We Need Languages
This summer, my children have suddenly decided that they actually like some of the music that I listen to. (I will interpret as a sign of their growing maturity, or at least something I’ve modeled by listening to Taylor Swift with them.) I keep hearing one of my daughters sing the chorus to Wall of Voodoo’s 1983 new wave hit “Mexican Radio.” That got me to listen to the song some more, and it made me realize it has more going on than first meets the ear.
It’s not a song meant to mock or kitschify Mexican culture but a comment on the limits language puts on our world. The song’s narrator lives in Southern California, where he can pick up Mexican radio broadcasts from just over the border. He is intrigued, but can’t understand what people are saying, “it’s a riddle.” Mexico is only a few miles away, but the broadcast might as well be coming from Mars.
It’s a reminder that language shapes our entire reality. Everything around us has a name, our thoughts have words. If I go to a place where I don’t speak the language, I can’t even make sense of the reality around me. Learning another language comes with all kinds of practical benefits, but the coolest thing about it is that you are literally living in a different reality when you use it. At the end of the year I spent in Germany, I started dreaming in German, at which point I realized my mind and not just my body had been able to travel to another world.
I mention this because language programs are being shut down at universities across the country, with West Virginia University being the most recent example. These acts represent a general devaluation of learning languages in America, reflecting the priorities of both institutions and students. I recently talked to a friend at a different institution that is cutting languages, even though “international business” is a popular major there. Even the students who want to do business abroad feel no need to learn another language.
It’s not just the students, however. If institutions don’t require students to learn a language, they are basically signing the death warrant for their language programs. Once upon a time, languages were at the very core of university instruction. Now they are treated as superfluous. (Football teams, on the other hand…) Plenty of conservatives talk about returning university education to tradition, but this is a tradition they feel no need to maintain.
That’s likely because learning a language is an exercise in empathy. You learn how to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and once you do that, you also become less sure of your own certainties. I myself benefitted greatly from this. After four years of learning German in high school, I got to go to Germany on a month-long exchange trip. Having grown up in a small town in Nebraska, the experience showed me a world far beyond my own. Even with my fairly rudimentary language knowledge, I was able to get to know other people living halfway across the world on a far deeper level. Once I came home, I got the confidence to explore more of the world, to not be limited by the familiar.
While I am no longer paid to be an expert on German history as I was in my professor days, I still enjoy the German language. I’ve even started picking up German literature in the original language to read for pleasure again. It’s fun, but it also feels like an act of resistance against an increasingly anti-intellectual, atomized, and xenophobic society. The prerogatives of that society demand that nothing is of value unless it can be converted into money. I don’t want to live in a society like that, but I can’t change that for now. What I can do is spend time outside myself in another reality bounded by another language. In a small way, it makes the riddle of the world feel less daunting.