, 4. why language matters, 5. slang and communication, 6. english is the official language of the u.s..

“Furthermore, using English, people can have more friends, widen peer relationships with foreigners and can not get lost. Overall, English becomes a global language; people may have more chances in communication. Another crucial advantage is improving business. If English was spoken widespread and everyone could use it, they would likely have more opportunities in business. Foreign investments from rich countries might be supported to the poorer countries.”

In this essay, Ryan enumerates both the advantages and disadvantages of using English; it seems that Ryan proposes uniting the world under the English language. English, a well-known and commonly-spoken language can help people to communicate better, which can foster better connections with one another. However, people would lose their native language and promote a specific culture rather than diversity. Ultimately, Ryan believes that English is a “global language,” and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages

“Language is a constituent element of civilization. It raised man from a savage state to the plane which he was capable of reaching. Man could not become man except by language. An essential point in which man differs from animals is that man alone is the sole possessor of language. No doubt animals also exhibit certain degree of power of communication but that is not only inferior in degree to human language, but also radically diverse in kind from it.”

Shah writes about the meaning of language, its role in society, and its place as an institution serving the purposes of the people using it. Most importantly, she writes about why it is necessary; the way we communicate through language separates us as humans from all other living things. It also carries individual culture and allows one to convey their thoughts. You might find our list of TOEFL writing topics helpful.

“Cultural identity is heavily dependent on a number of factors including ethnicity, gender, geographic location, religion, language, and so much more. Culture is defined as a “historically transmitted system of symbols, meanings, and norms.” Knowing a language automatically enables someone to identify with others who speak the same language. This connection is such an important part of cultural exchange”

In this short essay, Homes discusses how language reflects a person’s cultural identity and the importance of communication in a civilized society. Different communities and cultures use specific sounds and understand their meanings to communicate. From this, writing was developed. Knowing a language makes connecting with others of the same culture easier.

4. Foreign Language Speech by Sophie Carson

“Ultimately, learning a foreign language will improve a child’s overall thinking and learning skills in general, making them smarter in many different unrelated areas. Their creativity is highly improved as they are more trained to look at problems from different angles and think outside of the box. This flexible thinking makes them better problem solvers since they can see problems from different perspectives. The better thinking skills developed from learning a foreign language have also been seen through testing scores.”

Carson writes about some of the benefits of learning a foreign language, especially during childhood. During childhood, the brain is more flexible, and it is easier for one to learn a new language in their younger years. Among many other benefits, bilingualism has been shown to improve memory and open up more parts of a child’s brain, helping them hone their critical thinking skills. Teaching children a foreign language makes them more aware of the world around them and can open up opportunities in the future.

5. Attitudes to Language by Kurt Medina

“Increasingly, educators are becoming aware that a person’s native language is an integral part of who that person is and marginalizing the language can have severe damaging effects on that person’s psyche. Many linguists consistently make a case for teaching native languages alongside the target languages so that children can clearly differentiate among the codes”

As its title suggests, Medina’s essay revolves around different attitudes towards types of language, whether it be vernacular language or dialects. He discusses this in the context of Caribbean cultures, where different dialects and languages are widespread, and people switch between languages quickly. Medina mentions how we tend to modify the language we use in different situations, depending on how formal or informal we need to be.

6 Prompts for Essays About Language

Essays About Language: My native language

In your essay, you can write about your native language. For example, explain how it originated and some of its characteristics. Write about why you are proud of it or persuade others to try learning it. To add depth to your essay, include a section with common phrases or idioms from your native language and explain their meaning.

Bilingualism has been said to enhance a whole range of cognitive skills, from a longer attention span to better memory. Look into the different advantages of speaking two or more languages, and use these to promote bilingualism. Cite scientific research papers and reference their findings in your essay for a compelling piece of writing.

In the 21st century, the development of new technology has blurred the lines between communication and isolation; it has undoubtedly changed how we interact and use language. For example, many words have been replaced in day-to-day communication by texting lingo and slang. In addition, technology has made us communicate more virtually and non-verbally. Research and discuss how the 21st century has changed how we interact and “do language” worldwide, whether it has improved or worsened.

Essays About Language: Why language matters

We often change how we speak depending on the situation; we use different words and expressions. Why do we do this? Based on a combination of personal experience and research, reflect on why it is essential to use appropriate language in different scenarios.

Different cultures use different forms of slang. Slang is a type of language consisting of informal words and expressions. Some hold negative views towards slang, saying that it degrades the language system, while others believe it allows people to express their culture. Write about whether you believe slang should be acceptable or not: defend your position by giving evidence either that slang is detrimental to language or that it poses no threat.

English is the most spoken language in the United States and is used in government documents; it is all but the country’s official language. Do you believe the government should finally declare English the country’s official language? Research the viewpoints of both sides and form a conclusion; support your argument with sufficient details and research.

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our guide on how to write an essay about diversity .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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My Native Language Essay

My Native Language Is your native language something you take for granted? Well, for me it has been a struggle — a struggle with history, politics, society, and myself. Yet something guided me through it. I don't know what you heard about my native land — Belarus. For most of the world it is a new country , as four centuries of severe Russian assimilation devastated Belarusian culture. But some of it managed to survive, mostly in the villages. This shaped my biography. Although I was born in a city in the western part of then Byelorussian SSR1, the first six years of my life I spent in a village with my grandparents . I remember the manmade old woody gate to the orchard. I remember noises of storks on the roofs of the houses …show more content…

In the second grade, the teacher mentioned that soon we were going to study a new subject. It was the second official language of our part of the USSR — the Byelorussian language. That fact did not mean much to my classmates. Nor it did to me until one day my classmate teased me again about a word that I said "incorrectly." The teacher, who had been watching us, said that if it had been in Belarusian, it would have been correct. For the first time it occurred to me that the "village" language I had been speaking before I entered school was one of the Belarusian dialects. But in our exercise books, with the ABCs of knowledge, we were writing and rewriting, "The USSR is our great motherland. The official language of communication is Russian." At school we studied Belarusian rather superficially. We rarely spoke it, even during the Belarusian literature and language lessons. After years of studying in Russian, I could easier express myself in that language. But some instinct did not let me ignore my native language completely. Once I was quarrelling with my mother. She was shouting in Russian that I never shared my problems with her, but sulked like a wild wolf-cub, waited until they became bigger. She said "vauchanjo" — a very specific Belarusian word for "wolf-cub." My grandmother used it to

Reflection on Readings Using Comparison and Contrast Maxine Hong Kingston (Tongue Tied); Richard Rodriguez (Aria); Gloria Anzaldua (How to Tame a Wild Tongue)

Thesis: All three authors portray the voice of many people, who, on a daily basis, are underprivileged of speaking their own language, thus, emphasizing onto the lives of linguistic minority students around the world and how they struggle to cope in school and at home.

