What Role Does Your Family’s Native Tongue Play in Your Life?

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?

What role does your family’s linguistic heritage play in your life? Do you take pride in speaking or understanding a language that connects to your family’s cultural background? Have you ever felt pressure to lose your home language or accent?

Ilan Stavans argues in the guest essay “‘Don’t Lose Your Accent!’” that newcomers enhance and enrich American English:

The immigration debate often centers on who should be welcomed into our country. Some even argue that multiculturalism dilutes our national character — that the very essence of the country is somehow vanishing. But far from undermining the American experiment, immigrants enhance our culture by introducing new ideas, cuisines and art. They also enrich the English language.

As newcomers master a new language, they lend words from their native lexicon to the rest of us. For example, the English language — or maybe we should just call it American — has borrowed from others to name the foods so many of us love. Italians gave us “pizza” and “spaghetti,” and we borrowed “taco,” “burrito” and “churro” from the Spanish language.

Chinese immigrants introduced us to chopsticks, while the ketchup we drown our hot dogs, burgers and fries in is believed to have derived from a Chinese word. Irish immigrants introduced us to “hooligan,” “phony” and “galore,” and from Yiddish we got the words “chutzpah” and “schlep.” The terms “diva,” “tornado” and “tycoon” came from other languages, too.

Mr. Stavans continues:

Our nation’s founders would likely understand little of what we say today, given the amount of fresh acquisitions we’re always making. John Adams, our second president, was convinced that American English required a federally funded version of L’Académie Française in order to safeguard the people’s tongue from “going to the dogs.” He proposed in 1780 a strategy to build one. But Thomas Jefferson, who sought to protect Native American languages and is credited with introducing words like “belittle” and “pedicure” into our lexicon, disagreed. He believed that a language has its own survival mechanisms.

Adams, fortunately, was on the losing side. American English is of, for and by the people, and its well-being depends on us. We do with it as we wish — or as we feel, since language is so often shaped by gut emotions. There are authorities within each language, of course, chief among them parents, educators, language scholars and dictionaries.

When our foundational dictionary, Noah Webster’s “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” first published in 1828, it included only 70,000 words. To be accepted into it, words must meet a specific criterion. Over time, it became Merriam-Webster, a commercial lexicon that now contains over 15 million examples of words. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, as dictionaries in other languages might be. That is, Merriam-Webster doesn’t tell us how to speak. It’s the other way around: Native speakers and immigrants alike dictate what the dictionary should contain.

A Mexican immigrant, I am constantly amazed by how, in its 450-year history, American English has become stunningly elastic. It has recalibrated itself by learning from the past. It is essential that it continue to do so. Don’t give up your accent! Don’t lose your immigrant verbal heritage! As an immigrant, I find joy in hearing accents, particularly those by people who have mastered American English yet retain a beautiful trace of their native tongue.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

• What is your linguistic heritage? What role does it play in your life? Does your family speak any languages other than English at home? If so, in what ways do the other languages enrich your life?

• Do you or any family members have what might be considered an accent? How does it make you feel? Mr. Stavans writes, “Immigrants are sometimes made to feel that they have to suppress their language in order to belong.” Have you ever felt the need to suppress your language or lose your accent?

• What’s your reaction to the guest essay? How persuasive is Mr. Stavans’s argument that immigrants “enrich” and “reinvigorate” American English? Which details are most convincing? Which, if any, are less so?

• Mr. Stavans points out that Italians gave us “pizza” and “spaghetti,” and American English borrowed “taco,” “burrito” and “churro” from the Spanish language. Do you know any words from your family’s native languages that have become part of the American lexicon?

• Mr. Stavans writes that the debate and the fears over the purity of American English are nothing new, noting that John Adams, our second president, was convinced that American English needed safeguards to “protect the people’s tongue from ‘going to the dogs,’” while Thomas Jefferson sought to protect Native American languages and believed that a “language has its own survival mechanisms.” Do you think the worries over the future of American English are well founded or misguided? Do you agree with Mr. Stavans’s statement that over its 450-year history “American English has become stunningly elastic”?

• Mr. Stavans exhorts the reader, “Don’t give up your accent!” Does the essay change how you think about your cultural and linguistic heritage? Does it make you want to celebrate your — and our nation’s — multicultural roots more fully?

• What part of your family’s linguistic heritage would you like to share with your own children one day?