Pick up some slang.

Until a few years ago, I couldn’t speak Spanish without sounding about half a century older—and much more religious—than I am. The language is the first one I learned, but I was taught it primarily by my Dominican grandmother, a woman so pious that she routinely brags about her prayer regimen bruising her knees. Consequently, I wouldn’t say I was going to the grocery store without a compulsory “God willing”—si Dios quiere.

My grandma helped raise me in the Dominican Republic, but I moved to the U.S. as a child, where I mostly spoke English. So I wasn’t aware of how I sounded in Spanish until adulthood, when I returned to Santo Domingo and tried to socialize beyond my grandmother’s milieu. Around people my age, I struggled to approximate a personality. In an attempt to fit in, I self-imposed reggaeton studies, at the remedial level. The Dembow artist Kiko El Crazy got me up to date on la pámpara (roughly, “It’s lit” or “extremely good,” in English). The rapper and singer Bad Bunny gave me more terms for male genitalia than my abuela’s prayers will ever forgive. Soon, my Spanish widened past the vaguely apostolic version I’d learned at home. Slang was teaching me something fundamental: that unlike what many of us internalized in school, language is not a fixed algorithm to decode. It is fluid and flowering, as changing and heterogenous as we are.

This year, you may have resolved to improve your heritage language or to learn an entirely new one. You wouldn’t be alone: In one 2022 survey, Millenial and Gen Z respondents ranked picking up a “new language” as third and........

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