I’m sitting in my host bedroom in Santiago, Chile, when my dad calls me from home and asks me how my day was.
“Muy relaxing”.
I pause. “I mean, very relaxing, Baba”.
It’s normal to mix up words when learning a new language, and I was doing it plenty whilst speaking and trying to improve my Spanish in Chile. However, now having been here for a little over a month, I’ve been able to notice and pinpoint complexities that I would have never known or experienced otherwise.
I grew up speaking English and Marathi, a central Indian language, at the same time. I consider both to be mother tongues and I speak a mix of the two at home with my family. Along with English and Marathi, I can understand Hindi, India’s national language, and speak basic, conversational Hindi because both my parents are fluent, and I’ve grown up watching movies and listening to songs in Hindi as well. When arriving to Chile, I knew I was going to have to work hard to strengthen my understanding of Spanish without relying too much on simply translating from English, but I didn’t expect Marathi and Hindi to have such an influence in the way I approached and understood “chileno” (Chilean Spanish), and Chilean culture.
I spent the next hour of my call with my parents explaining all the little nuances I had been noticing about myself, especially in the way I had been interacting with Spanish and Chileans. For a reason unbeknownst to me, my Marathi, and in some cases my Hindi, had become more pronounced through my process of understanding Chilean culture and Chilean Spanish. For example, when I interact with my host mom’s grandkids, I instinctively and automatically tend to revert into Marathi before instructing my brain to speak in Spanish. When saying hellos to all the neighborhood dogs and cats on my daily commute to the metro, I tend to greet them in Hindi. When my host mom tells me a story, I tend to react using exclamations in Marathi, and more recently Spanish, rather than in English.
Over the past month, I’ve realized that I am able to understand Chilean culture more intimately through what I know of my own Indian culture than my American one. There is something intensely familiar about the way children interact with their parents, the way friends converse with each other on campus, and the gravity with which people share sentiments and feelings that reminds me of my interactions with my family. When I talk about food or politics with my host mom in Spanish, I naturally express my emotion and excitement in ways I would if I were in India rather than in America. And while these similarities exist in almost every culture and language around the world, for some reason, I am able to feel the weight more distinctively when I look at it through the lens of my Indian roots.
I explained all this to my host mom as well, about the dogs and cats and babies, and told her about how I’d told my dad I had a “muy relaxing” day rather than a “very relaxing” day. She asked me how to say “day” in Marathi, and upon translating it to “divas” for her, she triumphantly announced that I’d had a “Muy relaxing divas”. Had I not come to Chile, I would have never had the opportunity to experience all these tiny details and connections my brain has been discovering within the languages I know and am learning. Not only has it given me insight into my own multicultural background and how I communicate, but it has brought me closer to the people I’ve met in Chile in ways I wouldn’t have imagined, and for this, I am immensely grateful.
Avanti Patwardhan
Spring 2025
GW Chile - Spanish Track (GW Study Program)
Columbian College of Arts and Science
Political Communication Major