Spotlight on Languages
How Covid-19 Threatens Native Languages
The author of this essay examines and extols the way the Lakota and Dakota languages embody a worldview. Lakota speakers are cherished because their worldview is based on a harmonious relationship to one another and to Mother Earth. They live by the values hard-wired into their language. Global sustainability movements have adopted Lakota concepts like "Water is life" (Mni Wichoni), the understanding that life does not exist without water; "We are all related" (Mitakuye Oyasin), the interconnectedness of all energy in the universe, including humans; and planning for the future (Thokatakiya awoyukcan etan oyuhapi), the idea that we must care for future generations in all our actions. Covid-19 has only strengthened the resolve to honor and protect Lakota elders, the languages they speak, and the wisdom they carry. If history has taught us anything, it is that generations to come will need that wisdom more than we can imagine.
We All Speak a Language That Will Go Extinct
In this essay the author speaks of her experience as a young Farsi speaker who had moved to the US with her family, and some of the cultural aspects of her native language that influenced her early understanding of English. Also, since her parents were from a region that spoke a dialect, the use of some of those words at times made her unintelligible to her group of Farsi speakers. Also, how her affective response to those dialectical elements never changed, even when she no longer remembered why. In sum, we all cultivate a language that is our own, an idiolect, and like the author's family unit, first five, now four, when we cease to exist, it dies with us.
The Beauty of Being Bilingual
The author grew up bilingual in a one-bedroom apartment in Miami because her parents refused to let her forget how to speak Spanish by pretending they didn't understand when she spoke English. When she would let out an exasperated sigh before repeating herself in Spanish, her mother retorted, one day you’ll thank me! That day has come to pass thirty years later, in ordinary places like Goodwill, a Walmart parking lot, a Costco Tire Center. She is most thankful that she can speak Spanish because it has allowed her to help people. Her bittersweet experiences have taught her that being bilingual is the constant act of interpreting. The journeying back and forth. The discovery that language, and the stories it carries, is not a straight path.
There Is Nothing Wrong with Julián Castro’s Spanish
This article addresses the perception that the former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and presidential candidate Julián Castro does not speak Spanish well enough to be Latino. The author lays out his arguments for concluding that there is, in fact, no problem with Mr. Castro’s Spanish, other than prejudice against Latino Spanish-speakers. The author affirms that what makes Mr. Castro Latino is not whether he speaks Spanish. It is shared history and experience, including the deep-seated public curiosity about his relationship with Spanish. But instead of celebrating Mr. Castro’s linguistic heritage and his commitment to reconnecting with it, we keep policing whether and how well Mr. Castro speaks Spanish.
A Year in Paris That Transformed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Study Abroad is an essential component of any language program. Students live with host families with whom they converse, share stories, and learn important lessons about the host culture and about how their own culture is perceived by others. They take engaging classes in a much wider variety of fields than are available in their home language department. They also meet people their age who are native speakers of their language of study, and so are able to immerse themselves in the social life of another culture. As a college student, Jacqueline Bouvier spent her junior year in Paris, and the city became one of the greatest influences in her life. The article talks about the particulars of Jaqueline Bouvier’s junior year abroad experience while a student in Smith College’s study abroad program in Paris.
Study of Portuguese and Spanish explodes in China
Twenty years ago - before a commodities boom made China Brazil's top trading partner - ties between the two were negligible and few Chinese students studied Brazil's official language, which has more than 220 million native speakers worldwide. Today, record numbers are doing so, wagering it will guarantee them work as diplomats, interpreters or lawyers for Chinese ministries or firms in the Lusophone world. There has also been an explosion in the study of Spanish - spoken in many countries of Latin America. See why the Chinese see the study of these languages as a way to improve employability.
Everyone Has an Accent
We need to set aside the illusion that there is a single true and authentic way to speak. Native and nonnative speakers of English all have accents, since having no accent is plainly impossible. An accent is simply a way of speaking shaped by a combination of geography, social class, education, ethnicity and first language. I have one; you have one; everybody has one. When American students go abroad to Spanish-speaking countries, no one hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R's had a nicer trill. Yet this is exactly the kind of assumption that a Spanish accent is likely to trigger within the United States. Accent by itself is a shallow measure of language proficiency, the linguistic equivalent of judging people by their looks. Instead, we should become aware of our linguistic biases and learn to listen more deeply before forming judgments.
Raising a Truly Bilingual Child
True bilingualism is a relatively rare and a beautiful thing, and by "true," the author of this article means speaking two languages with the proficiency of a native - something most of us will only dream of as we struggle with learning languages in school and beyond. Highly competent bilingualism is probably more common in other countries, since many children growing up in the United States aren't exposed to other languages. But the steps along the road toward bilingualism can help a child's overall facility with language. And early exposure to more than one language can confer certain advantages, especially in terms of facility with forming the sounds in that language. The author reviews some strategies that parents use to promote bilingualism in their children, its benefits, and some of the obstacles to achieving true bilingualism, something that requires great effort and focus. The author also reminds us that the languages you learn as a child are important, but so are the languages you learn later in life and that the human brain is amazing, and the human capacity to acquire language is amazing.
The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals
We know that learning more than one language enables new conversations and new experiences. Less obvious advantages include cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function - which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities. Researchers in Psychology have found that children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken. It seems that these experiences enhance the basic skills of interpersonal communication.
Born Again in a Second Language
A reflection from Simone Weil in her "Letter to a Priest", that a change in religion can be as dangerous a thing as a change of language for a writer, leads the author to reflect on additional insights on writing in a second language, from Samuel Beckett, an Irishman writing in French, and from the Russian writer Joseph Brodsky writing in English. It seems that in the process of adopting a second language as a means of expression, you don’t really change languages; the language changes you. Also, the author notes that writing literature in another language has a distinctly performative dimension: as you do it something happens to you, the language acts upon you. The book you are writing ends up writing you in turn.
Why Bilinguals are Smarter
In contemplating the benefits of language study, many of us consider the practical aspects of fluency in a second language. These typically include the ability to communicate with people that we would otherwise not be able to approach for conversation or insight. Another consideration involves understanding language as a cultural construct, and hence knowledge of a second language leads to a deeper appreciation of its culture. A recent article in the New York Times reveals another advantage to achieving fluency in a second language, as it reviews research showing that bilingualism leads to significantly enhanced cognitive abilities. Interestingly, the article points out that these benefits also accrue to those who learn a second language later in life.
The Spanish Lesson I Never Got at School
The author, the son of Guatemalan immigrants to the US, speaks about his experience growing up in Los Angeles without the benefit of bilingual education, never learning to read or write Spanish and as a teenager speaking at the linguistic equivalent of a second grader. As the author remarks, Californians believed that children like the author were smarter without Spanish. But even as Donald Trump was elected president, Californians approved a ballot measure to expand bilingual education in public schools. For Latino immigrant children, Spanish is the key to fuller communion with their elders and to a better understanding of their family histories. They are smarter in fact for every bit of Spanish they keep alive in their bilingual brains.