That’s why Americans not speaking English, or “Black English,” is so threatening. If the white male experience isn’t universally understood, it loses a lot of its power.
I’d never quite managed to pinpoint why people in English-speaking countries are often so threatened by people speaking another language, and I think that pretty much pinpoints it.
I think there’s an obverse side to it, too: someone speaking another language really highlights that there is another experience other than the white male experience, and highlights FOR someone who only experiences the white male experience that they cannot understand another experience (at least, not without some effort).
On an immediate level, I think it makes some people uncomfortable because you can’t understand what they are talking about. As a fresh young uni student coming from a small country town where the only other languages I heard, outside the classroom, was the lady in the shop occassionally scold one of her children in Chinese, or the lady at the cafe do the same in Greek; to actually hear people having conversations in a different language as they walked down the street was strange.
Hearing men conversing, especially if they glanced at me while they did it, was threatening because I didn’t know if they were talking about me, and if they were what they were planning to do (generally walk past and continue their conversation I came to learn). So I think on a very basic level it can be frightening, especially if you have a particular view of that ethnic group, not to be able to understand what is being said. Some people learn from experience, like I did but I think some predjudices are too ingrained for others to get around.
On another level some people seem to think it’s rude to converse in another language when in an English speaking country – which I find completely ridiculous. I often want to ask them if they would learn another language to go on holiday, I suspect they’d say they wouldn’t go anywhere where they didn’t speak English. Even if I learned another language so I could live in the country where it was the primary language, I would still speak to my family in English because it’s the language I’m most familiar with, and the language I think in. It’s not a difficult concept to see that other people think this way too.
I think also some people think they have a right to know what everyone else is saying.
I can understand *discomfort*, and I think it’s very human to feel a bit disconcerted when people around you are speaking in a language you can’t understand. What I hadn’t understood before was why so many people moved from “uncomfortable” to “downright threatened”, and I think that what does it is the reminder that there’s more things in heaven and earth… People don’t like being reminded that they are an insignificant speck on an insignificant rock on the edge of a galaxy which is one of more-than-they-can-imagine.
(Plus, there’s the relationship between language and identity, which I didn’t mention. Might write a post on that at some stage. Not all that relevant to this discussion, I just find it interesting.)
I also think it’s understandable when a 17-18 year old young adult, who is in the midst of a major upheaval of her life *anyway*, feels it’s all a little strange (and threatening at times). That’s absolutely fair enough.
But as you say: you learned.
I find that people protesting the use of a language other than English in Australia almost exclusively mention their issues of self – “*I* cannot understand” is always, always the core of their message. That this attitude is so prevalent is a reflection of their insecurities but at the same time I can see Mindy’s concern, that it undermines one’s ability to accurately assess a threat (to one’s safety).
In the first instance, that selfishness is something I have a great deal of difficulty understanding. I acknowledge this is probably because I have spent my entire life surrounded by languages I don’t know, often in my own home (my mum speaks eight languages/dialects, of which I only speak four, so there would often be friends around and they would chat in whatever they felt like using), so I’m quite used to understanding that my experience is not-central. :o)
Old Feminist’s summation is very interesting, I like it.
Eight languages – wow! (or four, for that matter) I speak one, and enough to hold a VERY basic conversation in another, and words here and there in a few more. I know that learning languages gets easier the more you know – but to me, eight just seems like a lot to fit in one head when I can’t even fit two in. ;) So, I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I hate it when people say they’re impressed with my intellectual achievements, especially things that come naturally/easily to me (I find it a bit condescending, but I can’t articulate WHY) – but I do think it is really quite amazing what the human brain can do, as demonstrated by your mother and yourself. I can only attempt to imagine how interesting life would be, and how interesting self-expression would be, when one can speak that many languages.
Anyway, enough of the adulation ;) It’s interesting that you raise that, because as I was writing my response to Mindy above, I was thinking about my own experience/exposure to languages at school and growing up generally.
It can be summed up as: a little more than Mindy (mostly because I grew up in Sydney rather than a small town, so more exposure to be had), MUCH less than steph.
I think that, in Australia, we get much less exposure to other languages than pretty much anywhere else. In non-English speaking countries, there’s generally a reasonably high exposure to English (even if people don’t learn it), and often other languages (and, of course, multiple dialects).
Even other English-speaking (or English-as-an-official-language) countries: the UK is derided for its lack of people learning a second language, but actually, based on the experience of my British friends, most of them get a couple of years of French (if nothing else), which is certainly more than I had. I guess the small towns are still pretty monocultural there, but the cities are multicultural – and, of course, many British people go on holidays to somewhere in Europe at least once during their childhood. In the USA, there’s a fairly large amount of Spanish – plus something that blew my mind in New York: ads on the subway in Russian (and other languages – notably Spanish, but that wasn’t a surprise – but for some reason, it was the Russian that caught my imagination the most). There are enough Russian-speakers in New York to make ads in that language worthwhile.
