Many Languages

I was at the hair salon last Friday. One of the stylists was cutting the hair of a francophone man whose trip to the "big city" for shopping included a haircut. They chatted away in French.

As the receptionist ushered me to the hair-washing bowl, she watched this little bit of multiculture on parade and said to me wistfully, "I wish I could talk another language. You can get way more jobs, especially if you have French."

I have never heard anyone in the U.S. say that they wished they could speak another language, other than in the "someday I want to" sense. You know: "Someday I want to ride a camel." "Someday I want to climb Everest." "Someday I want to take French lessons and then go to Paris."

Furthermore, at least in the middle of the U.S. (gross generalization alert), people who are bilingual generally don't mention it. That's because they tend to be bilingual English/Spanish, and that's usually not considered an asset. As I was leaving Colorado, a state with a large Hispanic population, a few jobs in public health and social services did list Spanish language skills as a desired quality. But that was rare. (It was also four-plus years ago; perhaps attitudes have changed.)

Of course, any large U.S. city, even those in my beloved flyover country, have immigrant communities and the languages they have brought with them. These communities also tend to be what government-ese would label "an underutilized resource."

But I'm still amazed at the number of times language comes up as a consideration in what seems to be daily life in this country.

The saddest example is from the inquiry into the death of a Polish man in the Vancouver airport as officers subdued him with a taser. An airport worker, whose job was something else completely, testified that his job took him into that area that evening, and because he happened to speak Polish, he offered his services as a translator. For some reason, he was told they didn't need his help.

Imagine, an airport worker who happens to speak Polish. It seems improbable that an airport worker in Minneapolis, St. Louis, or Des Moines would speak Polish. However, now that I stop to think about it, many workers in Minneapolis, at least, appear to be non-native English speakers. I wonder where they're from--and I wonder if any officials at those airports know, or care, what language resources they have at their disposal.

Here's another language example. Recently, I've had a work reason to deal with names from various First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario. Some of the names (of both people and places) are spelled differently in different online resources. My job, fortunately, didn't require me to establish policy. The variety in spellings reflects the fact that the names themselves are transcripts from languages that don't use our alphabet. Like Libyan leader Qadhafi, Khadafi, or Gadaffi.

In my final example, my brother's history of the Czech people was recently translated into Czech. He wrote it in English. I tease him about the oddity of a people's history being written by a citizen of another country--a country on a different continent, to boot. I am of course proud that they think so highly of his work. I can't imagine a history of the United States written by a Spanish or a Lebanese scholar being translated into English. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I don't think American historians would be particularly interested, never mind the American public.

Which means today's version of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America would likely not be part of political science courses at my alma mater. And that's a shame.

I'm sure that none of the people in the hair salon last Friday had any of this in mind--they were just having a conversation. But I'm pretty sure it was a conversation that wouldn't have--couldn't have--happened in my hometown.