People who struggle with the English language deserve compassion
By Lethbridge Herald on July 13, 2022.
Editor:
Learning a language is hard work. It requires determination, energy, and patience. Yet we often look down on people who speak with an accent. We must realize that one who speaks broken English manages at least two languages. They deserve respect not disdain. We slight them at our cost.
I once had a professor from the United States who had worked very hard learning Japanese to teach with it. He taught Christian Social Ethics in a seminary in Tokyo. I did not think too much about the course. I did not take him seriously because of his heavy accent.
That minor shortcoming had clouded my shallow mind. Some years later I found that he had played an important role in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program called Tennessee Valley Authority – TVA.
A prominent professor and a leading Keynesian scholar was dismissed by an immature student, not because of his scholarship, but for his accent! It was a great shame on my part and a huge missed opportunity for me.
It is well known that it’s almost impossible to acquire a new language and speak it fluently after the age 12. I have had to work in four languages on four continents during my life. But now I can function in only two.
While learning to work in one, this lazy twit never applied due diligence to keep up to date the others. Languages are living organisms and evolve incessantly. I have condemned myself to remaining a person of four defective languages. It’s no one’s fault but mine. In Japan, I catch myself speaking Japanese to my bewildered Canadian wife. My sisters are often appalled by my not-politically-correct vocabulary and anachronistic expressions.
Without compassion, love, patience, and understanding of those who hear me speak or read what I write, I have no place to call home in terms of language. But all is not lost. I have learned the beauty and uniqueness of every culture evident in its language in bits and pieces. For example: when drought strikes, they say “Ea hana pula – Rain refuses:” in the Southern African country of Lesotho. It means in Basotho culture every natural element has a life and its own will. Respect the rains! Not pray for the rain but pray to the rain for it’s blessing. The Sun could be a curse in a drought prone country.
Much injustice, misunderstanding, and prejudice are inflicted on people because of a lack of understanding of difficulty learning other languages.
The worst case I have heard of is a judge who threw a case out of court because the key witness spoke with a heavy accent. Correct accent is more important than truth? What a travesty! The judge should be thrown out not the evidence.
A young immigrant was fired for expressing his deeply felt sympathy by using the only word he learned to express emotion. He had no idea it was expletive.
Not only is a language a matter of accent and vocabulary, it represents culture, customs, history, and traditions, in fact people themselves. That’s why prohibiting the use of native tongue was a very effective way to destroy people. That’s why the language laws are passionately debated in Quebec, and rejection of the language nearly destroyed the Indigenous people in Canada.
My daughter went to school from the last two years of elementary school up to the second year of middle school in Switzerland. When we came home in Toronto, she was virtually a Francophone. She struggled in English but managed. But she was not officially classified as a bi-lingual person in the province of Ontario with a few incentives like language bonus. The designation was reserved for the Anglophones whose French reached a functional level. Not for Francophone who can manage in English, nor for people who have other languages other than English or French. I am appalled by such arrogance of Anglophones shown in the blatantly systemic entitlement.
Languages are not only the means of communication but also represent people themselves. Let us all apply compassion, humility, patience, and understanding to those who struggle with Canadian official languages.
At the Tower of Babel languages divided people. On the day of Pentecost people were able to communicate with each other speaking foreign languages. Two stories show that not only languages divide people but also can unite them.
Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui
Lethbridge
18-17
god is english – has one not read the bible? 🙂