In Canada, everyone’s meant to be bilingual these days – and at least there’s an *exposure* to two languages (eg products have to be labelled in French AND English – actually, in the UK, a lot of products are labelled in several languages, too). In NZ, there’s more use of the Maori language than there is here. In Sth Africa, there have always been at least English & Afrikaans that were “acceptable” for white people, plus, of course, the various Indigenous languages. This is also true for other English-speaking African countries. And India – given the general diversity (language and otherwise) of India, I’d imagine that most Indian people would be exposed to more than one language from a young age, even in small, poor villages.
Note that I’m not talking about *learning* other languages, specifically, but *exposure* to other languages (although the number of people learning more than one language is an indication of exposure, probably).
Anyway, I think that this lack of exposure to other languages is one of the things that contributes to the (sometimes subtle and hidden) racism of the Australian culture more generally. YES we see ourselves as “multicultural” and “tolerant of others”, but that often translates into “tolerant of others as long as they integrate and speak our language”. I think that, all too often, we hide our racism from ourselves and it makes it worse – and then when things like Cronulla or the recent attacks on international students bubble to the surface, we blame it on “just some hick idiots”, “just one part of society, not all/most of us”.
I wish we could have a decent conversation about it, as a WHOLE community.
“tolerant of others as long as they integrate and speak our language”.
This is pretty much the crux of it, what I like to refer to as our ‘romantic multiculturalism,’ wherein we pick and choose the bits we like/want to tolerate, and abuse the hell out of the rest, which, you know, is not how multiculturalism works.
I would love it if we could have a conversation about it as a whole community, and sometimes I think that we can and then I realise that we really, really cannot. I was stunned in the comments of another post the week before last, to find an acquaintance railing against the speaking of a language other than english and I just – yeah, sometimes they really are talking about you, but most of the time they’re really not. And people really struggle to understand that!
As an aside/tangent, on the learning of languages: I find it very interesting how often I hear the comment ‘I wish I had learnt another language when I was a kid.’ I wonder what inspires this: is it the romanticism we sometimes attach to a language we can’t understand? (which in its way is an interesting contrast to a language we can’t understand and which is therefore a threat) Or is it the desire to open up new opportunities? Or what? And I wonder how many people follow up this comment with going off to learn another language (anecdotally, not many).
My mum knows so many languages because she’s from Penang, an island state in Malaysia where everyone knows Hokkien and Malay, and there is a large Tamil-speaking population, and our family is Cantonese, and she went to an English-speaking school, so she knew five before she hit high school, which is when lots of kids in Australia start to learn only their second language.
I really like your term “romantic multiculturalism”. May I start using it?
“I find it very interesting how often I hear the comment ‘I wish I had learnt another language when I was a kid.’ I wonder what inspires this:”
Probably all the things you mentioned, plus more.
In my comment above, I made a couple of references to why I’d love to learn another language: I think it would give me a different way of thinking about the world; I think it would allow me to explore another side of myself. I also made a comment about how it shows what the brain can do, and that’s another reason: every time you learn a different kind of thing (eg maths, a language, music, etc), your brain makes new neural connections and it allows you to learn in a different way. I have a pretty diverse educational background already, and I find it really useful (and interesting!) because it often allows me to make connections that others don’t (of course, other people have different educational backgrounds, so they make connections that I don’t, and that’s basically what makes for interesting conversations :) ).
Plus I think it’s kind of, um, arrogant, I suppose, to travel and just expect that everyone will speak English to you.
So those are basically my reasons for wishing that I knew another language (not that I’ve given up; I’m still working on the one that I can have a basic conversation in, and whenever I go to a new country I try learn a few words, enough to order food and buy tickets and that kind of thing).
Re your mother’s languages: heh, I was wondering if she might be from either Singapore/Malaysia or India; they are the most language-diverse regions that I know of. Probably the former more so, in terms of number of languages someone might *grow up* speaking.
Please do use ‘romantic multiculturalism,’ I think it describes the culture in which we live quite well.
I think learning a new language really helps make new connections in terms of ideas, it’s one of the reasons why I do wish that more people in Australia could speak at least a second language! I’m not saying it’s the be all and end all or anything, but I do think it helps open up one to new ideas and things. As does the internet. :o)
And it’s totally arrogant to go traveling and assume everyone will speak English/your language, you have to at least pick up a travel dictionary and learn how to say thanks!
Also, I just read this very interesting article on how language shapes cognitive function: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? Very interesting!
Thanks for that link!