I’m contemplating my relationship with language as I look out to a grey and rainy day from the window of a seventh-story hotel room in Binghamton, NY. It’s not a particularly pretty town but it’s surrounded by gorgeous high green hills that spring up around it on all sides. I’ll include a photo in the header for reference.
Binghamton once had something big to offer. It prospered when the Chenango and Erie canals were linked, and the Erie Railroad rolled through in the 1800s. That was a while ago and while the city is still humming along, it’s a struggle. It had to shift industries to make up for a changing economy. Its logistical charm for 1800s transportation lines has landed it on a map of hotspots for drug trafficking in the 2000s. According to the Census Bureau, the median household income is about $42,000 and almost 32% of the population lives in poverty. It’s a tough scene.
I am visiting Binghamton for my daughter’s dance competition, but I live over in the aforementioned high green hills in a town called Ithaca, not too far away. My town’s median household income is $89,000 and the percentage of our population that lives in poverty is 11%. It is the home of Cornell University and Ithaca College. It’s a luxury to live somewhere so beautiful and prosperous. I think this geographical and economic scenario aligns neatly with my relationship with language.
I speak English as a native language and wherever I’ve gone in the world, everyone has understood me and my needs. I don’t have any particular accent, I have a decent amount of big and fancy words in my mental portfolio, I used to write for my university’s newspaper, I published a book, and I am a keynote speaker from time to time. I’m a book worm and I learned to read so early that I have no memory of learning to read or write or speak. I’m still working on my listening skills. Among my list of hobbies is letter writing and sending all forms of snail mail. I handwrite at least one letter a day.
Doors open to me because I am a communicator and a people person. Language, in all its forms; reading, writing, speaking, listening, body posture, has come easy to me and I am acutely aware of the extreme benefits of that skillset and everything it encompasses. Which is why I’m trying to branch out.
I speak a little Spanish. It’s not pretty. It used to be better after I took six consecutive years of Spanish classes from high school to university. I could travel in and around Mexico or Spain, understanding what was being said and in return, being understood. It was incredibly rewarding and empowering. It gave me a sense of independence and interestingly, status. But I haven’t used my skills for two decades, and they’re barely hanging in there in the recesses of my brain.
I am so far below the level of limited proficiency that I don’t even know what to call it. Certainly not emergent bilingual. I just looked up antonyms for emergent and I am landing my Spanish speaking skill set on the word withering. I am a withering bilingual. Very, very close to a monolingual. In reflection, I actually don’t know exactly how proficient I was in Spanish because there were never any consequences. I didn’t need the language to become a citizen, obtain a driver's license, get a job, get a promotion, or to enjoy the comfort and benefits of community and companionship. Outside of the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree, I didn’t need Spanish for anything at all. It was purely optional. Like living in Ithaca, it was a luxury item.
Still, I loved learning a different language, passionately, and even to this day I’ll try out my Spanish on anyone who will let me. I will use every single word I know, never leaving the present tense, with a native Spanish speaker in America especially because I can see, even if I can’t know, how exhausting it must be to hit barrier after barrier due to something as awesome and silly as language. ¿Por qué? It is tribalism? Is it protectionism? Is it classism? What is the social science behind letting someone in or out based on language? Whatever it is, I can’t relate. I’ve always been drawn to the exotic person. The new person. The one with different visions in their minds, different ways of describing things and celebrating things. I’m so interested in other people that as soon as I could, I traveled the United States and the world.
I’ve visited 40 states and 17 countries and as an adult, I even lived in one of the other countries as an ex-patriot or “ex-pat”, Australia. I was working there on a one-year contract, and I didn’t know anyone at first, so I signed up to take three languages in my spare time: Spanish, German, and Mandarin. The classes were conducted twice a week and I performed just fine in Spanish and German, where there are endless cognates, and I had some familiarity having experienced those languages extensively growing up (I also lived in Germany as a child of a military family). The focus was almost entirely on speaking as far as I can recall, but I don’t know why because there wasn’t a large German population in Australia, and reading and listening could have been at least equally as valuable. I find myself now wondering if we, as teachers, always default to the spoken language as the first step in language instruction. I look forward to learning more about this and if there is evidence to support priority among specific language skills.
But Mandarin was a different experience altogether. I could not hear nor speak the different tones. I tried for three straight months, and I made absolutely no progress. Most of the time I felt as if I could say the tones, however, the instructor clearly disagreed. All of the time I felt as if I could not hear the differentiation in the tones. I don’t know if it was the rote classroom setting, if it was the teacher, if it was the methodology, or if it was me but I suspect it was all three. It made me feel like Binghamton, NY makes me feel. Gloomy, struggling, barely making it. I would sit there and rationalize with myself that I’ve got strong study skills, talent in other ways, talent in similar ways, and a willingness to try, and yet I would feel so mentally exhausted after class. I always knew I was only going to take one semester of Mandarin and there was no consequence.
Today I have the luxury of feeling proud of myself for trying something new, a language most of my peers have never tried to acquire. I also have the luxury of failing at it because my native language is so well-known around the world. But I’m losing the luxury of failing at English, which I have taken for granted and which has come to my attention as I begin volunteering at an adult English learner organization called Open Doors English in Ithaca. I can see that I don’t always get the nuances of sentence structure right and I don’t know all of the rules related to superlatives and comparatives or anything else. Or, I might know the rules but I don’t know why the rules exist or how they came to be. This has to change if I’m going to be an asset and an advocate for other people who are trying to claw their way out of a gloomy situation and reach greener pastures. Although I have a new learning curve ahead of me, I’m still situated on the high green hills of language luxury. But I’ve gotten close enough to the issues tied to L2 individuals to know that now there are consequences if I don’t do my part to make my community a place where everyone can flourish.