Vaporback Writer

More Esperanto

Posted on Monday, January 12, 2009

Wow, the Esperantists found that post really quickly, and I appreciate their input and supportive comments. So, being on a roll, I think I will give another brief sermon from my Esperanto soapbox.

Let me tell you a little story. When I was in junior high school, I took a year of Spanish. Although I didn't take any foreign language courses in high school, I decided to pursue a bachelor of arts degree in college. Essentially, it was the same thing as a bachelor of science degree, only with an additional two-year foreign language requirement. Having a shallow familiarity with Spanish (based on my hazy junior high memories), I decided to take first and second year Spanish in college.

Flash forward (mumble-number-mumble) years. We now find Kristy employed by the King County Library System, one of the largest circulating libraries in the country. Many of our patrons were non-native, non-English speakers. For the first time in my life, I found those two years of college level Spanish being put to occasional good use. Even after two years of study, I hadn't learned all the verb tenses that exist in Spanish, so I wasn't entirely comfortable risking making a fool of myself in another person's native language. Nevertheless, more often than not, I took that risk and was largely able to communicate, as awkward as those conversations often were. And I felt very proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone and doing what I could to help those patrons use our services.

Then, a few minutes later, another recent immigrant would step up to my desk. Although I didn't speak Russian, I recognized it as the language that this person was using. And I couldn't help her. I'd have to get a translator on the phone from our central branch or resort to an online program such as Babblefish in order to attempt to communicate. This encounter didn't leave me feeling nearly as warm and fuzzy.

Then, within the hour, another patron would step up and attempt to communicate in yet another language--one that I might or might not have even been able to recognize.

The diversity of our local population was further reflected in the foreign language collections at each library branch. In mine, we had books and movies in more than a dozen languages. Spanish, yes. Russian. Hindi. Tagalog. Chinese and Vietnamese. A few French titles. Swahili and more. And people, those titles circulated. There was a far greater demand than I would have ever imagined before working in this setting.

The same year that I was working at the library, my daughter entered middle school for the first time. I was all the more committed to the idea of language study after my experiences at the library. True, there was no way that any one person could learn all the languages spoken regularly in our local community, but any small bit we could do to foster an understanding of other cultures is clearly even more essential for kids growing up today. I remembered Spanish, German, and French as being the only choices when I entered middle school. I wondered what sort of additional languages might be available to my daughter.

What I soon found out was that she had zero choices. Zip. NO foreign languages were even offered at the middle school level. In the heart of King County, alive with so many different languages, our children are losing their best opportunity of ever becoming fluent in another language by being denied the opportunity to study one when their brains are young and malleable enough to eventually achieve such a goal.

Today, my daughter is in high school. It's a bit late as far as I'm concerned, but she's finally being offered foreign language electives. Her choices? Spanish, French, German. And Japanese--the same choices I had all those years ago with the single addition of Japanese. While this is a start, thinking back to my experiences both at the library and as a sometimes-tutor of ELL students, I realize that no one ever approached me with an attempt to speak French. Or German. Or Japanese. Spanish, yes. But otherwise, people from these countries either aren't here or had access to enough English education before their arrival that communication is not an issue for them.

What I observe is that here in America (or at least in King County), there is a HUGE disconnect in languages we deem worthy of study by our children (mostly those spoken by white Europeans), and those that surround us everyday (those spoken by nearly everybody else). Is this racist? Or merely a reflection of the frustration I myself felt in never being able to learn such a stew of complicated and sometimes obscure languages? I hope that it's the latter. But then the question becomes, what can we do to address this issue of multiple languages being employed in the same setting? How will we ever learn to communicate when it is impossible for any one person to learn them all? Do we stomp our feet and stubbornly insist that "If you plan to come to America, you'd better damn well learn the English language!" (as difficult and irrational as English can be)? How's that working out so far? Consider southern California before you answer.

This is exactly the reason why an easily learned, mutual second language (such as Esperanto) is so desirable. Yet I can understand why so many people haven't thought about it in these terms. I grew up in Oregon, where the only foreign language we ever heard in the streets was Spanish. If you wanted to communicate with people of other cultures in your neighborhood, you studied Spanish; problem solved. Now, however, both here in Washington and on my visits home to Oregon, there are people among us from dozens of other countries. And if it's happening here, it's happening across the country as a whole. So, is Esperanto a quaint novelty that will never catch on? Or is it a possible solution whose time may have finally come?