My daughter is losing Nepali and I helped let it happen

𝕴𝖓𝖛𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖉 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓

By Prashant Swor

Earlier this month, we were invited to a neighbor’s house for dinner. The room was filled with Nepali, conversations overlapping, familiar expressions, teasing and laughter. Some guests were people I had known closely; others, not so much. But hearing Nepali all around me made the room feel instantly familiar.

I have always been the kind of person who cannot resist adding humor to a gathering. That evening, I made dozens of jokes that had several people laughing. My preteen daughter, meanwhile, had found someone her age, and the two quickly bonded.

A few minutes later, as we started eating dinner, I overheard my daughter explaining to her new friend why everyone had laughed at one of my jokes. Then she said, “I wish I understood why everyone was laughing.” Her friend apparently felt the same way. The two girls agreed that they wished they understood what the adults found so funny.

I pretended not to hear them, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every adult in that room had understood the words, the context and the humor without explanation. My daughter understood enough to know she was missing something, but not enough to participate fully. She was surrounded by her own language and yet, in an important way, was outside the conversation.

That small moment brought into focus something I have watched happening gradually for years: my daughter is losing a language she once spoke naturally. And I have to admit that I have played a part in allowing it to happen.

Long before I became a parent, I often asked young people born here to immigrant parents whether they spoke their parents’ native language fluently. Many told me they understood it but struggled to speak it. Quite a few said some version of the same thing: “I wish my parents had forced me to learn their native language.”

I used to wonder why those parents hadn’t tried harder. Why didn’t they insist their children speak the family language at home? Why did they allow English to take over? Now that I have a child of my own, I am less comfortable judging them. I suspect many of those parents did try. They probably reminded their children, encouraged them to speak with grandparents and fought the same battle I am fighting now.

When my daughter was little, she spoke good Nepali naturally. We spoke it at home, and she used it naturally outside the house, too. I assumed that because she had the language, she would keep it.

Then she started preschool. English became the language of her teachers, classmates, books, entertainment and, eventually, most of her friendships. She didn’t consciously abandon Nepali. English simply became the language she heard most, needed most and found easiest.

And I understand why. English is the language in which she has grown up. It is the language of school, friends, jokes, books, television and the world immediately around her. Nepali can sometimes feel like a language she is expected to perform for adults, a language she speaks because grandparents and older relatives need it rather than because her friends do. If I were in her place, I might make the same choice.

There is an important exception, though. When my daughter talks to her grandparents on both sides of the family, she speaks Nepali fluently. She does the same when she talks to older members of our community, perhaps because she knows they may not understand English. In those moments, the Nepali she once spoke so naturally seems to return without much effort. It reminds me that the language is still there; what is fading is her everyday use of it.

For nearly a year, she also attended weekly virtual Nepali classes with a few of her peers and a relative. Like a typical kid, she would often hesitate to have me in the same room while the classes were taking place. From time to time, I would sit quietly outside the room, listening from the doorway, and I could tell that she was doing well. I have also found notes from those classes in which she had written the Nepali alphabet and spelled out shorter words. The classes have since been discontinued for reasons I cannot specify here, but I plan to resume them.

That realization has left me with mixed feelings. I have never been unhappy that she is becoming more comfortable in English. I want her to thrive in school and feel completely at home in the United States, where she is growing up. I never wanted her to feel guilty for speaking English or to think that embracing American life meant rejecting her family’s history. But as English became stronger, I also began to realize that I was not doing enough to keep Nepali strong.

There were times when she answered me in English and I simply let the conversation continue because it was easier. When she couldn’t find a Nepali word, I sometimes supplied the English one rather than waiting. I could have made Nepali books, stories, music and conversation a bigger part of her everyday life. I could have been more consistent.

It would be easy to blame schools, social media or the dominance of English. But those explanations do not absolve me. I knew what was happening, understood what could be lost and still allowed convenience to win more often than it should have.

I also don’t blame my daughter. She is simply a preteen growing up in an overwhelmingly English speaking environment. The responsibility belongs to the adults who understand what is at stake.

But preserving a language cannot simply mean demanding that children speak it. If every conversation in Nepali becomes an opportunity for correction, the language can begin to feel like an obligation rather than a home. Perhaps our job as parents is not simply to insist that our children speak our language, but to give them enough reasons to want to return to it.

A heritage language is more than vocabulary and grammar. It carries family jokes, grandparents’ stories, affection, memories and cultural references that can lose something in translation. It gives children access to people and parts of their family that may otherwise become harder to reach. It lets them hear their grandparents without translation, understand the jokes adults make when they think the children aren’t listening, and enter stories and memories that might never feel quite the same in another language.

There is another reason to value multilingualism beyond preserving culture and family connections. Research has found that children who learn multiple languages can benefit in areas including communication, literacy, problem-solving and focus. The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that multilingualism can offer both academic and social benefits. So learning Nepali is not simply about holding on to the past; it can also be an investment in her future—a concept I’ve tried to help her understand in her own terms. 

Losing the language does not mean losing a culture, but it can make one of the most direct doors into that culture harder to open. My daughter wasn’t simply missing a language that night. She was missing a shared moment with the adults around her. Everyone else was laughing together, and she knew there was something on the other side of the words that she couldn’t quite reach.

I don’t know what my daughter will say about this when she is 20 or 30. Maybe she will wish I had pushed harder. If she does, I will have to accept that. I cannot blame her for losing something I was responsible for helping her keep.

For now, I will keep speaking Nepali to her, even when she answers in English. I will try to make the language part of her life without making her feel that she owes it to me. I cannot decide which language she will ultimately choose, but I can keep the door open.

That night, as we drove home from dinner, my daughter asked me whether it was possible for her to one day understand all the jokes I had been cracking. Then she asked how long it would take.

Her questions gave me a little relief. At least she cared enough to wonder. I told her that with dedication, she could become comfortable enough to understand those jokes in less than a year. She said she was willing to learn.

Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. But for the first time in a while, I felt that the door was not closing.

And perhaps years from now, she will sit at another Nepali dinner, hear everyone laugh at a joke, and understand why. More than that, I hope she will understand that the language was never something she owed her parents. It was something we should have worked harder to preserve for her.

Some things may not have worked as well as I had hoped in my own efforts, but I know there are other simple approaches that have worked for parents and children in similar situations. If you have found something that has worked especially well for you, please feel free to share it in the comments. It may help another family trying to keep a heritage language alive.

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Editor’s note: “Prashant Swor” is the pen name of an author whose Nepali-literary work, originally published on this platform under a real byline, has been well received within the Bhutanese diaspora. This column was deliberately written in English to help parents and children connect across language barriers, while the pseudonym protects the privacy of the child featured in the piece.