“So your whole family speaks Telugu, but you don’t speak it?”
This, in some form, is what people say when I tell them I do not speak the language my family speaks: Telugu.
“Then why don’t you speak it?” you might ask.
To answer that question we have to go back in time to elementary school in Connecticut.
My parents tried to teach me Telugu when I was younger but it did not work. So English became my first language instead.
In third or fourth grade, I was enrolled into a local Telugu school. But the only thing the teacher taught me was the Telugu alphabet.
After learning all of the letters, the teacher somehow expected me to know how to speak Telugu.
But I don’t have a problem with understanding Telugu, I thought. How am I supposed to speak it?
After finishing fourth grade and elementary school in 2019, I moved to Texas.
In sixth grade, I was enrolled into another Telugu school, Manabadi, where I relearned the Telugu alphabet and then actually learned more about speaking it. But it was during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, and my teacher was strict.
So I dropped out of another Telugu school.
In eighth grade, I made some friends who were Telugu and actually knew how to speak the language, and they helped teach me how to speak it. But that did not help.
I did not remember that I have been hearing Telugu in my house for 16 years, but I have not started to actually listen and try to speak it until this year.
Well, I have not completely tried to speak Telugu — mostly because I am a little bit scared I will mess up. But I have started to incorporate tiny bits of Telugu into my life and have tried learning and saying small words and sentences like “ksaminsandi” meaning “sorry” or “excuse me” in Telugu and is written as క్షమించండి. In addition, I have also memorized how to count from one to 10 and now sometimes count in English; Telugu; Spanish, since I am taking Spanish II; or Korean, since I am in taekwondo and we count from one to 10 in Korean.
You are probably wondering, “OK, so what am I supposed to do with this information from an 11th grade staff designer?”
To people who do not speak the language of their culture: try to learn how to speak at least a little bit of the language. You can start by listening to people speak it and trying to speak it yourself. You can also try to listen to basic conversations in the language and learn to speak sentences.
Learning to speak the same language as your family as a second language might seem hard. But with enough practice, you can still learn how to speak it.
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