Language

February 17, 2014

I’ve been here in Lusaka now for two weeks.  I am deep into lesson planning for the Missiology I course that I will be teaching starting next week.  I have found out that I can get cable tv for a reasonable price and hopefully starting tomorrow I will have that. 

I have lists of things to reflect on for this blog….I need to move on and so I need to take the time right now to do some of the reflecting!

I am pretty convinced by now in my travels of the world that English is a secondary language in whatever country in which it is spoken.  Even in America it is a secondary language because the first languages are the native languages, such as Dakota.  The dominant culture in the United States has succeeded in minimizing the original languages spoken in what is now known as the United States of America to the point where most people think (or at least I did for many years) that English has always been spoken there.  Not so.

I actually don’t know if there are any countries, or cultures, in the world where English is the first language.  Obviously English started somewhere and spread, probably through colonialization and global conquest.  Even in the UK there are first original languages, Irish in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and Gaelic in Scotland and Welsh in Wales.  English is secondary.

The point I actually wanted to make in this blog entry is that languages put (most) Americans to shame.  Here I am in Lusaka and listening to the accented English of the Zambians and realizing day after day that English is not their first language.  When groups get up to sing in chapel on Friday mornings here at the Theological University College they often speak in their “mother” tongue, the tongue of their original people group. 

I first realized in Khartoum, Sudan, that all of my students knew at least two languages, English and their original mother tongue from their people group.  Many of them also knew Arabic and many of them knew several people group languages.  Then I was told how many languages Sudan had, it numbered in the hundreds.  I was, and am, in awe.

As a country we Americans need to find a way to make learning secondary languages more accessible and possible.  Language learning gives us a common ground with so much of the rest of the world.  I know a little bit of a few languages, so at least I can say, “I know a little bit of German, or Spanish, or Chinese, or Arabic.”  But I don’t have them mastered the way that most people in most countries have their secondary languages mastered.  And it is most people.  The colonizers, the ones who originally brought English into most of the countries around the world, are usually in a minority.  The minority language becomes the official language and thus becomes spoken by the majority as well.  Often the minority population that brought the official language does not learn the language(s) of the majority but the majority must learn the minority group language in order to access government services, medical care, education, etc.

I hope this has been a useful reflection.  More soon…

Blessings,

Debbie