My language story is not the traditional struggle with English and its language rules but with a different language, Spanish. Even though my parents were born in Spain and lived most of their lives in Spain, I cannot speak Spanish to save my own life. I felt very ashamed of this as I could not say I could speak Spanish, yet my family and ancestors were not only able to speak Spanish but also create the language as a whole. I was a joke to my family and my bloodline as to how their descendants could not speak the language they created for them.
One time at a funeral, the people at the funeral wanted me to do a quick speech on the podium. I decided to speak in Spanish since most people there were Spanish speaking and everyone there was confused, especially grandma. Whenever grandma heard me try to speak in Spanish, she got very confused. I felt like I was letting her down and I felt like she was sad that the Spanish in our family was going to die with me since I could barely communicate with it. She would also get angry at things since I would try to teach her basic sayings in English and she got frustrated with me and she wanted me to learn Spanish instead of her learning English.
Another good example of me and failure of speaking Spanish was on friday nights. My family has the Spain cable package for our T.V so we are up to date with Spain news. We also have the Spain game show channel and every friday night we would watch the Spain version of Wheel of Fortune. The host always wears a suit just like the American version but the host also has a big brown beard. Me and my family always try to solve the word puzzle before the contestants can solve it. I try to tell my family the answer but they do not understand what I am saying and I have never won one of our family competitions.
Another hindering factor is that my school did not teach Spanish that well. I only had 4 years of it, which may sound like a lot but the first year, my teacher could not get to the lesson most days, the second year was mostly on culture, not the actual language and the last two years were on Zoom and we know how Zoom classes are.
I did not need to speak Spanish for school, which is the only other important place at the time and most of my work is in English. The only time I needed to use Spanish in the school setting was from 8th grade to 11th grade for Spanish class,however, those classes were more of a Spanish culture class instead of learning the rules of Spanish. Not only since I was not getting graded on my Spanish speaking in school, but I did not want to struggle learning Spanish, why struggle to learn a language that is for my family who knows me best. Everything changed in one day of Spanish class as we learned about Spanglish. Spanglish is a hybrid of English and Spanish, and I found it amazing as it was the silver bullet to my language problem. My classmates though it was stupid and dumb and “was an embrassment to the language of Spanish” but I supported it all the way. The reason why I accepted Spanglish so quickly while others disliked it was because it seemed like the perfect way to bridge my grandma’s language barrier. I put my hints of Spanish that I picked up while also putting together English words my grandma most likely have heard and then finally, I have created a sentence my grandma can understand.
When I came home that day and tried to speak Spanglish, two key things happened. First I got a confused look on my mom’s face. Her face was like if I started to speak an alien language out of nowhere and I was getting a speech in said language. She was utterly confused by what I was saying even though it was just a fusion of English and Spanish that came from my mouth. All I said to her was “Mom, Aprendí un nuevo language!” For a quick translation to English, I said “Mom, I learned a new language!”. As you can see, it has both Spanish words and English words, so if the person knows Spanish they can use the context clues of what I said in Spanish with the English words surrounding the known Spanish. The second key thing was that for the first time, my Grandma understood what I was saying for the first time in forever. My grandma only speaks Spanish her whole life but because of my Spanish that I put in my English, she finally understood what her grandson was saying.