Reflection on Language #5

As a student of languages, I have mixed feelings about how some suggested that the world would be simpler if we all spoke one language. I have studied French, and also Spanish. While I’m nowhere close to fully tri-lingual, I can do bits of communication and comprehension for both languages.

With this issue of language being debated, in the interest of preserving the culture of all languages, I think it best if all cultures keep their historic language. To further ease communication, I believe raising bilingual children, or multi-lingual children will be the best way to proceed.

Within my own childhood, I've experienced the language my grandparents spoke at home. While my parents worked, and after school, I stayed with my grandparents a few blocks down. Though my grandparents were both born here in the United States, Their parents both came over as young adults and settled in a traditionally Polish town, Platte Center, Ne. This is where they grew up together, and then eventually fell in love and got married. Although they both worked, and spoke English, as soon as they came home, the spoke in Polish to their 5 kids, and even to this day, my father can say a few things in polish from his childhood. As devout Catholics, Sunday mass was a necessity every week, and Latin was mixed with Polish when in church mass. Even as I was growing up, the church I attended still spoke Latin, and there as still a few prayers I can recite from my childhood In Latin.

With this, I mean to only point out that language is very specific to the people who speak it. The language is important to cultures, and I believe that the best way to inspire true INTERcultural communication is to make others open to the languages of others, and not shut down and simplify by teaching only one language. Knowledge is a gift, and the more we can learn about others and their language, we set the world up for a better future.