Foreign Languages

The study of foreign languages is a hot button of distress at my university. Students can meet the university minimum by studying a language in high school for three years. They can also go abroad for a semester, even to countries where English is spoken, and meet this requirement. This is actually more stringent that our previous program, which allowed students to study other cultures but avoid concentrated study of another language entirely.

Even so, many students panic at the prospect of taking a foreign language. Some students grudgingly give a language course a shot. Others spend the energy they could have used to develop mastery on schemes to get out of the requirement entirely.

My department requires students to demonstrate some proficiency in a language: they must get through the second year. Anyone who has studied another language knows that even at this level, not too many of us are very fluent. We can say we “know” the language in the sense that T.R. Fehrenbach means in his column in the San Antonio Express-News today. Fehrenbach says, “Americans study other languages but rarely learn to speak them,” which he sees as one of our positive attributes as a nation.

In Fehrenbach’s United States, we all stick to English and American customs and get along fine.

Fehrenbach sees this as the American genius: the old country disappears in us, including its language, within one or two generations of arrival in the United States. He contrasts the successful loss of competing languages in the United States to the problems caused in Canada by the stubborn resistance of the Quebecois to letting go of French. He even compares the United States to unruly Belgium, which doesn’t have one language to define its identity. He places multi-lingual Switzerland and India in the same category with the United States, however. The Swiss have several official languages, but “only Swiss federal politicians bother to learn, say, both French and Schwyzerduutch plus Italian,” and the Indians still use English, which allows them to develop a national identity.

He tells the story of his Chinese American comrade at arms who was called upon to explain Chinese customs to his fellow G.I.s in Korea. A third-generation American, he knew less about China and its customs than he did about his native West Texas, and he spoke with a West-Texas accent. The only thing he claims to have learned from his friend was the reason Chinese restaurants in the United States served rolls and crackers.

If the United States is so successful because immigrants come here, pick up the local language and adopt the local customs, why did this West –Texan grow up working in his family’s Chinese restaurant? Why is going out for Chinese on Christmas Day such a defining cultural experience that Bob Clark could use it to such great effect in his quintessential American coming-of-age tale A Christmas Story?

Seguin has three Chinese restaurants. One of them is even open on Sunday, when the Christian-church-going crowd might want to eat out. Why? Because our version of Chinese cuisine has become part of the fabric of American life. If the Chinese people had been willing to let go of their food traditions when they arrived on North-American shores, we would all be poorer for it.

American food culture is probably the area in which immigrant cultures have been most assimilated into the life of the United States. Chinese and Italian restaurants are so ubiquitous that we don’t see them as foreign anymore. The cuisine of Louisiana has French and Acadian influences. Humus, from the Middle East, has found its way onto the standard appetizer menu in the United States.

And Mexican food. We made tacos in my home in Michigan in the 1970s. We bought packets that came with shells (the tortillas, gasp!) and spices for the meat. I even tried to make corn tortillas myself, way back then.

We use many foreign terms for foods. Spaghetti. Lasagna. Samosa. Humus. Croissant. Bouillabaisse. Étouffée. Margarita. Taco. Burrito.

We have also retained food words from the languages indigenous to North America also made their way into our particular version of English. For example, American English borrowed squash from the Narragansett language and chocolate from the Maya . Tomato came from Nahuatl.

These words have become so familiar that we no longer think of them as foreign.

I must say that Fehrenbach is right about one thing. It is much easier to study a foreign language than it is to actually speak it. I have studied Spanish, French, Arabic, Persian and Russian. Of these, I speak only Russian well. I understand a lot and can buy things in Spanish and French. In Arabic, I can tell you my name is Robin and that I’m going by car. I can tell you Tehran is expensive in Persian, but not much else. But knowing these languages makes North America richer for me. Perhaps if English-speaking U.S. citizens weren’t so scared of the confusion they feel when learning foreign languages, we wouldn’t be so upset by the people who want to keep speaking them after they arrive here.

We love the foods and the words that represent them, why not learn the verbs that describe the process of cooking? Why not learn to thank the server in the language associated with the cuisine? We embraced the foods, and they became part of our culture. If we embrace the languages, they won’t stay foreign for long, and neither will the people who speak them.

Now, I think I’ll get some Chinese.

Gym Source