I’m a little jealous of the students in my classes who can talk to each other in a foreign language and surf the web in that particular language in the middle of class.

Of course, I’ve a few other students my age who know my native language, Gujarati, but more often than not, many of those people can understand the language but can’t speak it, which flushed away any chances of “secret conversations” that my younger self hoped of having.

This trend is becoming more and more common as the years pass. Even now, I don’t know half of the translations of English words into Gujarati since the British Raj allowed for the infiltration of English into Hindi and by extension, Gujarati, which has led to the creation of Gujaraglish. Not officially, of course.

But even then, my method of speaking Gujarati isn’t anything like Spanglish or Denglish since those speakers know the translations for specific words but use the conglomerate words for convenience. I simply don’t know the words and in all honesty, it’s kind of depressing.

Many other the younger Gujaratis who I know, such as my sister, can’t speak the language at all, which isn’t really that big of a problem of practicality when you’re living in the US, but there are so cultural issues that arise. I’ve noticed that whenever my family and I visit my grandparents, my sister can understand my grandparents with few mistakes yet she cannot speak directly to them so I’m the designated translator whenever we all meet up. I don’t mind translating, but I find it a little sad since my grandparents contributed so much to our upbringing and yet my sister, much like many other children that move to different cultures, is disconnected from our relatives due to a language barrier.

When I expressed a little interest in learning how to write Gujarati, my mother had said that there really wasn’t any point in learning it since I would never use it in the US and the British colonization in India spread English to all the official documents so I’m pretty much set if I wanted to go to India at any point.

Still, it feels as though a lot of cultures are being wiped out in this manner. A quick search on Google yielding a Wikipedia page of the last known speakers of various languages and when they died, taking their languages with them. This is a horrible fate, especially when these languages do not have a tradition of being written down. However, some other languages that were dying out, such as Hebrew, had a revitalization when it became the official language of Israel and people actively began to promote its use.

Of course, it’s much harder to preserve a language that’s only spoken deep in a rainforest or only has a few remaining speakers, but it’s interesting to think about what we can do to help record these languages, at the least, so they don’t fade into the void of time.