MANY LANGUAGES, ONE WORLD
United Nations Academic Impact Student Essay Contest
Write an essay (2000 words or less) discussing the ideas of global citizenship and understanding and the role that multilingual ability can play in fostering these. Your essay should reflect your academic, cultural and national context.
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By Bruno Marcel Duarte Coscia
Polytechnic School, National University of Asunción
We are witnesses of an evolving reality, a new development model induced by the role of information technology and communications that results in economic, social and political consequences; or what we refer to nowadays as Globalization. After the invention of the printing press and the industrial revolution, Globalization signals one of history's great shifts characterized by the information era. In each of these periods, there have been major cultural changes with many repercussions. As a result of this transition, society again is introduced to a crisis, but not directly an economic or political crisis, but an identity crisis, due to the process of cultural globalization that displayed the evidence of the extension of the market and the industry where the symbolic goods are reached by more people. This causes an homogenization and segmentation of interests, making the preeminence of a culture of consumerism obvious. At the same time, causing a wider gap between rich and poor countries. This results in current migration movements.
This new culture is subject to geographic blurred lines as a result of the Internet. Mass communication mixes our geographically distant traditions as if they where around the corner from each other, seducing us with goods or social positions that muddled our ideals. This creates a scale of values biased by the wealthiest countries where they hold a "cultural imperialism" that influences everyone, manipulating our behaviors in a subtle way. This is the context where we find ourselves eager to find a mirror and define ourselves, but due to the hectic speed of the world we have no escape, other than through the distinctive and enigmatic question: "Who am I?"
This question is implicit, but we can sense its repercussions in places like Ukraine. Today, the country is divided in two; those who speak primarily Russian, and those who speak Ukrainian. The sense of belonging to the country is threatened by this unstable culture identity which the Ukrainians have to face. When culture is endangered, violence emerges creating a terrain of struggle that shelters the citizen and, hence the identity crisis. Preserving the identity of a country through its culture is a guarantee of peace, that is why a linguistic policy without the cultural factor represents a major failure in our world.
Here we can appreciate a particular line that belongs to a native language called Guarani: "Panambi che raperãme resẽva rejeroky nde pepo kuarahy’ãme tamora'e añeñotỹ." The translation of the phrase responds to: “Refulgent butterfly that dances in my way, if the shadow of your wings I could stand.” Beyond the curiosity of the meaning, I will go a little further challenging the reader with a deeper approach: Why should a citizen, a global citizen in the 21st century, consider as important such a sentence? Guarani is the second official language in Paraguay, a country located in the heart of South America. This phrase is part of one of the greatest songs called “Panambi vera”, translated as “Refulgent butterfly” by Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, one of the most iconic and legendary composers of the Paraguayan culture.
What would the world be with only one flat culture? If I want to share something from Paraguay with the world it will not necessarily be material goods, it would be who I am. I would give myself because culture shows up as an interrelated dependency between inhabitants with its customs and traditions in a given context that makes them unique and authentic. As a matter of fact, we would not be talking about Globalization if there were only one culture.
Would we be capable of suppressing the Paraguayan experience from the world and depriving others the richness of our culture? Our efforts should be oriented to not allow compromising the individual identity of every citizen, but to improve, making them grow and develop as a flower that needs to show its beauty. Answering the question about the importance of the phrase in Guarani above stated we remember Goethe when he writes in his Faust: "What you have inherited from your fathers, you must acquire for yourself to make it your own." That is our compromise as global citizens, be who we are, starting from where we are and with whatever we may have, seeking deeply in our roots to find ourselves without fear. This is only possible with a proactive education beginning with us, towards the others. From this reception, we can embrace any culture and not look at the difference as a threat, because the common factor is the humanity that joins us together but with different shades.
The human language unites us, it is a capacity that makes us humans. That is why the mastery of our first language is a human right, and the respect of the linguistic differences should also unite us, since it is part of us and our culture. Our languages constitute an example of a right to be different, and thus an individual that speak a foreign language should not be discriminated.
Paraphrasing Yvette Donado, Vice President of ETS, it is believed that "Learning two or more languages from a very early age improves cognitive abilities in such areas as mental flexibility, abstract thinking, and what is known as 'working memory', a type of short-term memory important for learning and problem solving. There is evidence that dual-language learning does this by developing greater tissue density in the areas of the brain related to language, and by increasing brain activity." [1]
But beyond the cognitive benefits that result from learning more than one language, it is claimed through the controversial hypothesis, called "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", that the structure of language defines the boundaries of thought. The weak version that is the most accepted, alleges that language influences thoughts and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.
