Some words don’t translate. Ask your family for the ones only your language has. They’re heirlooms.

Some words carry a whole way of seeing something that no translation quite picks up, and they usually live in the mouths of the oldest people in your family. When nobody asks about them, they go quiet within a generation. You would not think of a word as something you can inherit, but it behaves like one, and it disappears the same way.

Ask at dinner this week what word your family has that English does not. Write down what they say and what it really means, with the story attached. You are the only person positioned to keep that particular one.