An Immigrant Woman’s Opinion: My Native Tongue Does Not Define My Immigrant Identity After All

What it feels like to lose a language – and why I’m not too worried about it.

Walk around New York any given day and you’ll be bombarded by advertisements on billboards to buses and everything in between. Given the marketing overload, I don’t often pay attention to these messages. But as I started thinking about what I wanted to write about this past Immigrant Heritage Month (proclaimed a national event by President Biden), a poster I thought I’d only fleetingly noticed immediately came to mind: it was an advertisement for French language classes by the French Institute Alliance Francaise. I walked past one at a bus stop just last week.

I bring this up because of an experience I had at a wedding a few weeks ago. My parents and I were gathered at the house of Romanian family friends whose son was getting married that weekend. It was late at night, and everyone was sitting around the firepit in the backyard, enjoying a loud and hilarious conversation. 

If you know anyone who is Romanian, you already know that loudness is par for the course at our parties, so that wasn’t the interesting part of the evening. What actually made the night stand out for me was that, for the most part, we were having the conversation in English. 

To set the stage: This was a group of people who had either fully grown up in Romania (like my parents) or at least spoken Romanian at home even though they’d grown up in the United States (like me). So it wasn’t a foreign language for anyone there. But while we’d started off speaking primarily in Romanian, as soon as someone in the group made the switch to English, everyone else did too. 

And nobody bothered trying to switch back. What’s more, the conversation flowed as loudly and naturally as it had before.

I mentioned this to a friend afterward. Her parents are both from Romania and she confirmed they’d been forgetting words and switching to English more often too, so it doesn’t seem like our wedding weekend was an isolated incident. And I think it’s also understandable. If your brain is constantly exposed to and exercising the muscle for one language on a daily basis, it feels natural that any others you do not regularly use could fall by the wayside. I’d venture a guess that many of my fellow multilingual readers feel similarly (please drop a comment below if you’d like to share!).

At this point in the article, you might expect me to say I’m feeling very distraught or disappointed at this development, that I’m somehow losing my connection to my immigrant heritage. 

But the truth is, I’m not. 

I don’t think this diminishes my connection to my Romanian heritage, even if I can’t describe that connection in its native tongue. Although I was raised in NYC and don’t remember much of the first six years of my life in Romania, I spent my summer breaks there from the age of nine through the time I finished college. Chalk it up to stubbornness, but I refuse to believe that the memories I made over all those summers will fade alongside the language. I think these feelings will remain as much a part of me as the color of my eyes – set at birth and immovable. 

In some circles, much is made of the “need” for immigrant children to retain their heritage and avoid the dreaded (gasp!) assimilation, but I’m here to argue that just because you learn to appreciate a new culture does not mean you’re turning your back on the one you were born into. I happily identify as American and Romanian and I don’t feel a conflict in relating to both, even if I can only use English to describe this belonging. 

So while that French bus poster made me wonder if I should be committing some time to work on my Romanian, I was able to walk past it with a smile on my face. Because I’m confident that the next time I land in Bucharest, it’ll feel wonderful whether or not my Romanian vocabulary has decreased to a kindergarten level (if I’m honest, it’s already there).

As we have celebrated National Immigrant Heritage Month this year, I wanted to invite my fellow immigrants to reflect on how they keep their immigrant heritage alive. What objects or cultural touchpoints help you define your heritage? Are there any absolutes in how you think about who can partake in your culture and who cannot? I look forward to reading your reflections in the comments section below.

P.S. For anyone looking to do some more learning on the topic of immigration, a personal recommendation is the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. Housed in two former tenement buildings at 97 and 103 Orchard Street, the museum offers a number of live and virtual tours through which visitors can learn the stories of the immigrant families that lived in those buildings and the surrounding neighborhood from the late 1800s through early 1900s. Check it out to learn about how immigrants shaped the great city of New York!