The Power Of Language In Mother Tongue, By Amy Tan

In Mother Tongue, an essay written by Amy Tan, the fictional author explains how we all speak different languages and how we are all categorized and treated differently by the way we speak. She gives us examples and stories that have happened to her and how they made her become “fascinated by language in daily life.”

The English Language Essay

The English language is particularly complex in almost all aspects. Many of the words in the English language have different meanings for the same word. This is not unlike the definition of the different levels of usage. McCrimmon defines the three levels, formal, moderate, and colloquial, by their sentence structure, diction, and tone (McCrimmon 193). ¹ Using McCrimmon’s definitions, authors can determine what type of writing is applicable to each of the three levels. For the formal writings, an adequate example of where readers can find it is in a professional journal, and an appropriate place to find an example of the moderate level is in a weekly news magazine. Also, the best place to look for an example of the colloquial level is in certain sections of the newspaper. All of the levels of usage apply to these different types of writings and assist in defining what each level involves.

Summary Of The Film 'The Linguists'

The film “The Linguists” follows linguists Gregory Anderson and David Harrison on their journey to learn about and document endangered languages in Bolivia, India, Arizona, and Siberia. Through their quest, they are able to interact with some of the few remaining speakers of languages that are near death and they manage to make an impact on how these communities view their heritage language. Focusing on the moribund languages of Siberia and Arizona, it becomes evident that speakers of the heritage language feel a love for the language and the culture it represents, but went through periods of oppression and embarrassment for being speakers of a minority language that ultimately shaped their attitudes on the language.

The Language Of Silence By Maxine Hong Kingston

Spanish is my native language, however, my mother advised my siblings and I to speak only English. This was because she was afraid that we would be rejected from professional careers if our English wasn 't unaccented, fluent, and similar in refinement to the working class whites. With time, I became a fluent English speaker with a developed Central American accent but like, any other young girl, I thought nothing of it. That is until one event, in particular, occurred that would cast a shadow of embarrassment onto my Spanish language. This event not only led me to desert my entire native language but a sense of my cultural identity, as well.

Personal Narrative: Bilingual Education

Before I turned four years old, my mother and I moved to join my father in Berwyn, Illinois. My sister ended having to stay back a couple of months so that she could finish her school year. We arrived to a nice apartment in the suburbs, it was a complete scenery change than what I was use to. Everyone seemed to have giant yards, bright green grass, large fences, and freshly painted houses. Back in Fresnillo, we had our large home, but it was rare for houses to have such large yards, so close to the heart of the town. From the time of the move until my first year in kindergarten, I had a bit of time to adjust, watching cartoons in English, I am not quite sure how I picked it up but I did. At that time my mother only spoke Spanish, my father is bilingual, but he would speak to us in Spanish.

Benefits of Raising a Bilingual Child Essay

6 Works Cited

Second language develops new friendships and new relationships. Last year, a new boy joined my son’s class. Later we found out that he was adapted from Russia. My son was able to communicate with him in Russian and right now they are friends. There was an important connection between boys – language that built the new friendship.

The Power of Language Essay examples

Children are very impressionable and tend to take on others’ opinions as their own, but as they grow older, they develop a greater understanding and perspective of the way things are and the way they should be. As adults, both Tan and Barrientos learned to accept and embrace the languages that previously embarrassed them. Barrientos immersed herself in her Mexican heritage and enrolled in many Spanish classes. With each enrollment, she faced yet another stereotype that came with being of Mexican ethnicity; her instructors thought she should already know Spanish since she was Latina. Barrientos is now determined to learn her native language. Tan has learned to love the way in

Analysis Of The Article ' Lost On Translation ' By Lera Boroditsky

In the article “Lost in Translation”, the author, Lera Boroditsky, maintains as her thesis that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. Boroditsky begins the main section of her essay with the history of the issue of whether or not languages shape the way speakers think. Charlemagne was the first to think that languages do in fact shape the mindset of speaker, but Noam Chomsky rebutted this idea with his thought that languages do not differ much from each other, thus in turn proposing that linguistic differences do not cause a difference in thinking. Now with scientists

Malcolm X-The Power Of Language

     If I say that I am currently employed with a major petroleum distribution center, you may think that I am a highly qualified person making limitless amounts of money. However, I am using the power of language to merely say that I work at a gas station making minimum wage. Great historical figures throughout history have used the power of language, the ability to use words to their advantage, to inspire people to unite under one common cause and to change the world.

Essay on My English

1. Define the three energy pathways. For each pathway, identify two exercises that utilize the pathway. If you were training to run a marathon, which pathway would be the focal point of your training? What types of activities would you incorporate into your marathon training and why? How will an understanding of energy pathways help you in your future training endeavors?

First and Second Language Acquisition Essay

5 Works Cited

In our everyday lives, the origin of our ability to communicate is usually not often taken into consideration. One doesn't think about how every person has, or rather had at one time, an innate ability to learn a language to total fluency without a conscious effort – a feat that is seen by the scientific community "as one of the many utterly unexplainable mysteries that beset us in our daily lives" (3).. Other such mysteries include our body's ability to pump blood and take in oxygen constantly seemingly without thought, and a new mother's ability to unconsciously raise her body temperature when her infant is placed on her chest. But a child's first language acquisition is different from these

Native Language Essay

Language is universal. People voice their ideas, emotions, and thoughts across to the world through language. Multitudes of people across the country speak a varierty of languages. However, a foreigner is reduced to their native language, and sometimes has difficulties mainstreaming English into their dialect. A native language is a foreigner's blueprint for the world to hear. Native language gives homage to a foreigner's culture and home life. Native tongues open doors for education and job opprutunities. A native tongue is translated in books and plastered on signs across the communites. Imagine if language decreased to just English, and no another language existed. People would mirror each other, and have no idea of diversity. So where

