A language kept alive at dinner carries more than vocabulary into the next generation.

Vocabulary is the smallest part of what a home language carries. Jokes that only work in one grammar, the way an aunt is addressed, the phrase a grandmother used when she was worried, all travel with it and quietly shape how a child understands closeness and respect. Lose the language and those things do not simply translate. They go, along with access to everyone who only spoke it.

If a language runs in your family, use it at the table this week even imperfectly. Ask someone older for one phrase they remember hearing as a child, and write down who said it.