By Nahrizul Adib Kadri

When I was a child, my parents often spoke Javanese to each other, especially when discussing things they didn’t want us kids to understand. Most of the time, their efforts were in vain—me and my siblings all understood them perfectly. Well, at least the gist of them. It’s just that we couldn’t respond in the language.

Somehow, the words always stopped at my ears, never making their way to my tongue.

This passive understanding of a language is something many of us, I believe, experience. I was told that my grandfather was originally from Central Java, Indonesia, and when he settled in Kampung Jawa, Ayer Baloi, the language lived on through the generations. My mother, despite not being Javanese by blood, picked it up fluently because she was surrounded by it. And yet, despite growing up in a household where Javanese was spoken, I never became an active speaker.

Some might see this as a loss—a sign of how languages fade over time. But I see it differently. Language doesn’t just vanish; it transforms, adapts, and survives in different ways. My understanding of Javanese may be passive, but it remains a connection to my roots, shaping how I see and experience the world.

Take, for example, my love for Indonesian movies on Netflix. Unlike many who need subtitles to follow the dialogue, I watch them without any. There’s something deeply satisfying about hearing the words and instinctively knowing their meaning, even if I would struggle to string together a proper sentence in response. It feels like a quiet inheritance—a reminder that, despite not speaking Javanese actively, the rhythm and essence of the language still live in me.

This ability to absorb rather than articulate isn’t unique to me. Languages have always traveled, evolved, and found new forms of existence. Consider the word coffee, a drink so universally loved that it needs no translation. Its journey began with Ethiopian goat herders who first discovered the stimulating effects of coffee beans. From there, it travelled to the Arab world, where it was known as qahwa. The Ottomans adapted it to kahve, which then became caffè in Italian, café in French, and finally, coffee in English. The word changed as it crossed cultures, but the essence of what it represented remained the same.

Isn’t that how languages work too? They don’t simply die; they shift and adapt to the people who carry them forward in new ways. Just as qahwa transformed into coffee, perhaps my understanding of Javanese—though silent—keeps the language alive in a different form. Maybe fluency isn’t just about speaking but also about feeling a language, about instinctively recognizing its sounds and meanings, even if we don’t actively produce them.

We often hear concerns about languages disappearing, especially among younger generations who no longer speak the tongues of their ancestors. But what if we stopped seeing this as a failure and instead recognized it as a form of evolution? Just because a language isn’t spoken in its purest form doesn’t mean it has been erased. It lingers in the words we recognize, in the way we respond to familiar phrases, and even in the films we enjoy without subtitles.

International Mother Language Day, observed annually on 21 February, reminds us of the importance of preserving our linguistic heritage, but preservation doesn’t always mean rigid adherence to tradition. Sometimes, it means allowing a language to take new shapes, to live in passive understanding, in cultural appreciation, in the quiet knowledge that, even if we don’t speak the words, we still know them.

So, if you find yourself nodding along to a language you understand but do not speak, don’t see it as a loss. See it as a quiet connection to something bigger than yourself—one that, much like coffee, has travelled far, transformed, and yet, somehow, still remains beautifully familiar.

_{Ir Dr Nahrizul Adib Kadri is a professor of biomedical engineering and the Principal of Ibnu Sina Residential College, Universiti Malaya. He may be reached at nahrizuladib@um.edu.my This piece first appeared in TwentyTwo13}