Monolingual Family V.S. The Polyglot Wannabe


Nathaniel Worthman 
Professor. Dadak 
Writing-101
12.2.19
            
            For this language log, I want to talk about something that has affected me for all of my life. Multilingualism in America. While most people don’t even give a second thought to the disadvantages of being monolingual this was something, I have struggled with for most of my life. I was born in Guatemala with my twin brother James and my little sister Sandy before being adopted and brought to the United States to an extremely monolingual family. Don’t get me wrong, being raised by an upper-middle class white family in Long Island, New York has afforded me many opportunities and for that I’m so grateful!! The only thing is that culturally, I always felt like a little bit of an outcast in one way or another. For example, as I grew up and really started to get to know who I was as an individual I realized that I had a huge passion for languages and language learning and preservation. Because of that, one Christmas I only asked for language books from my family. While I was extremely lucky to receive books to learn: French, Tagalog, Arabic, Hindi, Latvian, Polish and some others. I will never forget what my mom told me that my aunt had said to her. “Kathy, why does he want to learn all of these languages? All the people that speak them that come to America have to learn English anyway.” It was at this point in my life that I knew I had to help change my families view on the importance of language learning and the importance of cross-cultural communication.
            In order to complete this goal, I became president of the multicultural club in my high school in the school district that all but two of my cousins attended because I knew that every year our club put on show to showcase the diverse cultures in our school. This way I would be able to educate my cousins as well as the broader community the importance and beauty of cultural diversity. Luckily for me, the show was a huge success and even encouraged my cousins to learn German outside of school because It wasn’t a language offered in school. Additionally, my family started to have a better view on people who speak languages other than English and I know now that my goal is to help educate people on the importance and beauty of other languages.

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