This was the product of much debate since the recent 86th Academy Awards where a Nelson Mandela documentary was nominated, and thus the life of Mandela was magnified, where we could appreciate the evidence of his skills as a remarkable negotiator and a well-known rhetorician. One of his quotes was: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” This is fascinating owing to the unconscious benefit that he receives from what is called The Foreign Language Effect, in view of he learned Afrikaans while in prison that gave him a small advantage over F. W. de Klerk in their negotiations. It is known that at that time the differences between black South Africans and Apartheid were problematic and belligerents. In a formal research, it is reported that: “It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.” [2]
Learning another language has more benefits and repercussions than we can imagine. For computer programmers as myself, nowadays it is common to work remotely thanks to the Internet. Salary is appraised with an international value, this attracts many other enthusiasts and bestows foreign exchange to the local country. This means that the language should no longer be a barrier in expressing ourselves and to achieve business. In order to enact a multilingual approach, we must meet a sine qua non condition. We need to grasp and dominate our first language because it is useless to have multilingual individuals with severe impairments of language production and reception in their native languages that will affect any language they learn later.
Microsoft Corporation published a report in 2012 warning that there will not be enough graduates in computer science to fill all of the available job openings in computer-related occupations between now and 2020, they claim that there will be an additional “1.2 million job openings in computing professions that require at least a bachelor’s degree” [3]
It is said in the report: “The United States faces a growing economic challenge, a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating. The country faces the paradox of a crisis in unemployment at the same time that many companies cannot fill the jobs they have to offer. But these problems are not unrelated.” [3]
We need to look at this fact with a critical eye, the birth rate of the USA is not high enough to fulfill the needs that the report are stating. That means that their economic competitiveness depends on immigration to sustain their workforce, as the report continues: “The result compounds our economic problems, as many students fail to achieve their full individual potential and, as a country, we fail to achieve our full national economic potential. Every job in technology that is unfilled also means the loss of as many as five other jobs. It is a problem that ultimately affects everyone across the country.”
That opens a rainbow of opportunities for those who can speak English. In fact, if English is the most spoken language around the world today, it is rather because the language management is not truly guaranteed on the Internet [4]. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and the English language exercise hegemony on the Internet in terms of “cultural imperialism”.
English was from the beginning the founding language of the Internet, through the Domain Names System (DNS), which manages hundreds of millions of Internet addresses in the world. This system was created in the image of the American standard code for information exchange, favoring Latin characters (without diacritical marks) authorizing only the letters 'a' to 'z', numbers between 0 and 9 and script. To try to break this linguistic ghetto, technical standards have been developed such as Internationalised Domain Names, (IDN), which allow writing domain names using non-Latin alphabets (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic or Hangul) [5].
In conclusion, Charles Darwin pointed out an interesting position in his early work that is valuable for us in this context. He mentioned that individuals less adapted to the environment are less likely to survive, than those who are better suited to their environment. The latter has more chances to leave inheritable traits to future generations. It is curious how many individuals react trying to isolate or encapsulate this phenomenon as if it were an abstract changeover, however reality is more stubborn and is not reducible. What really matters and must be the subject of discussion and concern, is our attitude through which we face this reality. Could we stay inert observing how the world changes in front of our eyes, afraid to interact with new forms of expressions as languages? We have so much to give and receive as global citizens with our own cultural background. Are we committed to be protagonists of our lives?
References:
[1] Becoming a Multilingual Nation: The Challenge and the Promise, ETS Senior Vice President Yvette Donado, La Cosecha Conference Keynote https://www.ets.org/newsroom/news_releases/becoming_multilingual_nation
[2] Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S., & Sun Gyu, A. (2012). The foreign language effect: Thinking in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases. Psychological Science, 23, 661–668 http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/foreignLanguaeEffect.pdf
[3] Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft). 2012. A National Talent Strategy: Ideas for Securing U.S. Competitiveness and Economic Growth. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/presskits/citizenship/MSNTS.pdf
[4] Multilingüismo Article, from Wikipedia. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiling%C3%BCismo
[5] Barriers to multilingualism on Internet http://www.unesco.org/new/es/media-services/single-view/news/blockages_still_a_problem_on_the_road_to_a_multilingual_internet
