What taking a foreign language has taught me about privilege in America
If my professor doesn’t think I’m stupid, maybe I don’t have to either
Language has always been somewhat of an obsession of mine and I have always wanted to learn another one. When I started at Florida State University, I knew both my Creative Writing and Anthropology majors would require a certain number of foreign language credits, so I chose a language and culture I had long been interested in: Italian.
I began taking Italian in my fourth semester, and I fell in love with the language straightaway. I eventually decided to add the major to my course load. This meant taking some prerequisites as co-requisites and playing some major catch-up. Soon, the nuances of the language got harder and harder, and I started to feel like I was falling further and further behind.
Studying a foreign language is one of the most unique and challenging experience of my academic career.
This semester, I am taking the third and fourth sections of Italian at the same time, and my professor for the latter course, Dottoressa Silvia Valisa, is also my professor in a different class, Italian Cinema, taught in English. So two days a week I sit through her Italian class, trying not to let myself drown in the things I don’t know, and two hours later, I sit through her cinema class, finally able to articulate myself. She commented once that I talk so much more in the cinema class than I do the former, to which I could only respond, “Well, yeah, this one’s in English.”
Then one day after the cinema class, I ended up crossing paths with Dottoressa Valisa outside the building. After exchanging hellos, with no hesitation, she clicked off her phone and said, “McKayla, you’re so smart.”
I almost started crying. For two-thirds of a semester, I had convinced myself this professor must think I’m an idiot. In Italian, I barely speak. We have covered some absolutely fascinating topics, such as the definition of art and the interplay between immigration and racism — things about which I have opinions — but because I find it so difficult to convey the nuances of the things I want to say, I stay silent. My essays, mostly grammatical messes, allow me to present my ideas a bit more coherently, but they still fail to fully represent the things I’m thinking in English.
The most important part of learning to speak a new language is speaking the language, which is what group work is for.
And yet here was this professor, a wildly intelligent woman in two languages, telling me she thinks I’m smart. She told me she loves my writing, both in English and in Italian, and she enjoys hearing what I have to say. I was gobsmacked, I was flattered and most of all, I was relieved. If she doesn’t think I’m stupid, maybe I don’t have to either.
After this interaction, I was immediately reminded of a scene from Modern Family. In it, Gloria, a native Colombian, passionately describes the challenges of being bilingual in a society that is not, asking her husband and son, “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”
I know that feeling now. I know how horribly frustrating it is to have to painstakingly translate each word as you speak. I know that deep, sinking feeling you get in your chest when you aren’t 100 percent sure what’s happening in the conversation around you. I know the way the words get all choked up in your throat when you can’t trust them to come out the way you need them to.
But the thing is, I only have to live with this feeling for two 75-minute periods a week. In 2011, the Census Bureau found that 60.5 million Americans spoke a language other than English at home. While 77.6 per cent of these people self-reported as speaking English “well” or “very well,” the other 22.4 per cent self-reported as speaking it “not well” or “not at all.” That’s roughly 13.5 million people who struggle on a daily basis to get by in a culture that does not speak their language.
America does not currently have a national language, and this article is not meant to engage in the long-standing and often contentious debate over whether we should. I have my opinions on the subject, but that’s a discussion for another day. Instead, I would just like to take a moment to recognize the valiant effort that millions of Americans put in every day to participating in a culture that often excludes them at the most basic level.
It is so easy to forget, in a culture filled with words in our ears and on our screens, that there are those who cannot understand as naturally as we do. My goal for the future is to have more empathy toward those who speak two or more languages fluently, especially those whose primary language is not English. I cannot know what it is like to be a resident of a country whose very foundations are outside your realm of comprehension. I can only try to make things easier for people who do know what that is like, when I can, and be patient when I cannot.
And to those of you polylingual individuals living in a culture in which your tongue is considered foreign: In bocca al lupo!