I will never forget the moment I realized that I did not know English as well as my peers. I was in the second grade and my teacher was asking our class if we could name this specific type of fruit. No one was able to name it until I suddenly realized what she was describing. I raised my hand and called out, “Figgy!” That was a definite “no” response I got following with “Did you mean to sayfig?”. I realized not only was the word I said incorrect but that my mother had only taught me the babyish way of saying it. This wasn’t the first time I had gotten a word wrong but the first time I had been publicly embarrassed about it. However, this was the first of many more times I could not answer my teachers due to only knowing the words in Polish or Spanish.
This was very frustrating for me. I felt like I appeared stupid and incapable to express myself properly. It did not help that I was grammatically corrected by my best friends when I spoke, which of course I have nothing against wanting to improve myself. I just could not help feel like I was looked down upon because of it. The sassy Latina in me decided I was not going to not try and express myself even if it meant I would be corrected. It would be ignorant of me to not try and better myself but understand that I do speak two other languages- an advantage most do not have.
To this day the origin of where and how words became formed remains unknown. There are several theories out there that speak to it saying that perhaps it was formed by sounds that reflected actions or desires like hunger, anger, sex. However, it all boils down to the fact that as human beings we have evolved (unlike our monkey friends) and somewhere along the way we developed the capability to speak. Language has always been fascinating to me. I took an accent/dialect class in college that had me realize that depending where we were born and raised determined the way we moved our tongues and shaped different vowel sounds. It gave me a greater understanding to why people spoke the way they did. That sometimes the reason people have trouble speaking in other languages is due to the fact that their mouths have not been structured to move that way in their own language. For example Spanish speakers do not have the "th" sounds that English speakers use so they will most likely pronounce a word like "that" with a "d" making it "dat". English speakers will most likely have a hard time with sounds that European speakers use that are made in the back of the throat like the French "r's". It helps with empathizing with other speakers when understanding things like this. I'd like to encourage that for those who's English may not be perfect to keep trying at it, and understand that you are not incompetent- no one should make you feel that way. And for the rest of us to be encouraging and patient- the language of love speaks far greater than any other language. How else did you think it worked between my Polish speaking mother and my Spanish speaking father? Love is and should be our first language.