That being said, not all of my friends are Korean and I do not think that you have to be the same ethnicity in order to form close connections with people. Many of the close friends that I have today are people that I met through KASA. I joined the Korean American Student Association (KASA) with the hopes of making new friends and was successful. For the first time I had the chance to interact with and meet people who had the same cultural background as I did. With this new perspective, I came to campus at USC for the first time this past fall semester. It is the language that allows me to spend quality time with my grandparents and other relatives who I do not get to see often because of the distance between us. It is the language that I use with the people I love the most. My negative associations with using Korean in public disappeared and I started to connect more positive ideas with the language. During winter break of my freshman year, I visited my grandparents in South Korea and was able to spend a lot of time with them. Since I was home all of the time, I began to use Korean more often than English. This mindset changed with the onset of the pandemic. Eventually, I started to feel embarrassed using Korean with my mom or dad and stopped doing so.
I would constantly get weird stares or the occasional dirty look from people who did not speak Korean. Though I spoke mostly Korean with my parents, I had developed a habit of using English with them when we left the house because I had had negative experiences with speaking Korean in public. Growing up in predominantly white neighborhoods, I never really had the opportunity to use Korean outside of my home and as one of the few Korean students in my high school, I didn’t have any reason to use it with my friends either. In addition, they may have a certain language that they associate with certain people or places. Although these types of speakers may have a dominant language that they tend to use in more day to day interactions, this does not mean that it is the language that they like to speak the most when it comes to socializing. This is especially true for bilingual speakers who grew up speaking more than one language. However, not all languages hold the same weight in a conversation.Ī person’s first language is not always the one they may prefer to use when creating a bond with a new person. To communicate with someone else, you need to have a shared language. Language plays an incredibly important role in forming connections with other people.
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