When I was in third grade I got into an argument with my teacher about why we should learn French instead of Spanish. My position was simple and straightforward: I liked France. France, particularly its language, had been a large part of my upbringing: my mother, despite not being a native speaker, taught me the alphabet and numbers in both languages and lulled me to sleep with “Frere Jacques” as often as “Rock-a-bye Baby.” On the weekends she would brush up her French watching PBS’s “French in Action,” and I dreamt about one day going to the places shown in the show’s opening, especially the water garden outside of the Pompidou with “the lips.” To my nine-year-old self, learning Spanish merely meant being able to order at a Mexican restaurant in a different language, which I was too shy to do anyway. No one I was friends with spoke Spanish, and at the time product labels and billboards didn’t show up in both language; Spanish just didn’t play into my everyday life.
My teacher’s argument was pretty simple, too. She rolled down the world map, pointed to the two countries, Mexico and France, and then pointed to us. “Which country is closer?” she said testily. I scowled at Texas for betraying me, its borders cozied right up to millions of people who hablaron español. France was just too far away to be useful, end of discussion.
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Language is perhaps the one cultural marker that has to answer to practicality. Traditions like Fourth of July fireworks expend significant resources in a literal flash, food culture has just recently truly begun to have to answer to its environmental and health effects, and few people look at Michelangelo’s David and say, “Sure, that’s pretty, but think of all the kitchen countertops they could have made.” Language, however, is both inherently cultural and inherently practical. It expresses unique nuances about a culture and what it holds important, such as German’s schaudenfreude or the Inuit’s multiple words for snow. Language conducts culture as well, the means through which oral and written traditions of a people are passed on from generation to generation. It holds a people together and sets them apart – which, of course, is problematic when you want to unify people cross-culturally into a supranational organization. Europe’s 32 official languages express a unique cultural diversity, but presents difficult challenges when trying to communicate messages between nations. I have enough trouble each morning communicating to the cashier at the café which pastry I want, and that interaction only involves two languages and basic vocabulary – I can’t imagine trying to ratify a treaty in a council with ten or twenty languages represented. Clearly the proposed strategy of adopting one to three languages of “wider communication” is significantly more practical. But so are marble kitchen countertops.
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Years after I realized my dream of seeing the mechanical lips of the Pompidou water garden, I opted to study Italian to fulfill my foreign language requirement during college. While I was never the most talented or dedicated Italian student, I did take enough away from my two years of study to order a panino or ask the price of a pair of boots. While everyone around me on the transatlantic flight watched romantic comedies and slept, I stayed up cramming vocabulary and verb ending back into my brain. This was more important and more real than any exam.
Once we’d dropped our bags off at our new apartment, my fellow jetlagged expatriates and I wandered down to the corner café for some much needed coffee. How to order un caffé is the one of the first things KU's Italian program teaches you how to do, and thus I was more than ready, warming my tongue up for the rolled r’s of vorrei like a runner stretching her hamstrings before a 50-meter sprint. I wanted to start this trip off with a quick, easy boost to my Italian speaking confidence, but as each of my roommates ordered with not even an Italian “grazie,” I realized all my training was for naught. The barista took their requests in stride and stated how much money they owed in crisp, practiced English. I ordered my caffé in Italian nonetheless, but the luster of my unique knowledge had disappeared with each familiar English word.
The EU may not need to bother with selecting languages of “wider communication,” for the European people seem to have chosen them for themselves, although it’s clearly a coerced decision. English may be the language of 80% of data storage, but more importantly it is the language of popular media – just try to escape the dulcet tones of Lady Gaga, or flip through TV channels and see how few “foreign” films you catch. And within city centers and other popular travel destinations, English is the language of multitude of tourists. The English language is no longer merely a tool to cater to those from English-speaking countries – it is truly a language of wider communication between peoples from around the globe. One afternoon I caught two people with two different native tongues awkwardly discuss directions on a street corner, cobbling together an understanding from the English they both knew.
Despite my 3rd grade teacher’s strong argument for learning Spanish, my argument against it was just as practical: no one I knew spoke it, so why should I? The same attitude represents the future of the “languages of intimacy,” the unfortunate tongues not chosen for wider communication: eventually everyone will speak the larger languages, and once everyone you know speaks one language, why even bother with a second language of limited use?
Right now, Europeans still generally hold firm to their mother tongues, be even so, it’s undeniable that English is creeping in. When my mother first visited Paris 25 years ago it was virtually impossible to get around without some proficiency in French; by the time I started making trips to Europe with my parents 15 years later, I could easily get by with some hand gestures and a smile, if not plain English. Perhaps linguistic diversity is just another thing of beauty that will disappear from our cultural landscape, hunted into extinction like giant kangaroos and wooly mammoths. But even as we hold language to a higher standard of practicality, maybe we will respect it in a way society has found easy to do with less practical cultural markers: as valuable in and of itself, and worth the trouble no matter the cost.
