By Ynosh Ilagan
This Fall we will be publishing a series of spotlight articles about multilingual students and faculty at DU. These articles are based on interviews that Dr. Kamila Kinyon and a group of multilingual students conducted about interviewees’ lived experiences, including continuing connection to heritage languages, role as writers and teachers at DU, and thoughts about multilingual and multicultural identity. This project is funded by a Faculty Research Fund Grant awarded to Dr. Kinyon for 2023-25. We welcome this opportunity to celebrate DU’s multilingual community.
“There’s definitely the part where you have to adjust to speaking in English all the time here,” answered Francisca when asked about her sense of connection or disconnection to her language, “You just, like, restrain yourself from speaking Spanish even when you know there’s other people that might know how to speak in Spanish.”
Hailing from Ecuador, Francisca Aguirre is a first-year student at DU, majoring in Criminology with a minor in Leadership Studies. Spanish is her native language, while English is her second language. She only recently moved to the US for college, making it only around her 7th month in the country. She spent her whole life in Ecuador, where she had diverse experiences in learning both languages.
She spent much of her student life in a bilingual school, comprising teachers and students who come from various parts of the world. Because English is part of the curriculum, she has been learning the language for about 12 years now since pre-school. When she was little, her teachers also made her watch movies in English, which she also sees as an effective way of learning a new language.
But because most of Ecuador doesn’t know how to speak more than one language, Francisca only spoke Spanish with family and in almost every day. Basically, she’s not used to speaking in English outside of school that much. Also, in school, English is mostly used formally in academic situations such as in her “English” classes like Science and Math. Spanish, on the other hand, is used it almost every context, especially informally like when talking to friends. At the same time, most of the students in her school are people from Ecuador, furthering the need to speak Spanish constantly.
So, she is fluent in Spanish only because she grew up in a Spanish-speaking country. “But in English, no, I feel like I’m very fluent in writing and reading, but I’m very bad at like, at least for me I feel like, I’m not very good at speaking in English,” she adds, “As I said, I speak in English but my mind thinks in Spanish. So doing that translation in your head is sometimes very difficult. And it’s also challenging because you can just sometimes forget the words or just be blank and [not] know how express what you want to express, exactly the way you want.”
The region where she’s from in Ecuador has a specific dialect and accent. She would say certain words and phrases in a different way compared to other regions and countries, and there would also be different words for the same meaning. But despite this, she doesn’t seem to struggle in communicating with other Spanish speakers in the U.S. as there are little to no differences between the speakers.
Sometimes, she would mix both Spanish and English together when conversing with friends. She calls this “Spanglish”, when she talks in Spanish then say some words in English. Although, she would only use this approach with her school friends in Ecuador, since they all share the same experiences. She talks in straight Spanish here in the U.S., but she would occasionally use Spanglish with Hispanic people who immigrated to the U.S. because they use it a lot when they talk.
Transitioning between Ecuador and the United States wasn’t that complicated for Francisca, since there was already a lot of Western influence back home, but she still experienced culture shock. “There’s a lot of things that are kind of like the same, but at the same time they’re not,” she describes, “So for me, the most different thing I encountered here was how people relate to each other. I feel like back home, people are more welcoming…When you meet someone new, for example, we will hug the person, give them a kiss in the cheek…And that was a culture shock for me, because I had to stop doing those types of things when I meet someone else [here], like we are separate, like, you cannot do those types of things…I feel like people here are more independent; everyone does their own thing.”
Other challenges come from the fact that the U.S. is a country where people speak English both daily and informally. Even in essays, she is expected to “just talk” and not write in the formal way— something she wasn’t taught to do back home. She would also sometimes forget words, not pronounce things precisely, or be self-conscious that her English might not be that well. Speaking in Spanish also feels different as she is generally louder and faster compared to speaking in English. And, restraining herself from speaking in Spanish because of her English-speaking environment creates a disconnection from her identity, since she believes language is a really important part of how people identify themselves.
The hardest part for her as an international student is being alone and far from home, since she is used to being next to family and she is currently in a different country that speaks a different language. She also at first didn’t understand how important it is to have a huge international student community, but after living in the U.S. for quite some time, she realized that it is important in the process of adjusting to have people that come from different places and are in the same situation.
She’s now more comfortable and confident in speaking in English with more time and practice with American friends since being the U.S., but she still faces the struggles until now. But being away from a Spanish-speaking country, Francisca is able to create emotional connections with people that speak the same language. Meeting other people and connecting with people from Latin American countries helps maintain her Spanish identity.
At least, she appreciates the English class she had to take as an international student of the University of Denver, titled “English for Academic Purposes”. She sees it as a perfect way of introducing international students to the academic context of the U.S. Professors themselves are also international, so they get to share their perspective towards the learning and studying in a place that speaks a different language. She also had an English class where she was encouraged to give background on her second language as part of writing. She also highlights organizations like the Latine Student Alliance, though she has yet to be involved since she is still adjusting with classes.
She believes that being multilingual creates more ways to connect and relate to people and opens people to a whole new world of opportunities. You perceive the world in different ways, you learn more things as you interact with people who come from different parts of the world, and having a second language is a great skill to have in the future when relating to people.
The change she wants to see right now is having more courses on Latin American culture to get more people interested as well as for Latin Americans themselves to keep their connection with their culture. She also advices people to be more open-minded in learning about other cultures because it is very beneficial in all types of ways, which include broadening their perspective of the world and just because it’s fun and interesting to meet new people and learn from other cultures.