Striving for a Multilingual Community

In the midst of International Education Week (Nov. 12-16), with events taking place at schools across the country, we might pause to reflect on how multilingual we are here at UC Berkeley. Walking through Sproul Plaza, you can hear discussions in Chinese, friends talking in Farsi and student groups telling others about their activities in Spanish. In the International House cafe, you can view video feeds of the latest news in several languages and then go online and search for library materials in over 350 others. You might speak a language other than English in phone conversations with family, or perhaps you can count yourself among the 4000 UC Berkeley students taking a language course.

We are a multilingual campus, but are we a multilingual community? Although less than half the student body reports learning only English as their first language, many say that their non-English native languages have somehow become foreign as they have grown older. How do the languages of lectures, discussion sections, sports events, club activities, chats with friends and all the other places where we make meaning in our lives at Berkeley connect to our multilingual selves, to our histories and the futures we might imagine?

Students in courses such as Professor Claire Kramsch’s Language and Identity freshman seminar have begun to explore these questions, writing about the languages in their lives. Almost universally, they have argued that language is not just a neutral code for expressing meaning. Rather, they express the sense that we are different people in the different languages we speak. Meghan, for example, who first learned Spanish in a dual-language immersion program in the United States, writes:

“English taught me rules. Spanish made me a revolutionary. In English I can clearly express myself. Words flow out in essays of sound, and just as I can speak to a professor about politics I can drawl to a friend about Friday night plans. My English is a tyrant. It is regulated. Controlled. Divided and conquered until every piece is analyzed and stripped of meaning: patriotism, morality, freedom. My Spanish is raw and changing. It is a rebel fighter. In Spanish the words tumble out. Sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow, sometimes words that I don’t even know the meanings of in English. Spanish lets me into a world where otherwise I could not be.”

While, like Meghan, we might feel like different people in the languages we speak in the present, Ania’s recollections show us how languages might also serve to divide the different periods of our lives. She writes:

“With surprisingly little mixing or overlap, each of the time periods corresponds to a language: Polish to my past, English to my present and French to my future. Each of these languages, in turn, is bound to a distinct and unique set of memories, feelings and experiences, intertwining in my brain so tightly that they cannot be torn apart … Polish, the language of my past, is the language of my heart, my earliest memories, my family, my history.”

Ania’s message is hopeful: Later in the essay she looks forward to living future lives in Russian, German or Italian. In contrast, Susie’s tale of acculturation in the English-speaking American school system after arriving from China is filled with a sense of loss and struggle to learn back the language she had spoken fluently before:

“Now, when listening to my grandparents brag about how intelligent I was as a child, I feel embarrassment at how much I had tossed aside in order to become a proper “American” child. My dread of speaking English has been transferred to dread of speaking Chinese, my recitation of English vocabulary has been replaced by memorization of Chinese terms. Learning Chinese is much different than learning English; instead of accomplishment, I feel frustration at having so much difficulty with a language I was born into.”

These passages are excerpts from longer essays, and as such do not do justice to the many meanings explored by each of their authors. In the spirit of a fuller exploration the Berkeley Language Center, a unit that supports the learning and teaching of heritage and foreign languages on the Berkeley campus, would like to invite interested readers and writers to join in the development of a new group blog-forum on language, culture, and identity:

foundintranslation.berkeley.edu. Student volunteers will be sharing a table with the Berkeley International Office at the International Education Week kickoff event on Sproul Plaza, 12-1 p.m. today. Please stop by!

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