What does it mean to speak our heritage languages?

Open Minds London Group - Oct 23

This month we returned to the amazing LGBTQIA+ bookshop, The Common Press, to hold our London Open Minds group. Our topic was ‘language’ and what it means to us as LGBTQIA+ people with South Asian heritage living in the UK.

We started by talking to each other about how many different languages we speak and what languages we consider to be part of our heritage. We all had experience with speaking other European languages and some of us had lived and worked in Europe and South Asia.

Not being able to speak the languages that our parents speak or used to speak kept coming up in the discussion. Living in the UK means that most of us have access to at least 2 different languages in our family homes and being able to understand lots of languages means that we always see ourselves as between cultures. This is usually a positive thing but when it intersects with our LGBTQIA+ identities, it can make us feel like we don’t fully belong to any culture.

Some of our parents came from places where more than one language was spoken on a daily basis and some languages sometimes had a higher status when spoken in public. The English language gives us access to opportunities that we would not get if we only spoke our heritage languages and we recognised that this is probably one of the reasons why over time, our heritage languages get spoken less and less by us and our families. This is one of the legacies of British colonialism in India and it intersects with class and racism here in the UK.

Language is a communication tool and we spent a lot of time talking about what it meant not being able to use our heritage languages to speak to certain family members. For some of us, our grandparents only speak in a language that we cannot speak fluently and this means that there will always be things that we can’t say to them.

We talked about how it is important to remember that not everything needs to be expressed in words and not being able to communicate directly can sometimes open up opportunities for closer relationships. Non-verbal body language and shows of appreciation can sometimes be more powerful than just using words.

Generally, it is tough to talk about our LGBTQIA+ identities in our heritage languages as we’ve only heard these identities talked about in negative ways. We talked about how this is one of the other powers of language - it’s ability to describe and include, or ignore and exclude. If people use more positive and progressive words to describe LGBTQIA+ identities, we are likely to feel more included and seen and it’s likely that shame and stigma will decrease too.

Language is one of the most important places where our culture and identities live. As our cultures change, our languages change too and new words are created to help us describe new ideas and ways of doing things. This is why we must keep on pushing for LGBTQIA+ identities to become a more accepted part of everyday conversations in our heritage languages. Representation and visibility are not the answer to all of our challenges, but being able to see more LGBTQIA+ people with South Asian heritage speaking our heritage languages in film and music will make a huge difference to the daily lives of a lot of us.

Living in the UK means that we are mostly surrounded by the English language. We talked about how having migration histories means that we will always have a complicated relationship with language and how we should not allow other people to make us feel bad about this. It is very difficult to be fluent in a language that you don’t speak daily and we should not allow this to become a way for us to feel shame about our heritage. There are more and more opportunities for us to reconnect with our heritage languages and but it requires time and effort - things that are not available to everyone.

We broke up the session with small group chats and we also read a poem about the topic of heritage languages (My Mother(‘s) Tongue - Denisa Vítová). The feedback from the session was positive and people enjoyed having a long time to think about a single topic.

We next meet in London in January 2024 and hope to see some of you there.

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

We usually meet on the last Wednesday of each month and if you want to join us at an Open Minds Meeting, please visit the Events page on our website.