Mother Tongue Essay

There are many bilingual and multicultural people in the world today. For many, the choices of which language they use, and how they use it, correspond to what social or cultural community they belong to. Amy Tan, a Chinese American novelist, portrays this well in her short essay "Mother Tongue." Tan grew up in two vastly different worlds, using different "Englishes." The first world, which consists of her close family, she speaks what we may call "broken" or "limited" English. The second world, which is her business and professional world, Tan speaks and writes perfect standard and academic English. Having to "shuttle" between these two communities with very different languages has had many different positive and negative effects on

Essay on English Language: The International Language

Language is important because it's one of the main ways to communicate and interact with other people around us. It keeps us in contact with other people. English language is an example for the importance of a language because it is the international language and has become the most important language to people in many parts of the world. It is most widely used in communicating around the world, Also it is spoken as the first language in many countries. English is playing a major role in many sections like education, medicine, engineering and business. There are many reasons that makes English is the most important language in the world.

Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives

Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative “endangered languages” narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society’s consumption, while deemphasizing or even outright omitting the extreme injustices that beget language endangerment. The objective of this essay is to promote social justice praxis first by detailing how language shift results from major injustices, and then by offering possible interventions that are accountable to the communities whose languages are endangered. Drawing from my experiences as a member of a Native American community whose language was wrongly labeled “extinct” within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is described to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through language reclamation.

Wesley Y. Leonard is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His research aims to build language reclamation capacity in Native American and other Indigenous communities by directly developing reclamation tools and changing the norms of language sciences toward this end. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Indian Culture and Research Journal , Gender and Language , and Language Documentation & Conservation.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ) declared 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages ( IDIL ), noting that “[o]ptimistic estimates suggest that at least 50 percent of today’s spoken languages will be extinct or seriously endangered by 2100. More pessimistic, but also realistic estimates claim that 90–95 percent will become extinct or seriously endangered . . . . Most of these languages are Indigenous languages.” 1 In this summary, UNESCO correctly identifies a major crisis: the world’s language diversity has drastically diminished in the last several decades, many languages are not being transmitted to new generations, and the majority of these languages are Indigenous. 2 This phenomenon, referred to technically in language sciences as community language shift or just language shift but more commonly framed with metaphors for the endangerment of biological species, is particularly serious in North America, the focus of this essay.

Native American and other Indigenous language shift has increasingly become a focus of scientific and social concern, and the collective response has had many effects, several of which are positive. These include increased awareness, research, community language programs, and new networks of scholar-practitioners and activists. Language policy has shifted accordingly, both at the level of individual Indigenous communities and by non-Indigenous governments and organizations, with many calls to support language maintenance and revitalization. The IDIL , for example, “aims at ensuring [I]ndigenous peoples’ right to preserve, revitalize and promote their languages, and mainstreaming linguistic diversity and multilingualism aspects into the sustainable development efforts.” 3 Organizations geared toward this work, along with several language documentation initiatives, have been created. Even the U.S. government, long an agent of violence toward Native American nations and languages, passed in 1990 the Native American Languages Act, which established as policy that the United States will “preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages.” 4 Most important, many Native American communities are working hard for language maintenance and recovery.

I come from a Native American nation that is engaged in such work. I am a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and our language, myaamiaataweenki, fell into almost complete dormancy during the 1960s, having been replaced by English until community efforts began in the 1990s to bring our language back by learning it from historical documentation. I am proud to report that myaamiaataweenki is used by many Miami people today. In this essay, I draw from my experiences in Miami language work, as well as my training and research as a linguist who specializes in language reclamation , a decolonial approach to language revitalization that centers community needs and goals and focuses on addressing the underlying causes of language shift. 5 The way language reclamation brought my community together corroborates, alongside similar examples from other communities, the assertion in the aforementioned Native American Languages Act that “the traditional languages of Native Americans are an integral part of their cultures and identities and form the basic medium for the transmission, and thus survival, of Native American cultures, literatures, histories, religions, political institutions, and values.”

What happened among Miami people — a story of extreme language shift but also, and crucially, of language recovery — is shared by other Native American communities. Indeed, as summarized by Indigenous education scholars Onowa McIvor (maskiko-nehinaw) and Teresa L. McCarty, “the sociolinguistic landscape in Native North America is defined by the dual realities of language loss and reclamation.” 6 However, accounts of reclamation are not widely reflected in academic and popular descriptions of language shift, which instead emphasize only the loss. I collectively refer to these as dominant endangered languages narratives , the core parts of which I refer to in the singular as the narrative . As I detail below by drawing upon tools and principles from Linguistics and Native American Studies, 7 the narrative contains several truths and is framed as beneficent, but draws atten tion away from the injustices that underlie language endangerment.

Linguistics, the discipline described as “the scientific study of language” though better characterized as a set of particular approaches to studying language, is predicated on the inherent value of language. Linguists recognize that all humans use language, and that languages meet the communicative needs of their users and evolve as needed. For this reason, claims about intrinsic deficiencies in a given language variety — for example, that it “doesn’t have grammar” or “is primitive” — are linguistically baseless. Instead, they are manifestations of a sociopolitical principle exemplified throughout this volume: that beliefs about people get transferred to the language(s) with which those people are associated. Beliefs about a given language variety’s alleged superiority or inferiority relative to others, along with other language myths, strongly affect language practices and policies. In contexts where Indigenous peoples are rendered as “savage” or even less than human, related ideologies about Indigenous languages follow.

Related to the point above is the notion that accounts of languages and language use are contextually embedded in historical and contemporary social relations and power structures. As a corollary, public narratives about oppressed language communities are likely to 1) privilege the needs, wants, and perspectives of dominant groups and 2) discount the roles of dominant groups and institutions in this oppression. Following this logic, dominant narratives warrant careful scrutiny, both in terms of their content and who is relating them for whom. Even “descriptions” can become speech acts — statements that perform an action — especially when they come from people with power. As discussed throughout this essay, it is common for non-Indigenous agents who have considerable power due to their social positions to describe Native American languages in ways that are not accountable to Native American communities.

