A language of belonging: Advice for learning the mother tongue of your ancestors

NEW YORK (AP) — Losing a tangible connection to your family’s ancestral homeland can bring unexpected sorrow, whether through the death of an older relative, the sale of a property passed down for generations gets sold or the destruction a handful of surviving heirlooms.

Learning a language spoken by their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents is a way some English-speaking children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants choose to reinforce ties to the old country and nurture their cultural identity.

Knowing the mother tongue of one's ancestors could unlock a stack of letters that clarify hazy chapters of family history. Basic speaking skills may lead to meeting cousins in another country. Listening to stories and songs in the original language conveys nuances and meaning that often are lost in translation, experts say.

Imparting an ancestral language to their children also is important to some parents. Adults who grew up speaking a language other than English, perhaps because they had immigrant parents or they were born abroad themselves, may see the language as a way to foster intergenerational bonds, preserve family traditions and expand future career options.

Whether you’re a parent who wants a child to know their roots or someone eager to acquire an ancestral language yourself, here are tips for claiming a legacy through language.

Linguists and educators generally categorize foreign language students into two broad groups, each with different starting points and perhaps motivations. Most children and adults are second-language learners, who begin formal instruction with little or no prior knowledge.

Most heritage language learners, by contrast, organically acquired some familiarity with a language other than English as young children, said Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, associate director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. They typically heard the language spoken at home and understand or speak it themselves to varying degrees.

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

Repeated early exposure tends to give heritage language students an advantage over second-language learners, but they may be reluctant to speak up in class if they aren't confident in their grammar or relatives teased them for not being fluent, experts say.

Many people are embarassed about making mistakes when conversing in a language they don't know very well, said Arturo Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Center for World Languages. He encouraged students to use what they already know, saying perfection doesn't have to be the goal.

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

Some scholars and educators say that someone with a cultural or familial relationship to a language also could be considered a heritage language student even if they are starting pretty much from scratch, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit research and teacher education organization that promotes language learning and linguistic diversity .

Listening to relatives whose first language isn't English is an effective way to learn a heritage language, Yang Xiao-Desai, a professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University, said.

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

Podcasts, music and subtitled movies and videos in a target language also may help learners pick up words and phrases .

Ivanova-Sullivan recommends expanding the circle of people with whom you practice. Some communities have programs that pair an English speaker learning a foreign language with a native speaker who wants to learn English.

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

Visiting your family's country of origin can be a valuable experience for people who can afford the trip, Ivanova-Sullivan said. She takes her 12-year-old to her native Bulgaria for two months every summer.

Organized tours overseas for people who want to visit their ancestral homelands have multiplied in the last decade, in part due to at-home DNA test kits.

If you're interested in learning a language while traveling but have limited time off from work, check out intensive programs like EF Language Abroad, which has campuses in Spain, France, Korea, Italy, Germany, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

Before or after traveling, connect with members of your extended family on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even beginner students can pick up phrases and customs from their relatives.

Parents who want their children to learn a family language and embrace their heritage can consider community language schools, which integrate language lessons with cultural traditions . Volunteers and parents from local immigrant communities often operate such schools as nonprofit organizations.

Classes typically are held after school or on weekends. Most are designed for children learning or maintaining a language spoken at home, but some serve adult learners as well, said Joy Peyton, president of the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools.

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

The coalition, a nationwide initiative that connects and advocates for these schools, has documented nearly 1,000 programs teaching 62 languages in 44 states, she said. Korean is the most-taught language, according to Peyton.

Ana Lúcia Lico, a co-founder and board member of the organization, came to the U.S. from São Paulo, Brazil, at age 35. She made sure her two sons, now 20 and 23, learned Portuguese and were immersed in Brazilian culture while growing up in Northern Virginia.

Her older son, Gabriel Lico Bickham, attended a local heritage language school for two hours every Saturday for about a decade, starting at age 4. He remembers learning grammar but also being immersed in games like “Corre cotia,” similar to the American duck, duck, goose.

Lico, whose husband was born in the U.S., said she also exposed her boys to Brazilian Portuguese through music, dance and playing sports.

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

Hiring childcare providers who are native speakers or shopping in neighborhoods where a heritage language is spoken are additional ways for children to learn the ancestral tongue, said Richard Brecht, co-director of the American Councils Research Center, a nonprofit group devoted to the improvement of language learning worldwide.

Comic books about a group of children living in a fictitious neighborhood in Brazil helped Bickham learn Portuguese, a skill he says is helping shape his future. Also fluent in Spanish, he recently graduated from the University of Virginia. In January, he leaves for Mozambique, where Portuguese is the official language, for an English teaching assistant position through the Fulbright program.

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