I believe that anyone who has grown up bilingual has always had an interesting and unconventional relationship with language. Learning two or more languages at a young age thrusts you into the mentality of knowing the existence of a social structure, from very early on we are taught that there exists people and culture outside of where you are, a privilege that did not exist at a certain point in history. Growing up in this state of mind often puzzled me as a child, I would be pressed at school about the importance of English but when I returned back home me and my family spoke only in Bangla(my native language). As I grew older I realized the need to be literate in this global language and how it can shape my future, but the thought of being deemed “illiterate” if you can’t speak or write English still baffled me.

It was when I was exposed to media outside of Bangladesh when I started to witness the prevalence of the English language, every show, every book, every movie that I watched and read was English. Slowly, I started learning English more from the Cartoon Network shows that I watched rather than from school. Losing myself in the halls of Hogwarts in Harry Potter or in the ever peaceful Shire in The Lord of the Rings, these books and movies played a huge role in how I learned to communicate in English. However, while I was losing myself in pages and pages of fiction I never properly managed to learn conversation, even though I can strike up a little chit chat I had trouble properly articulating my thoughts into words. At a point I realized that I could write better than I talked, and so that’s exactly all I did when it came to English.

I once wrote a very bad fan fiction about Lord of the Rings, and quite enjoyed the process. An English speaking friend once asked me about this story and told me to give a brief description of it, and to my demise I struggled to really explain what I was trying to do. I could tell him about the general story, but I failed to pitch the character motivations, the endless nights I spent trying to come up with a convincing plot twist, I knew how to write it down but not say it out loud. “Aragorn learned to deal with accepting his loss of the title “The king of Erebor”, rather than drown himself in self-pity” was something that I could write, but not say. I became very frustrated, and started to question my ability to converse in English. As I knew for a fact that I fully understood and could write in this language, I knew this might be a problem that I could fix with time and practice. More importantly, I came to understand the viewpoint of people who don’t know how to converse in multiple languages, how no matter how much knowledge they have or not if they fail to express it through language that goes completely in vain.

After spending all my life in a non-English speaking country, moving to a college in New York is definitely a challenge. Though I am much better at articulating conversation now, I still struggle to completely get my point through. As a bilingual this is the small challenge I have to face, but to everyone else who did not have the means to complete their quota on meeting society’s definition of “Literate”, I think I am better off with my few stutters in between sentences.