Learning About Languages
Steve Leveen, founder of the America the Bilingual Project and author of America’s Bilingual Century, an excellent book, is a friend of mine.
He recently copied me on an essay he posted on his America the Bilingual Project website titled “Cratering Language Enrollments Reveal America’s Linguistic Divide.” It began with a quote from Guadalupe Valdés, a professor emerita in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education:
“Bilingualism has always been a gift the rich have given to their children.”
That’s ironic, I thought. Because in America today, it can be said that bilingualism is a gift that the poor, those who migrate here, give to their children!
I should know better by now. But I find that I’m still stunned by how quickly the children of our migrant Latin American employees at Paradise Palms (the botanical garden we’re establishing in Western Delray Beach) become fluent in English.
One of our Guatemalan workers, Nasario (who Steve tutored for a while), has a five-year-old daughter who did not speak a word of English. Despite their trepidations, Nasario and his wife enrolled her at a nearby (to Paradise Palms) public school in September. (Their main concern was that it did not have a functioning TEFL-type program for monolingual Spanish speakers.)
On her first day, I watched her get on the school bus that stopped for her in front of Paradise Palms. As I said, she spoke zero English. My heart broke thinking about what hardships lay before her.
Just this morning, eight months after that day, I encountered her in our “Kids Park.” I started a conversation with her in Spanish. She switched immediately to English. And she spoke both fluently and without an accent. In fact, had I not known otherwise, I would have assumed she grew up in an English-speaking home.
This should not have surprised me.
In the late 1970s, I lived in N’djamena, Chad, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English Lit at the University of Chad. To make a few dollars on the side, I took a job teaching English to the teenage daughter of a French father and English mother who had decided, since the official language of Chad was French, to speak English at home to help their children learn the language.
The first time I met this girl, who was five or six years old at the time, I began the conversation in French. (My French at the time was strong.)
But she answered me in English.
I tried to continue the conversation in French, but she insisted on responding in English.
Frustrated, I thought I’d shake her up a bit by switching to Chadian Arabic (which I had a functional control of).
She looked at me derisively and said, in her perfect English, “Why are you trying to speak to me in the language of gardeners?”