Conversely, the field of Native American Studies frames issues, linguistic and otherwise, through Native American experiences and points of view, and strongly emphasizes accountability to Native American nations. Though a principle of Native American Studies is that respect for tribal sovereignty entails identifying differences among tribal nations, the field also recognizes common experiences across multiple nations, especially those with shared relationships to a particular colonial government. For this reason, alongside attention to particular tribal histories and circumstances, it is common for structures of oppression, and strategies to end them, to be theorized in general ways as I do in this essay. Native American Studies responds to a variety of oppressions such as racism and sexism, recognizing the need for an intersectional analytic as elaborated by Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser in this volume, but stresses the major role of colonization in contemporary Native American experiences. 8 To this end, Tribal Critical Race Theory, a framework that draws upon general principles of Critical Race Theory but adds and highlights the political status (nationhood) and experiences of Native Americans, asserts as a foundational principle that colonization is endemic in wider society. 9 Particularly important for this essay is settler colonialism , the project and supporting logics whereby governments such as those of the United States and Canada try to replace Indigenous peoples — and by extension our languages, lifeways, intellectual traditions, and futures — through resettling Indigenous lands with new polities and linguistic landscapes.

Given the violence of settler colonialism, scholarship in Native American Studies frequently references oppression and trauma. As these accounts are crucial for understanding realities such as the current status of Native American languages, I include them. At the same time, I share Unanga x̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s observation that “damage-centered” accounts can promote problematic views of contemporary Indigenous peoples and mask our resilience and successes. 10 My response is to refuse the assumptions of inferiority that often accompany such accounts and instead to promote reclamation, with emphasis on how Indigenous cultural and intellectual traditions provide tools to support this work. For example, the focus on relationships that is core to Miami and other Native American communities’ ways of knowing is hugely important for language reclamation. A relational approach to understanding the world illuminates how language shift occurs when something ruptures the relationships people have to languages; language recovery thus requires rebuilding these relationships.

Though linguists certainly consider relationships such as how multiple languages may derive from a common source, it is not a disciplinary norm of Linguistics to follow the relational model described above. Instead, aligning with dominant academic practices of conceptualizing knowledge as universal and disembodied, it is common for linguists to focus on discrete elements, such as sounds, words, and clauses. Moreover, it is common practice for researchers to present linguistic analyses without mentioning their relationships to the communities whose languages are under discussion or engaging the question of who is licensed to make or share a given analysis. According to this logic, the quality of research conclusions lies in their reasoning, evidence, and impact. In Native American Studies, conversely, these metrics apply, but there is also emphasis on how knowledge is produced in particular places and contexts, with significant attention paid not only to what knowledge should be produced but also if, how, and by whom it should be shared.

As a Miami person whose lived experiences with language shift and recovery primarily involve my own and other North American Indigenous communities, and whose professional training occurred at U.S. institutions, my analysis draws on global trends but focuses on North American (particularly U.S.) dynamics. For this reason, the points I offer in this essay should not be taken as universal, though I draw attention to two themes that I believe are true for most Indigenous communities. First, members of Indigenous communities (as with minoritized communities in general) share the experience of being the characters, rather than the narrators, of stories and theories about language shift. Second, although many language scholars and activists center social justice when responding to language endangerment, this is not true for dominant endangered languages narratives. While the sharing of these narratives has supported some important interventions in research, education, and policy, their framing can harm Indigenous communities and the language reclamation work we do.

Widely referenced by linguists as a call to action is the 1992 “Endangered Languages” collection of papers published in Language , a flagship journal in Linguistics. This series includes linguist Michael Krauss’s essay “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” which claims that “[l]anguages no longer being learned as mother-tongue by children are beyond mere endangerment, for, unless the course is somehow dramatically reversed, they are already doomed to extinction, like species lacking reproductive capacity.” 11

While such a break in intergenerational transmission actually applies to an array of languages and dialects, several of which are not Indigenous, Indigenous languages have become the prototype in discussions of language shift. This theme of doom and gloom, with Indigenous language “extinction” as the presumed endpoint, anchors many popular as well as scientific discussions of language endangerment, and is central to dominant endangered languages narratives.

For instance, the teleological trajectory toward complete nonuse of a given language, described in the narrative as “extinction,” is almost always anchored in predictions with specific numbers. In general, this is operationalized through a statement that some percentage of the world’s roughly seven thousand languages will disappear within a specified time frame, often one hundred years, as with the IDIL statement quoted earlier. Sometimes the narrative mentions that “languages have always died,” but with an accompanying explanation that this phenomenon has greatly accelerated in recent times. Especially frequent in reference to current trends is the specific claim that “a language dies every two weeks.” Though empirical research reported on in the Catalogue of Endangered Languages finds instead that this rate is actually about every twelve weeks, the crux of the idea holds. 12

Even though the narrative often ignores major types of linguistic diversity — for example, the glaring omission of endangered sign languages — it normally includes a statement about the value of linguistic diversity, or of human diversity more broadly. If framed within human rights, the narrative could offer compelling support for social justice. However, the narrative instead too easily evokes neoliberal discourses of diversity, in which examples that are lesser known by dominant groups — the assumed baseline — are rendered “diverse” and become repurposed as resources. This is exemplified by the narrative’s lamentation of cultural and scientific losses when languages “disappear,” emphasizing how “we” (who is the pronoun referring to?) are losing this knowledge or “our” heritage.

Particularly when shared with academic audiences, these claims of imminent loss frequently reference how language diversity is crucial to science. For instance, a major research framework in Linguistics aims to uncover universals of human languages, a task that requires data from many languages, including, of course, those that are endangered. Especially when related by linguists, the narrative may include details about how concepts are encoded in grammar, or how ecological knowledge may be gleaned from words. Longer versions might include examples of concepts known only because “we discovered them before it was too late.”

Although the basic idea is true — that different groups, and by extension different languages, encode different types of information and showcase human linguistic potential in different ways — the problems in this section of the narrative are numerous. As elaborated throughout this essay, the framing of Indigenous languages as resources to extract, whose value lies in what they can provide for “us” (non-Indigenous publics), and whose embedded information becomes true “knowledge” only after it has been described and curated within scientific circles, is Colonialism 101.

