A recent Facebook thread had me thinking about my relationship with the languages spoken by my family. Almost all my relatives speak English to some degree, including the regional Chinese-Filipino dialect I would identify as "my family's language."

My family's language, but not mine. Probably never mine. In some ways, I have a heritage language I may never speak. I still can't successfully lipread my family's language, and can only speak a few childish words of it -- brush your teeth, time to eat, go to bed. English had far more resources to learn with: libraries full of books I could read, drills on vocabulary and grammar so I had patterns I could guess at, speech therapists trained for the phonemes of that tongue. And so that was my language.

I'm used to being surrounded by that dialect when I'm home sometimes, and even more so when we're in the Philippines. What I'm used to is not being able to understand it. That's... just my experience with it. It's ours, but it's mine in a different way than it is theirs.

But if you asked what my family's language is, I would still point to our dialect. And I want to see it preserved, and I want my own children (who are likely to be hearing) to someday learn it from my parents, aunts, uncles, brother, and cousins, even if I myself may never speak it. Many parents want to give their kids something they didn't have themselves, and this is one of mine.