Accepting a foreign language is accepting another worldview
Language is closely intertwined with the cultural worldview of a person, and furthermore, of a people.
Some people kind of “rebel” and don’t like to see that other languages have some features that their mother tongue doesn’t have. It is easy to be disturbed by certain difficulties of a foreign language and claim that those linguistic features are superfluous and don’t add a meaning to the message. However, they don’t realise that a certain language may find these features essential for the worldview of its speakers. As Orville Boyd Jenkins puts it, “each culture’s worldview is self-contained and adequate in the sense that it provides a coherent view of reality as perceived and experienced by the cultural group under consideration and this is reflected in language”. Jenkins continues saying that “a worldview denotes the complex of beliefs, concepts, sense of order and social constructs, role-models and moral precepts”.
“Nature does not have gender”, told me a fellow trainee a few days ago here in Brussels. Yes, I completely agree on that, but in saying that you might not be thinking openly, so you restrict yourself to just your idea of “nature” and you leave no place for other perspectives and ways of perception. I think languages open your palette of colours. Things are not just black or/and white, things are green, sky blue, fuchsia, lemon yellow and this fact makes you a bit freer.
Languages give you also the opportunity of performing different parts of yourself; the movements of your tongue and mouth change, your look, also your gestures are different when speaking in other languages, such as German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, English …
Accepting the “character” of a language with all its features is like accepting the character” of a colleague, a friend or a beloved one; it is an act of tolerance. Furthermore, learning a language or just the will to learn that language is an act of love, in a way, an “official” declaration of love for otherness.
Second language (acquisition) can represent either an “alien” identity or a mere tool for communication. Whatever are your perceptions and reasons for your will of acquisition of a certain language, nothing should put you off off having the possibility of perceiving the “whole package” that any language carries with itself.
Concerning the second (or third, forth…) language acquisition in a foreign country, language teachers should be aware that there are different people having different cultures in the classroom, so teachers should accept and take advantage from the multicultural and multilingual atmosphere in the class and do not force students to assimilate to the dominant language nor underestimate difference: otherness. Diversity should, therefore, be a priority in language classroom (tip for teachers 
).
With the culinary image of the melting pot it can be illustrated another model, supporting the idea that every culture and language contributes to a wider, divers, therefore, hybrid society.
Add comment Abril 8th, 2006