Friday, May 4, 2012
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Welcome to my blog about languages, multifaceted identities,
and building bridges of understanding and communication between people of
diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds! Here I hope to share my thoughts
and personal experiences relating to multilingualism, multiculturalism, and
multilocalism in this increasingly interconnected world society.
The first order of business is to give you, my readers, a
bit of background about myself so that you can better understand the context of
my viewpoints as expressed in my posts. I am an American woman with Colombian
parents. My two native languages are Spanish and English, and I am also fluent
in French, all three of which I read and write in. I have taught at the
university level both in the United States and France in the subjects of anthropology,
French, and English, and have additionally coached music ensembles at the
primary- and secondary-school levels, as well as serving on a graduate
committee for a masters student in orchestral studies. I play the violin
professionally and am an amateur player of the four-stringed domra, a
Russian-Ukrainian instrument of the lute family. I have played in two balalaika
orchestras and one Irish folk band, have dabbled with bluegrass, and am a great
lover of all manner of world music, hoping one day perhaps to play with a
Middle Eastern music ensemble. My love of music is also expressed through
singing (of the shower and karaoke kind, though I have sung at a wedding, too) and
dancing – of the salsa and belly kind, mostly! I also currently serve as an
interpreter-translator primarily for law enforcement, but have also worked in
this capacity for the justice system, the medical field, and international
science fairs.
I begin my blog, then, with an opinion on the value of
multilingualism, not primarily for business or money-making, but for feeling
more intimately connected with a much greater number of fellow human beings,
for being able to embrace different cultural truths encapsulated in the very
structures of the languages that carry them, for feeling more ALIVE and UNIVERSAL.
Feeling like our identity is broader and more complex.
I believe many, if not most, people (at least in the
countries that I have visited) intuitively understand this value and wish to either
acquire fluency in another language themselves or create the proper
circumstances for their children to do so, even better, natively. I have asked
myself over the years why, if such a demand and desire exist, most public
schools in the U.S. do not offer “foreign” languages until high school or
middle school. Could something be done to change this? Ideally, these languages
would be introduced in preschool or kindergarten and continued throughout a
child’s schooling for a true bilingualism as seen in many countries around the
world. And sometimes parents who could speak to their children in another
language at home and therefore give them the gift of bilingualism (or more) do
not choose to do so for fear that the children will not then properly learn the
dominant language of the society. How wonderful it would be to create a
far-reaching educational campaign to disabuse people of their false notions about
multilingualism in children. How wonderful it would be to promote
multilingualism across the board so that we are all learning each other’s
languages and it is not ever a one-way street for immigrants and international
business people. How wonderful if real money could be put into introducing
languages at the primary school level or earlier.
Just some beginning thoughts. More to come later…
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