Language

My family is pretty diverse when it comes to language which "is a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understands to have the same meaning" (Rubenstein 110). Both of my father's parents are bilingual. My Grandpa can speak both fluent Italian and English as well as write it. He doesn't speak Italian much around our family because nobody else can speak it or understand it so I have maybe heard him speak it a handful of times. My Grandma has learned some Italian over the years of being married to my Grandpa but he mostly just speaks English. Italian is part of the Indo-European language family and is part of the Romance branch.

My Grandma can speak both fluent Spanish and English as well as write it. She is constantly speaking Spanish around all of us. My Grandma wants us all to be able to speak Spanish but it is hard now that we are fluent in English. Some of her siblings live in New Mexico so they never have had to learn English, so they speak Spanish around each other. Even when she is speaking to one of her siblings that does speak English, you always know when they are talking about something private because they speak Spanish so nobody knows what they are saying. It is also easier for them to speak Spanish because that is all they knew growing up. Spanish is a part of the Indo-European language family and is part of the Romance branch as well.

They did not pass Italian or Spanish down through our family. We all wish they would have but it didn't happen. Also it didn't make much sense for them because English is the lingua franca of the world so we have eventually needed to be fluent in English as well.  "A lingua franca is a language mutually understood and commonly used to communicate by people who have different native languages" (Rubenstein 128).  I do think that it would have been cool to be trilingual!