If you took a trip back to 1920s-era Brunswick, things probably wouldn’t look all that different. Sure, you’d have to contend with the loud honk of the tin lizzies driving around—not to mention the clanging of streetcars motoring up and down Maine Street—but at the most superficial level, the Brunswick before you is fairly similar to the town you know today.
Down on the street, however, things would not be so familiar: if you decided to walk down to Cabot Mill, not only would you find the place working optimally, you would also have strolled right into the heart of Brunswick’s now-forgotten French quarter.
Up until the middle of the 20th century, speaking French in Brunswick was a part of everyday life for a large segment of the population. Yet, as with so many of the linguistic and ethnic enclaves that defined the American social landscape a century ago, you would be hard-pressed to find modern remnants of the Franco-American community beyond family names like Michaud, Levesque or St-Pierre.
With each passing generation, interest in learning ancestral languages decreased. Even though the United States has no official language, for now at least, English reigns supreme. In the 2010 census 80 percent of respondents listed it as their primary language. Spanish, in second place, could only manage 12 percent and Chinese, the third most popular, mustered less than 1 percent. It’s no small wonder that people think the U.S. is a monolingual nation.
In a world where more and more people speak English, it can be increasingly easy to assume that speaking a single language is sufficient. The Economist calls this the “Let’s speak in English and save us both the trouble” method. While I’m fairly certain this feeling doesn’t apply to the majority of students here, some of you may well believe that speaking the language of Hawthorne, Chamberlain and Longfellow is more than enough.
And, in some ways, you would be right. You could easily go the rest of your life without ever speaking another language. But Bowdoin students aren’t the kind of people who are content with just getting by.
Admittedly, because I come from a country with four official languages, my outlook on linguistic diversity is quite different. In Switzerland, learning a new language isn’t something you do in high school and forget completely by your second year of college. It is a necessity. If you want to do business in—or even just visit—a different region of Switzerland, chances are you will have to know another language.
In America, you could argue, things are quite different. Yet the dominance of English in this country shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to learn a new language. As Professor of German Steven Cerf quipped to me the other night, “in a globalized world, we need mediation, and the only way to mediate is to speak other people’s languages.”
Learning a new language has wider repercussions than the broadening of your mind. Language skills can help you bridge cultural differences and reshape the frame of your thinking. They allow you to discover new possibilities and new relationships. Learning a language is one of the more empowering human experiences, for language truly separates us from the rest. As Charlemagne once commented, “to have another language is to possess a second soul.”