Since the fall of the Tower of Babel, one fact has remained constant. Some languages are more valuable than others. And by that, I mean commercially valuable, not culturally valuable, of course.
Take for instance, the fact that I grew up around three languages. Konkani-Marathi mishmash at home, French in the neighbourhood and English at the school my parents spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to send me to (Thanks Quebec!). Out of these three, my parents decided English was the most commercially valuable, and Konkani was the most culturally valuable. So my father read to us constantly and showered us with books written in English, but continued to talk to me and my sister in Konkani. French, well to us French was something that got us by in a province infested with French people so my parents didn’t really bother to speak it at home. Their plan worked, mainly because my father speaks SAT-perfect English with a few polysyllabic words thrown in to any sentence, my mother speaks 95% grammatically correct English, if not at the level of my father, and we were very young, an age during which you can (and should) expose children to multiple languages and still maintain high levels of fluency in all of them.
Over the years the Konkani, Marathi and French skills faded. I still understand them all perfectly, but my ability to recall vocabulary words at the drop of a hat faded as I began increasingly to respond back to my parents in English and we left our French immersion environment for English-speaking climes. Unlike many Indian parents, my mom and dad just let it go, realizing that for us, it would be English that would be most important. Take, for instance, every Desi parent’s favourite profession, medicine. Do you know that if you test low on the English skills portion of the exam you’ve automatically shot your MCAT score in the foot? It’s a third of the test, and difficult if you consider English language skills unimportant, and as a result, never really develop any critical reading skills or advanced vocabulary. I tutoured my sister for that portion of the exam (I used to work for Kaplan) and I found them to be equivalent to the LSAT passages. Whatever you may want to say about lawyers (“selfish money-hungry social climbers too dumb for medical school” seems to be the prevailing sentiment) the exam itself is impossible pass unless you are a very fast reader who is able to quickly absorb and understand lots of information.
I know my parents feel sad that I speak Marathi with the grace of a herpetic pigeon, but I guess they both feel it was the price of moving somewhere outside of India. These days, the only smacktalk I get about my poor Konkani and Marathi skills comes from my Indian relatives-and I usually shut them up by pointing out that when the courts in the United States make Marathi their official language, I’ll start giving a frock about whether or not I can correctly pronounce “luh” versus “luh” (requires knowledge of Sanksrit alphabet to be funny).
One thing I DO feel bad about is that I no longer speak French as well as I did in the past. I can still read it perfectly and understand it as long as people are speaking at that Quebec-immigrant speed, but it’s not like it used to be. So I was talking to my sister the other day about how I’d like to take up some French immersion again-just getting back to being fluent in conversation and I got a hissing, spitting lecture-laded shot of “Why?????? Are you crazy??? That has to be the least useful language in the bloody world-I want to kill Mummy and Baba for making us take French in school for the easy As.”
As we talked about it-I really how on-spot she was about the issue of French. So what are the commercially useful languages of tomorrow? There are 2 my friends- first up is Spanish. The second is Chinese. Let me tell you something-reading job boards for attorneys, every other bloody advertisement is begging for a “Spanish language skills” or “Chinese language skills” attorney.
Here is how I deal with people coming up to me in the hallways at my job and gibbering at me in Spanish. “NO HABLAMOS ESPAGNOLE.” Now, frankly, it’s not my job to assist the screaming hordes in any case. My job is to carefully ensure the legal squandering of your taxpayer dollars. That is what I am PAID to do (by you, of course). But, I’d like to be able to direct people to where they need to go. I hate it when I get calls and the other person on the end of the line is like “oh speak Spanish?” and I’m like “no” and then they fumble for English for a whole 15 minutes while I fantasize about slamming down the phone and wringing the neck of whoever transfers these calls to me knowing it’s NOT MY JOB and the whole thing is really frustrating because if I spoke Spanish I could get them off the phone faster and give them the number for the person who is you know, paid to take their calls.
But I don’t. So instead I stew in a vat of frustration and irritability. I guess you could say “well, they should just learn English” and I agree with you-they SHOULD. In a perfect world immigrants would come to this country legally and bother learning the majority language. But when you’re spending the majority of your day engaging in backbreaking labour, I suppose developing second language skills ends up falling somewhere on the back burner. For every conservative on the TV loudly bleating about how immigrants should just damn well learn English, there are multiple corporations out there quietly advertising for high-level, well-paid positions where a second language like Spanish is part of the overall required skill-set. As my sister pointed out, it’s pretty much all but required for in the medical services profession. “I’m sick of having a translator in the room,” she complained to me. “I may as well just learn Spanish myself and I am totally making my kids learn it, too.”
What about Chinese, then? Well, let me just put it this way. If you don’t realize that China is a force to be reckoned with, that it isn’t growing by leaps and bound and that our country is inextricably tied to them through a vast trade deficit then you have been living in a cave drawing Paleolithic picture-art. As trade grows, as China develops not only their manufacturing sector, but also begins to compete with the United States in the arena of biotechnology, computer sciences etc. (made likely by the fact that the research community in this country is hampered by people who think the earth is 6000 years old) and other high-skilled fields-a lot of companies are going to be needing a lot of help in being able to effectively communicate with the Chinese. I would say that for those interested in a field like business or business law, a background in Chinese would be invaluable, and make one highly marketable.
There is a beauty in French-like many Romance languages it is melodic, almost like an orchestrated symphony in how it sounds to the ear. But French is the language of yesterday. Like Dutch and Portugese, it is the linguistic artifact of a bygone era. You don’t need to speak Dutch, or Portugese or French or German anymore. Not only are they no longer your colonial superpowers, the majority of Europeans speak elegant, beautiful English. We have no barriers between us to hinder business or personal interaction.
So let’s be realistic. Let’s stop complaining about immigrants and face up to the fact that if you want to be a doctor or a nurse-you’re better off learning some rudimentary Spanish. Let’s stop snarking “ching chong” and start introducing Chinese as an option into a school’s foreign language curriculum. It’s either picking our way through the shards or building the tower back up. And frankly, I’d rather learn Chinese than Esperanto.