Most important, and also a reflection of colonialism, is that the narrative deemphasizes why language endangerment is occurring on the unprecedented scale that it is. Indeed, a common statement is that Native American languages are “quickly disappearing,” and that “a language dies when people stop speaking it.” Such tautologies are not helpful. Borrowing conceptually from Newton’s principle that objects in motion stay in motion unless an external force acts upon them, Chikasaw linguist Jenny L. Davis observes that intergenerational transmission of languages continues over time unless an external force disrupts this process. 13 By extension, the external forces should be the focus, yet the dominant narrative largely does not reflect this.

The narrative often does provide some explanation for current trends in language “loss” by referencing broad factors such as globalization, education, or language shame. Some narrators identify unequal power relations explicitly. However, the narrative rarely engages the deeper forces that facilitate these unequal power relations and related inequities. Missing, for instance, is critical engagement with how globalization is not merely a story of the world’s populations getting closer due to travel and technologies, but crucially also a story of colonialism and imperialism. Missing are critical examinations of how policies, such as what languages are used and taught in schools, are indexed to nation-building and nation-eradicating practices that are themselves linked to colonialism and imperialism. Language attitudes, particularly shame toward one’s language(s) of heritage, can have large effects and are worth studying. The problem occurs when the narrative presents language shame as the source of language shift, rather than an outcome of oppression.

Sometimes the narrative includes explanations that superficially may come across as reasonable or self-evident. Referencing “economic pressures,” for example, some versions explain that members of minoritized language communities adopt languages of wider use to get jobs. However, beyond failing to query the economic injustices that often characterize these situations, the narrative frequently omits key linguistic principles that bring such explanations into question. Multilingualism is the historical and contemporary norm in most parts of the world, and people can and do learn additional languages while maintaining those they already have. Nevertheless, the narrative naturalizes Native American communities’ wholesale replacement of their original languages. Along with “wouldn’t it be better if we all spoke one language?”-type arguments that dismiss the harms of language shift, the narrative misses how language maintenance and reclamation occur in contexts of multilingualism, which has long been the norm across Native North America. 14

And sometimes the implied reason for communities such as my own shifting entirely to English is that it just happened. Native American language loss is a natural result of progress — unfortunate, yet inevitable, and in Native Americans’ best interest, helping them to be part of modern American society . This colonial rationale evokes logics of Social Darwinism that have long been debunked in anthropological sciences but remain robust in wider society, as a quick perusal of reader comments for popular articles about “dying” languages shows.

The truth is that contemporary Native American language shift is primarily an outcome of oppression, a point that many members of Native American communities can explain easily because we experience the effects of settler colonialism, racism, and other - ism s daily. Major examples include land dispossession through forced relocations and environmental degradation, policies aimed toward language eradication, violent disruptions to cultural practices (with some even made illegal), and assimilatory education through missions and boarding schools. Added to these are wider issues that adversely affect language maintenance in general, such as the hegemony of English and other pressures discussed by other authors in this volume.

In critical scholarship, language endangerment is theorized and responded to in complex ways, engaging issues such as those summarized above. Recent Native American language shift reflects what critical language scholars such as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas refer to as linguicide , which is anchored in linguicism : “ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, regulate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language.” 15 But linguicism is not the frame that the narrative espouses. Instead, it focuses on the “disappearance” of Native American languages, with little attention to the oppressions that created and reinforce this outcome.

In response, I next explore these stories of oppression and linguicide — those that are not prominent in the narrative but that regularly come up in my discussions with other Native Americans. These are the stories that must be shared, honestly acknowledged, and responded to. Again, owing to my experiences and relations as a Miami person, I draw heavily on examples from my own community.

I begin with literal displacement via land theft. Despite a series of treaties by Miami leaders with the U.S. government stating that the original Miami homelands in Indiana and surrounding areas would remain Miami forever, our community was split in 1846 when many families — including my direct ancestors — were forcibly removed from these lands to a reservation in Kansas by U.S. agents. Traditional Miami cultural practices, which reflect relationships to particular homelands, were, of course, disrupted. And then in a second removal in the late 1860s, several Miamis, though not all–again, splitting the community beyond what had already occurred in 1846–were sent to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), further disrupting community lifeways. This second removal was followed by individual land allotments through legislation similar to the broader U.S. policy (Dawes Act) to socialize Native Americans into Euro-Western relationships with land as individual property and capital. 16 As with this allotment policy, which applied to members of many Native American nations, the Miami removals themselves also reflected a broader policy: the U.S. government’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. 17 For this reason, though the details vary, the examples from my community parallel those of many Native American nations, particularly those whose homelands are in what is now the eastern part of the United States.

Shortly after the bulk of removals and displacements, the U.S. government adopted a policy of assimilatory education of tribal youth via federally operated Indian boarding schools, which several of my Miami ancestors attended. When these institutions are (sometimes) mentioned in the dominant narrative, the illustrative detail is that they forbade the use of Indian languages and physically punished children who broke this rule. This is true and clearly important, but there is much more to consider. The fundamental assumption underlying these institutions was that Indian cultures and knowledge systems were “savage” and needed to be eradicated. In addition to their practices of blatant cultural genocide along with additional abuses, these schools ruptured tribal relationships; children were literally removed from their homes and kinship networks.

Although there are many stories of resistance, Indian boarding schools’ objectives were largely realized. Not only did the use and transmission of many children’s tribal languages end, these children were also inculcated with ideologies to justify this linguicide. I have long been haunted by an interview with a Miami Elder who had gone to boarding school in the early 1900s and stated that “it done the Indian children just a lot of good.” She explained that visitors came from the eastern part of the United States to make sure the children were speaking English, and that she worked in the sewing room at the school five days a week but on weekends went to church and Sunday school. She emphasized how on Sundays, they didn’t get supper but instead got a piece of apple pie and gingerbread, and that she would never forget that apple pie! 18 But she did forget — perhaps was forced to “forget” — our tribal language.

