Baro intaadan ka shaleynin

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

Learning your native language is tricky, say adult offspring of immigrants

 

Anne-Marie Vettorel speaks Spanish — up to a point.

 

She has trouble with Colombian slang, she’s prone to grammatical errors and sometimes she can’t find the right words for everyday objects.

 

For example, the Spanish name for “shovel.”

 

(Hint: it starts with “p” and rhymes with “mala.”)

 

But Vettorel does speak Spanish — just not as a first language.

 

That, for her, is a problem, especially considering both her parents are from Argentina and she desperately wants to sound like them.

 

“I would love to learn Spanish by living in a Spanish-speaking country,” she says. “It’s in my plans to live somewhere where I can soak it all in. Argentina would be my first choice.”

 

Now 20 and a journalism student at Ryerson University, the Vancouver-born Vettorel is a Canadian first but an Argentine at heart, except for a tricky little verbal conundrum called español.

 

She speaks it — up to a point — but not well enough for her to feel as authentically Argentine as she does Canadian.

 

“I just have this fantasy connection,” she says. “Wild horses on the Pampas, the vineyards of Mendoza. . .

 

“The only person censoring myself as an Argentine-Canadian is me.”

 

Behold the sometimes tongue-tied world of the language-deprived.

 

That, at least, is how they see themselves — the offspring of immigrants who now must struggle to hold their own in the language of their parents, one that should have been theirs as a birthright.

 

To make things up, more often than not, they have to go back to school and start all over again, practically from scratch.

 

“We notice it a lot,” says Maria Figueredo at the department of languages, literature and linguistics at York University. “They still maintain a link with their background. It’s a matter of maintaining a sense of identity.”

 

Or of finding one.

 

Vettorel is a child of immigrants to Canada. Like others, she failed to learn her parents’ language when young, only to repent that omission later.

 

But it’s one thing to absorb a language while an infant — something that seems to require no effort — and quite another to perform the same feat as a young adult.

 

Vettorel tries her best, battling to reclaim a cultural legacy that might have been hers free, if only she’d stuck with it as a child.

 

Like many others, however, she took the path of least resistance, adopting the lingua franca of her Canadian friends — and her well-meaning parents went right along.

 

By the time she reached Grade 2 or 3, Vettorel says, “we had completely switched to English in the home.”

 

Hers is an oft-told tale — a chronicle of betrayal, remorse and at least partial vindication that is shared, probably, by millions.

 

Take Anuschka Buob, who grew up on a horse farm north of Toronto, the eldest child of a Canadian mother and a Swiss German father.

 

But Buob did not learn Swiss German as a child.

 

“To be honest, at that young age, when you’re still a sponge, it didn’t occur to me.”

 

It does now.

 

At age 31, Buob is working for a multinational firm, based — you guessed it — in Zurich.

 

“I always wanted to travel,” she says on the phone from Switzerland. “I have a Swiss passport. I felt this was an opportunity. But the language was a key point for me.”

 

True, Buob spent several years boning up on her German while in high school in southern Ontario, but that was high German, the language they speak in Berlin or Bonn.

 

Swiss German is another sort of wurst, altogether.

 

“It’s quite difficult, even for Germans,” says Buob, who has lived in Switzerland for nearly five years. “From a comprehension point of view, I can get by. But speaking is painful.”

 

The same prickly logic applies to Korean.

 

Just ask Aeyoung Cho, who is embarrassed to admit she cannot speak the language of her forbearers.

 

“I think it’s a shame,” says the 30-year-old banker. “I think I’ve shamed my heritage and my nationality.”

 

Just one year old when her family moved to Canada, Cho did what countless other young newcomers do.

 

Almost as soon as she started school, she turned her back on her mother tongue.

 

“I was probably one of two Asian kids in my whole school,” she says. “I just wasn’t interested in it.”

 

She is deeply interested now, but it’s a long, hard slog.

 

“I definitely would like to learn Korean,” she says. “I’m looking to do it in the future.”

 

According to Figueredo at York, the urge to recover an abandoned mother tongue resonates more powerfully in some immigrant communities than others.

 

Roughly half of those studying Spanish at York, she says, fall into this category — kids of immigrants, trying to recoup a lost language, one they regard as being properly their own. Meanwhile, those enrolled in German studies just want to study German.

 

The difference seems to be that Spanish-speaking immigrants mostly belong to a more recent demographic wave and may not yet be as deeply integrated into the larger society as some other groups.

 

Still, every story is unique.

 

Consider Sarah Lopes, who was born in Toronto to Portuguese immigrants.

 

At first, she followed a well-trodden path, opting to speak English-only after she started school.

 

At age 16, she reversed engines and salvaged her Portuguese.

 

It took four years of hard work and discipline, but she’s fluent in her mother tongue.

 

Now 23, Lopes is studying Portuguese and Spanish literature at York and edits Entre Voc/zes, a magazine published in both languages.

 

“I was motivated to learn it,” she says of Portuguese. “I forced myself.”

 

But it wasn’t easy. When it comes to language, almost nothing is.

 

Just ask Mamta Mishra, executive director of a non-governmental organization called World Literacy Canada.

 

Her family exchanged India for Pickering when she was just seven years old, but Mishra never stopped speaking Hindi.

 

She continues to speak it now. Flawlessly.

 

Not only that, her 15-year-old son, Akash, who plays defence on his local hockey team and is a further generation removed from India, speaks perfect Hindi, too.

 

How is this possible?

 

Simple. You could call it language dictatorship.

 

“My father was a bit of a tyrant,” says Mishra. “We were forbidden to speak English at home.”

 

When she became a parent herself, Mishra adopted a similar approach. Even when her son began to rebel — predictably, around the time he started school — she stood firm.

 

“I would only speak in Hindi. With me, he just knew — I was the Hindi speaker. It was really, really tough.”

 

But it worked.

 

Of course, it might not work for everyone.

 

The gentler option is to do as Anuschka Buob did. As soon as she could, she hightailed it for Switzerland, partly for adventure but also for the language — and things seem to be going fine.

 

Up to a point.

 

“Most of my friends speak German or Swiss German,” she says, meaning to each other. “With me, they speak English.”

Toronto Star

[Somalicentric]

The thing is when a young person speaks their native language (with clear errors) they are mocked and ridiculed.

When they rather not speak their language because of the aforementioned, they are called out on it and labelled all sorts of things.

 

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't... the story of my life!

 

(with the expectation of folks who genuinely don't care)