Language is what binds us to our culture and ancestors. It’s what shaped our attitudes, beliefs, values, and understanding of what is truth. Our language is the ‘heart’ of who we are as a person. But language also depends on how your family interferes with it. How you expose yourself to it and how you observe and understand it. It can both isolate us and bring us closer together. But without our languages, would we all be with no identity?

Half my family speaks German, I do not. This has made me feel like I had no identity, when surrounded by Germans for many years, but have this also affected who I am overall? My father tried desperately to teach me German as a child, but as stubborn as I was, I simply refused to learn it. That, however, has had its consequences. When growing up, my parents and grandparents would chatter away in German, leaving me feeling left out. They would often “forget” I couldn’t speak it and start talking to me in ‘their’ language. I’d look at them blankly and they’d either leave it or get a bit irritated. My parents would also bring me along to their friends in Germany, who had kids around my age, thinking I might learn some from talking to them. However, I couldn’t. While they would all be have a big discussion in German, I would sit there awkwardly, trying to catch a phrase or two. But since I grew up with the German side of my family and been dragged along to German ‘play dates’, I’m most comfortable in an environment with Germans and German speakers. But my lack of a common language announces me as an outsider. My identity is closely tied to language. It fuels my feeling of marginality in the world. I fit in two worlds, but belong to neither.

There are also really two sides of me in this case. There’s the side of me that everyone else perceives, and then there’s the side that only I know of. A language barrier that allowed me to