Other boarding school survivors share their experiences of language oppression more directly, as with the following story from a Warm Springs Elder:

Before I went to the boarding school, I was speaking [a Native American language], and all my sisters and brothers were speaking it. That’s all we spoke, and then we got into boarding school and we were not allowed to speak. And I grew up believing that it was something very bad, because we got punished, or switched, and so they just kind of beat it out of me . . . . That boarding school did bad stuff to us, and they took the most important thing, which was our language. 19

As Diné scholar James McKenzie explains in an essay directed to applied linguists, trauma experienced directly by boarding school survivors, which in many cases extends far beyond language oppression to include physical and sexual violence, does not end with the survivors themselves. 20 Instead, the trauma can be passed on to subsequent generations, continuing to harm individual and community well-being until something intervenes. Language reclamation can address this trauma by helping people to (re)establish healthy relationships with their languages and what those languages represent in their respective community contexts and cosmologies.

Around the same time as the development and spread of Indian boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. government increasingly adopted policies and promoted nationalist narratives that furthered an ideal of English monolingualism. Even though the earlier historical record of settler life in the United States documents a landscape of many languages and more acceptance of language diversity, the notion that English was the language of the United States became increasingly promoted as an imagined original American trait. 21 This belief, which remains strong today, impedes the maintenance of Native American (and other) languages.

Linguistic justice calls for sharing stories such as those above, which though highly abridged can at least point to recurring themes of oppression, thereby facilitating the detailed discussions that need to occur. But sharing stories of colonial violence or the hegemony of English disrupts contemporary power structures, so stories such as those of boarding school survivors tend to be pushed to the margins. Whether by misattributing fault onto language communities or by just ignoring the agents of language oppression entirely, the narrative often works against justice by engaging a strategy that Davis calls erasure of colonial agency . Complementing this is a strategy of removing languages from their relational contexts. Davis describes the latter as linguistic extraction , the process of documenting, describing, preserving, or otherwise engaging with languages separately from the social and political contexts of their historical and contemporary use and users. 22

Both strategies occur in dominant endangered languages narratives, which adopt and naturalize “endangered languages” as the unit of focus as opposed to the broader process of endangerment. This frame of “endangered languages” reinforces a theory of languages as objects: named, bounded sets of grammatical patterns and vocabulary that can be counted, analyzed, or lost. Indeed, research by language scientists, which as shown throughout the essays in this volume has great potential to promote social justice, can also foster harm by rendering languages into disembodied data or objects whose primary value lies in what they contribute to science. I emphasize that it is common in Native American communities for languages and peoplehood to be heavily intertwined. 23 In such contexts, objectifying the language by emphasizing, for example, what its grammar reveals for science easily objectifies the people who claim the language.

Unfortunately, as extractive models of Indigenous language research remain sanctioned in normative research practices, associated framing is common in the dominant narrative. For instance, it regularly includes queries about how Native American languages contribute to “our knowledge,” where “our” is contextually referring to members of dominant groups, such as language scientists. Asking “What do we lose when a language dies?” has a similar overtone, especially when relayed in a context with few or no Indigenous people. This noted, it is not my opinion that wider society cannot or should not appreciate and learn from Indigenous languages. The problem is rather that these queries too often lack important counterparts, such as “What does colonialism have to do with it?”

It is common in Linguistics to categorize and theorize “endangered languages” through biological metaphors such as living and dying . This practice, which also occurs in Indigenous communities, is not surprising, given that using language is so intertwined with human life experience. Moreover, language endangerment, like biological species endangerment, occurs when environments have been seriously disrupted. If employed to express these links, the use of biological metaphors could facilitate social justice by calling attention to the issues that must be addressed to reverse language shift. In general, however, use of biological metaphors warrants great caution. In the narrative, Native American language shift is normally framed unidirectionally (only away from the original languages) using categories that represent increasingly severe stages of endangerment and end at extinction . This is highly problematic. 24

Actual extinction of a biological species is normally understood as a lost cause, an irreversible eventuality. By extension, if a language is “extinct,” interventions that could promote its future use, such as funding language programs, are illogical, hopeless, and unlikely to be supported. But here the species extinction metaphor fails. Using language is an action, not an object. A community may stop using its original language, but they can also start using it again so long as there are records of the language to learn from and people who are able and empowered to do this work.

In masking these and related possibilities, extinction narratives are a form of oppression. They are also entrenched. I have on many occasions related the story of how my tribal language had been declared “extinct” by linguists before the Miami people reclaimed it as a language of everyday use. Although Miami people assert our linguistic sovereignty by explaining that our language was just “sleeping” for about thirty years, some scholars continue to describe myaamiaataweenki as “extinct.” This is just one of the many contradictions supported by the dominant endangered languages narrative, whose strength in guiding theory likely at least partly explains why public sources such as Wikipedia have continued to describe my community’s language as “extinct,” despite ample evidence otherwise. 25

Even more serious than masking possibilities for language reclamation, the logic of language extinction intersects with the dominant narrative’s focus on “endangered languages” in a way that goes beyond erasing the underlying oppressions of language endangerment to also erase their continued presence. That language shift is “complete” does not mean these oppressions have even been identified, let alone corrected. The intergenerational trauma from boarding school experiences, for example, does not stop when a community’s language has gone out of use. Rather, it stops when communities can engage in and are supported in healing, and in rebuilding the relationships that boarding schools violently severed. Similarly, ruptures between communities and their lands do not stop when language shift is complete. Rather, they stop through interventions that restore those relationships, a process that requires decolonization and supporting activism such as the LandBack movement. 26

The dominant endangered languages narrative fails to support language recovery because it puts the focus on results of oppressions, rather than on identifying and dismantling the oppressions. But it does not have to be this way. I conclude with possible changes and actions.

First, rather than lamenting how languages “disappear” or “vanish,” I propose highlighting the agents of language shift through queries such as, “Who or what is oppressing these language communities?” From this vantage, the central question is no longer about what an undefined “we” lose when languages go out of use, but instead about changing social dynamics, a process that requires identifying structures of oppression and stopping them. This is a social justice approach, situated in an honest account of the historical and contemporary factors that underlie language shift in places like North America. Anthropologist Gerald Roche gets to the heart of what a social justice–oriented narrative could emphasize:

Speakers and signers of Indigenous and minoritized languages have repeatedly explained that their languages are endangered due to failures of social justice — the oppression, marginalization, stigmatization, exclusion, deprivation, and so on — that take place in the context of imperial, colonial, and nationalist domination. 27

Beyond working to reverse the injustices created by this domination, the second key to an alternative narrative is a focus on reclamation, and what non-Indigenous agents and institutions can do to support it. Shifting the unit of analysis away from “endangered languages,” which focuses on languages rather than the peoples who claim them, is crucial to this narrative. “Language endangerment” is an improvement, as it references a process rather than objects, but better yet would be to position community language ecologies as the anchor for the story. Language ecologies are the ways in which languages exist in their environments, and an ecological approach thus inherently emphasizes place (which is especially fundamental to Indigenous communities) along with sociopolitical, economic, and other factors in language shift and recovery. An ecological approach emphasizes relationships, which as noted earlier must in some way have been severely changed or damaged in order for language shift to have occurred. Unlike the dominant narrative’s focus, this approach firmly engages the multiple oppressions those communities have experienced and continue to experience, while also drawing attention to their rights, needs, goals, and futures.

