Keep speaking your family’s language, even badly. Rusty is still a bridge.

A half-remembered language gets treated as failure, which is what makes people stop using it, and stopping is the only thing that actually ends it. Broken sentences still carry affection, still reach relatives who have no other way to hear from you, and still keep the words from going fully quiet. Fluency was never the point of speaking to your grandmother. Contact is.

Use what you have this week, in a call or a message, and accept getting it wrong out loud. Ask for the word you cannot find instead of switching back. Most relatives are glad to be the dictionary.