“Моя американка” — my American — hits harder than a punch in the gut. It is hurled without warning from my mother’s lips. Just as innocently and quietly, her disdain for my thick American accent and stuttering burrows deep inside my core.
No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my mother tongue. It is often a dull ache: forgetting the names of cooking utensils, simplifying explanations of what I am studying in classes and falling into a routine in conversation to stick to familiar phrases. At Cornell, however, I acutely feel disconnected from the Russian language.
In the fall of my freshman year, I took RUSSA 3305: Russian for Heritage Speakers. Despite welcoming classmates and a brilliant professor, learning the grammatical rules of Russian and how to spell correctly the words I have used my entire life was humiliating. I trudged through the class, unwilling to admit how inadequate I felt when speaking Russian.
When the class was over, I no longer heard Russian daily. It left a gap in my self-expression. Despite never getting the hang of declining nouns — I use what feels right — Russian is the language that feels like home. It is the language that warrants phone calls to my mother simply so I can hear it spoken, the one I learned to regulate my emotions with and the tongue that holds the correct words for my anger and joy.
As such, I search through the stories of Belarus that my mother recounts to feel connected to the Russian language. In reliving my mother’s memories, I try to find the home in Belarus that she never found (living as a Jew in the Soviet Union), even though I never visited the country. As I slowly lose connection with the language she speaks, I try to connect myself to the culture and land instead. Picking black currant from overgrown bushes in the spring, allergies from dandelions growing throughout the village of Gatovo, and sliding down frozen hills on a backpack come back to me. My mother is homesick for the home she never found, making me homesick for a home that wasn’t a home but rather an idea of home. I acquire the feelings she processes in Russian and, by imaginative connection, hope that Belarus — and the Russian language that comes with it — which I have never seen or touched belongs to me, too. It is the burden of being the child of immigrants.
The struggle to maintain my first language is not phenomenal: it is a shared burden of many first- and second-generation immigrants. It is a case of first language attrition: the gradual decline in native language proficiency. With the benefit of hindsight, forfeiting the language my parents passed down to me is the price of assimilation. This realization makes “Моя американка” hurt so much more.
My loss of the language that connects me to the people I love reminds me of its power. Language is a vessel for culture, history and familial connections. For many immigrant families, the first language is not just a way to speak; it is a living repository of traditions, stories and knowledge that span generations. When this language fades, so too does a piece of the family’s heritage. Despite the diversity of Cornell — international students from 130 countries make up 26 percent of the student body and children of immigrants represent a large part of the University — the risk of first language attrition is ever-present. As children of immigrants growing up in an environment dominated by English, we lose our mother tongues gradually, adopting the language of the school, the media, and peer interactions. At Cornell, the pressures to assimilate, perform in academic settings and succeed professionally often leave little room for prioritizing the home language. As a result, first languages often slip into disuse, leading to language attrition not just in the immediate generation but across generations. So, to fellow children of immigrants (and even international students): speak your language, take that heritage language class and find your cultural community.
As a writer, language fails me more often than I am willing to admit. It is also why I write: so that the words that stumble over when I speak can be smoothed over when put on paper. I am painfully aware of the dangers of losing language. “When language fails, violence becomes a language” Elie Wiesel reminds us. In a politically torn country, a polarized campus, and a world that is turned upside into an “us” versus “them” battle, I hope my words connect people rather than divide them. After all, we share the language of humanity.
Ilana Livshits is a second year student in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her fortnightly column Live Laugh Livshits focuses on politics, social issues and culture at Cornell. She can be reached at [email protected].
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