Finally, following from the last point is the importance of prioritizing the lived experiences of members of Native American language communities when planning and executing language work. Roche notes that dominant approaches to theorizing language endangerment largely miss the political factors and lead to “a refusal to sincerely hear the voices of the linguistically oppressed.” 28 I follow Roche’s observation that many members of oppressed language communities are already explaining the causes of language endangerment and sharing stories of language reclamation, and yet we are not fully being heard or seen. 29 In Native North America, where settler colonial logics teach that Native Americans for the most part no longer really exist, this is to be expected; and by extension, the stories we relate and the needs we articulate are easily dismissed by dominant discourses and the actions they promote. As shown throughout the essays in this volume, however, many tools to address these injustices already exist. The question is whether people with power are willing to engage them.

author’s note

A Dean’s Professorship at the University of California, Riverside Center for Ideas and Society funded through a Mellon Foundation Investments in Humanities Faculty Grant supported work on this essay.

1 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “ International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032 ” (accessed June 12, 2023).
2 I follow the convention of capitalizing Indigenous when used as an ethnopolitical identifier to specific original peoples.
3 This statement appears on one of the main UNESCO websites for the IDIL . See UNESCO , “ Indigenous Languages Decade (2022–2032) ” (accessed July 25, 2023).
4 An Act to Reauthorize the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978 and the Navajo Community College Act, 101st Congress, 04 Stat. 1152, Public Law 101-477, October 30, 1990.
5 For an overview of the language reclamation framework, see Wesley Y. Leonard, “Contesting Extinction through a Praxis of Language Reclamation,” in Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures , ed. Suzanne M. McCullagh, Luis I. Prádanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, and Catherine Wagner (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2021), 143–159.
6 Onowa McIvor and Teresa L. McCarty, “ Indigenous Bilingual and Revitalization-Immersion Education in Canada and the USA ,” in Bilingual and Multilingual Education , 3rd edition, ed. Ofelia García, Angel M. Y. Lin, and Stephen May (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Cham, 2016), 422.
7 I capitalize the names of academic fields to recognize that they are proper nouns, each with specific sets of questions, methods, goals, and personnel.
8 Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser, “ Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic Intersections of Gender, Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization ,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 115–129.
9 Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “ Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education ,” The Urban Review 37 (5) (2005): 425–446.
10 Eve Tuck, “ Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities ,” Harvard Educational Review 79 (3) (2009): 409–427.
11 Michael Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” Language 68 (1) (1992): 4.
12 Lyle Campbell and Eve Okura, “New Knowledge Produced by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages ,” in Cataloguing the World’s Endangered Languages , ed. Lyle Campbell and Anna Belew (New York: Routledge, 2018), 79.
13 Jenny L. Davis, “ Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous Language Survivance ,” Language Documentation and Description 14 (2017): 41.
14 McIvor and McCarty, “Indigenous Bilingual and Revitalization-Immersion Education,” 3.
15 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, “ Linguicism ,” in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2015).
16 An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations (General Allotment Act or Dawes Act), 49th Congress, 2nd Session, Stat. 24, 388–391, December 6, 1886 (codified as 25 U.S.C. ch. 9 § 331 et seq.).
17 An Act to Provide for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and For Their Removal West of the River Mississippi (Indian Removal Act), 21st Congress, 4 Stat. 411, signed into law May 28, 1830.
18 This example comes from a series of Miami Elder interviews in the late 1960s that I accessed through Miami tribal archives. For reasons of privacy, I omit identifying details.
19 Quoted in Erin Flynn Haynes, “ When Support for Language Revitalization Is Not Enough: The End of Indigenous Language Classes at Warm Springs Elementary School ,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 209 (2011): 143.
20 James McKenzie, “ Addressing Historical Trauma and Healing in Indigenous Language Cultivation and Revitalization ,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 42 (2022): 71–77.
21 April Linton, “ Language Politics and Policy in the United States: Implications for the Immigration Debate ,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 199 (2009): 9–37.
22 Davis, “Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment,” 40–45.
23 Wesley Y. Leonard, “ Producing Language Reclamation by Decolonising ‘Language ,’” Language Documentation and Description 14 (2017): 15–36.
24 I detail the harm of this trajectory along with the underlying logics and effects of these biological metaphors in Leonard, “Contesting Extinction.” See also Bernard C. Perley, “ Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices ,” Anthropological Forum 22 (2) (2012): 133–149.
25 Leonard, “Contesting Extinction.”
26 Also written as two words (“Land Back”), this movement calls for and develops strategies to return lands to the control of their original caretakers. See LandBack .
27 Gerald Roche, “Abandoning Endangered Languages: Ethical Loneliness, Language Oppression, and Social Justice,” American Anthropologist 122 (1) (2020): 164.
29 For example, a 2021 issue of WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship focuses on “Indigenous Language Revitalization: Innovation, Reflection and Future Directions.” See WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship 16 (1) (2021). For an example from a previous issue of Dædalus , see Teresa L. McCarty, Sheilah E. Nicholas, Kari A. B. Chew, Natalie G. Diaz, Wesley Y. Leonard, and Louellyn White, “ Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices: Storywork as Theory and Praxis in Indigenous-Language Reclamation ,” Dædalus 147 (2) (2018): 160–172.

Native Language Essay

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Importance of Expressing in Native Language Essay (Critical Writing)

When learning any foreign language, a crucial part of this process is the development of the feeling of freedom while expressing. One of the effective approaches in this regard might be talking to recipients of a speech in a native language. It may free one’s flow of thoughts and establish relationships of trust, which helps an interlocutor to understand a message and emotion that the speaker tries to convey. In this paper, the example of the implementation of the mentioned exercise will be discussed.

