What’s my native language? In my family, it’s a question that’s never been easy to answer.
By Tania Gentic
My children were both fluent in Spanish before they could speak English, because I spoke to them only in my non-native tongue. When my oldest was a toddler, we made almost daily trips to Target or the Fairfax County Public Library, just to get out of the house (and so I could treat myself to a coffee I did not make at home—one of the small pleasures afforded parents of young children). Strangers often did a double take when they heard my daughter speaking to me in fluent Spanish. Inevitably, they would ask where we were from. I struggled to answer.
I was born in Canada to two immigrants: one from the former Yugoslavia, one from England. We immigrated to the United States when I was only a year old. My husband is a native of upstate New York whose high school Spanish he is only now trying to improve, thanks to Duolingo. Although I have taught Spanish-language literature and culture since 2002, I have no family connection to Spain or Latin America. I started speaking Spanish with the kids because my husband and I thought it would be good for them to learn another language. We also put them in Spanish-language immersion preschool and hired Spanish-speaking babysitters. But it was only the daily experience of parenting in Spanish that made me realize how profoundly languages other than my own had shaped my sense of self.
I was surrounded by accents and languages from a young age. Since my father only learned English in his 20s, he never quite mastered it. Among many details that have faded in my memory since his death, I remember most that he routinely confused his articles. He also pronounced his v’s as w’s, and “th” became “t.” In high school, my cousins, sister, and I compiled a list of all the funny expressions he and our other first-generation relatives used incorrectly. They talked about putting their dirty laundry in the “clothes humper,” wiped the counter with “towel papers,” and referred to us cousins as sisters, since in Serbian the word for cousin and sister is the same. My mother, on the other hand, had emigrated from London to Canada at age eight, and although she dropped her English accent in public, when she spoke to her parents it came back, albeit in a rather watered-down version; it seemed her childhood accent haunted her adult speech. I asked her once, when we met a family from London on the beach and she struck up a conversation with the other mother, why she did not have an English accent with other English people, only with her parents. She looked puzzled, as though she had never realized that her voice changed when she spoke with them. When her parents died, so did her accent; I have never heard it since.
My mother, a voracious reader, often corrected my father’s grammar and pronunciation. Perhaps this echoed her own need to sound English in front of parental figures who clung to their heritage and its ties to the British empire, despite their choice to leave England. By the same token, the sound of my father’s voice, heavily accented, seemed to contribute to his sense of never quite fitting in. He used to say he was always at a disadvantage because, as he put it, he “talked funny.” He seemed to carry a sort of shame about not sounding quite right, which likely stemmed from the notion of acculturation that was so in vogue when he immigrated to Canada in the 1960s at the age of 26. He told me once that when he was young and out in public with his sister, they spoke Serbian in a whisper, because they did not want people to know they did not speak English. As a family, we also loved a good story about language gone wrong. My favorite was about how, while driving through the South in the ’70s, my dad stopped in a gas station for coffee. After he asked several times for sugar, the attendant, who looked confused the whole time, finally came out from behind the counter and brought him some shoelaces.
With this background of accented experiences, I grew up feeling my family was inherently different from others. So when I started studying Spanish, I was determined to perfect my pronunciation. I spent the summer after seventh grade teaching myself how to roll my r’s. As a family, we spoke often of the fact that my sister, born in Virginia, was the only one in the family who was American. Though this multiculturalism was a strong source of pride for my parents, when I took up graduate studies in Spanish and Latin American literature at Penn, I suddenly became self-conscious about the fact that I have no ancestral connection to the specific identities I study and teach about. I was relieved when people in other countries with whom I spoke Spanish could not detect where I was from. Argentines thought I might be German, Colombians thought I was Spanish, Spaniards thought I was from the Caribbean, and one Puerto Rican academic thought I might be Catalan. For me, the most important thing was that no one thought I was from the United States. Why was it so important for me to pass as non-American? I don’t know. Perhaps it came down to my parents telling us whenever we traveled that “we don’t want to look like tourists.”
When I was around three, my father, who would not let anything go to waste, painstakingly drew and cut the letters of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet out of an old roll of linoleum flooring. They felt so big in my little hands. I can still picture the coffee can in which they resided on the floor in the basement, just under the chalkboard he brought home from a school he was demolishing. We would line the letters up on the floor, and he taught me all their pronunciations, repeating the dictate of the 19th-century Serbian philologist Vuk Karadžić, “piši kao što govoriš, a čitaj kao što je napisano”(write the way you speak, and read as it is written). This foundational truth about Serbian’s phonetic transparency was the counterpart to my father’s near-daily complaints about how crazy the English language is.But he also stopped speaking to me in Serbian around that time, declaring it easier to just live his life in English. To this day, I can go to Belgrade and correctly pronounce any sign, menu item, or newspaper article put in front of me. Sometimes I even trick the people around me into thinking I am from there. But then they ask a more detailed question, and the façade crumbles.
Meanwhile, my kids have inherited these linguistic experiences in ways I could not have imagined. I have many fond memories of my daughter as a toddler. One is when she put her diapers in “time out” (which worked for the diapers about as well as my time outs worked with her). Another is when she had done something she shouldn’t have (I no longer remember what) and she looked at me and pleaded, “Don’t speak English, Mama!” In that moment I realized that, to her, my language of affection was Spanish—my non-native language—and, without realizing it, I only switched to English when I was upset. From the time I was a toddler, my father spoke only his non-native language with me. Serbian was for swearing (in addition to being able to read Cyrillic, I can curse a blue streak in his language). Have I replicated that linguistic model unintentionally? Is my non-native language my love language? Is that why my daughter has so thoroughly embraced Spanish? She has perfect fluency in both languages. My son, on the other hand, has so much anxiety around Spanish, he will not speak it with me, even though he can go to summer camp in Spain and do just fine.
Recently I finished writing a book about another language, Catalan, that I can read and understand, but rarely have the opportunity to speak. I was at a party in Barcelona, and a simple question in that language—“Where are you from?”—caused me to balk. All I could think was that I would mispronounce the words, that I would sound like a tourist, that I would talk funny. Later, when my eight-year-old told me he was embarrassed because the counselors in his Catalan language camp thought he only spoke English, I realized that I was not alone. These emotions around language are all in the family.
Tania Gentic G’02 Gr’07 is the author of Geographies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona (Copyright Duke University Press, 2025), from which this essay has been adapted with permission.