As Maria was speaking about her inconvenience when she talks in Spanish, her native language, to those who cannot understand it, I was touched by her traits and thoughts. She is a very kind and emotional person who cares about her interlocutors and about being heard. Moreover, it might seem that Maria’s situation regarding expressing herself in the second language is quite common. A plethora of people trying to improve their speaking face the problem of the lack of confidence, not to mention the expression in a foreign language.

The constant work, practice, and self-reflection with a creative approach might be crucial elements of solving the issue mentioned, which is one of the main ideas of the counselor (Corey, Corey, & Corey, 2018). When Maria said some phrases in Spanish and told about her relief, I felt the same and recognized that she evoked empathy in me for her and everyone who struggles to overcome this language hardship.

The critical point of the video transcript might be the fact that after Maria talked in her first language, she started feeling better and realized that all group members were included. They did not distinguish what exactly she was saying but understood her message and emotions. The groupmates stated that they felt the power, connection with Maria, and inclusion (Corey et al., 2018). Hence, the idea of asking the members to sometimes speak in their primary language might contain significant potential.

Such an action from Maria demonstrated the efficiency of this approach as everyone not only understood the idea she was trying to express but also was pleased to listen to her. Moreover, Maria felt good and comfortable while talking in Spanish to the ones who did not know this language. Thus, using the tip discussed, a person might be more powerful and sure in what he or she is trying to explain.

The issue of confidentiality is another critical point to discuss. Confidentiality protects the legal and ethical interests of all groupmates. However, there might be a situation when the limits of confidentiality are to be defined in order to ensure the benefits of being a group member (Kelly, 2017). For instance, regarding the group described, it was essential to reveal that Maria’s native language is Spanish, Vivian is Vietnamese, and Tony’s first language is English.

Of course, the most appropriate way to deal with privacy is consent among groupmates about confidentiality limits and implementation. Hence, I would raise this issue at the outset of the group. I would state, “confidentiality is important for us; nevertheless, to gain maximum from our meeting, let’s discuss what information we shall disclose and come to a consent.” After a decision, the process of the communication might be smoother and more convenient.

It seems reasonable to assume that expressing thoughts in a primary language might be a beneficial and effective action to undertake to gain confidence and power while speaking in a foreign tongue. The described group meeting showed that the recipients of Maria’s speech understood her and felt included during the Spanish expressions. Then, it was stated that I would raise the issue of confidentiality at the outset of the group to provide the members with the opportunity to gain as much benefit as possible.

Corey, M.S., Corey, G., & Corey, C. (2018). Groups: Process and practice (10th Ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Kelly, B. D. (2017). Confidentiality and privacy in the setting of involuntary mental health care: What standards should apply? Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 3 (1), 90–97.

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In school, children who speak other languages will learn to speak, read and write English. However, unless parents and teachers actively encourage maintenance of the native language, the child is in danger of losing it and with that loss, the benefits of bilingualism. Maintaining the native language matters for the following reasons.
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Essay On Native English Language. 1496 Words6 Pages. "It is, I think, very generally assumed that a particular subset of educated native speakers in England, or New England, or wherever, have the natural entitlement to custody of the language, that the preservation of its integrity is in their hands; their right and their responsibility ...
Essays About Language: Top 5 Examples And 7 Prompts
6 Prompts for Essays About Language. 1. My Native Language. To add depth to your essay, include a section with common phrases or idioms from your native language and explain their meaning. In your essay, you can write about your native language. For example, explain how it originated and some of its characteristics.
My Native Language Essay
Good Essays. 1338 Words. 6 Pages. Open Document. My Native Language. Is your native language something you take for granted? Well, for me it has been a struggle — a struggle with history, politics, society, and myself. Yet something guided me through it. I don't know what you heard about my native land — Belarus.
PDF Bureau of Indian Affairs Native Language Revitalization
respondents about Native languages spoken at home by Native American individuals aged 5 and over (Figure 2). Figure 2. Native languages spoken by EL (English language learners) school year 2013-2014. In 1990, there were 281,990 who replied "yes" they spoke a Native language; in 2000 there were 353,340, and in 2010 there were 372,095.
Refusing "Endangered Languages" Narratives
Indigenous language endangerment is a global crisis, and in response, a normative "endangered languages" narrative about the crisis has developed. Though seemingly beneficent and accurate in many of its points, this narrative can also cause harm to language communities by furthering colonial logics that repurpose Indigenous languages as objects for wider society's consumption, while ...
Native Language Essay
ENL: English as a Native Language is traditionally assumed to be a language that is acquired from birth without formal instruction (versus a language that was learned as a second or later language). ENL is also referred to as L1 (first language), mother tongue, or inner circle variety. An issue with the term "native language" or L1 lies in ...
Importance of Expressing in Native Language Essay (Critical Writing)
Importance of Expressing in Native Language Essay (Critical Writing) Exclusively available on IvyPanda. When learning any foreign language, a crucial part of this process is the development of the feeling of freedom while expressing. One of the effective approaches in this regard might be talking to recipients of a speech in a native language.

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I bring my culture and language with me wherever I go.

My parents made my sister and me cling to our language. Now, I have learned to appreciate my Polish heritage.

I joined Tamil classes, and they forever changed my life.

Seeing my family speak Farsi makes me proud.

I pride myself in being able to keep something as important as my native tongue.

Try not to lose your native language because one day, you might need it.

Growing up with English and Tagalog was both a confidence booster and a blessing.

I’m grateful for what little Telugu I know, as it has allowed me to feel a sense of community and comfort.

I learned that embracing my culture means embracing all aspects of myself, including my accent.

My family and I find so much community with those who also speak Cantonese.

A mixture of languages is what makes my family special.

Speaking Spanish has allowed me to build strong relationships with my relatives.

I don’t speak my family’s language, but hearing it encourages me to engage in my culture more.

Learning Russian, Polish and English can be stressful, but it is a blessing.

Losing my ability to speak another language felt like an entire world was cut off from me.

An accent can be a barrier in America, but mine is an important part of my culture.

Why is it Important to Maintain the Native Language?

Intellectual:

Educational:

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