麻豆社

Professor Megan Neely of Duke University in North Carolina has lost her job directing the graduate programme. Last Friday she warned students who鈥檇 been speaking Chinese in public to 鈥渃ommit to using English a hundred per cent of the time鈥�.

Her email went viral. Thousands have signed a petition condemning 鈥渞acism in any form鈥�; millions have read her message on the Chinese website Weibo.

Outrage is understandable. Language is deeply bound up with culture and identity. Suppressing it has long been a way of controlling a people or race. Irish and Scots; Native American; tribal languages all over the world... Now seen as so important that 2019 has been designated by the UN as the Year of Indigenous Languages.

After my first gasp of horror, I found myself rather sorry for Professor Neely. She cited colleagues 鈥渄isappointed that these students were not taking the opportunity to improve their English.鈥� This is the School of Medicine: how confident would you be if you couldn鈥檛 understand something relating to your health?

She continued that they were, 鈥渂eing so impolite as to have a conversation that not everyone on the floor could understand鈥�. I was brought up to consider whispering bad manners: it too is rude to those left out.

Languages can exclude as much as elucidate. When the Giddeonites conquered the Ephramites over three thousand years ago, they made anyone escaping across the Jordan say Shibboleth. By pronouncing it Sibboleth the refugees gave themselves away... and were slaughtered in their thousands. Earlier still, in the account of the Tower of Babel, God scatters the peoples of earth and confuses their languages.

It鈥檚 often said that Jesus spoke in parables so we could follow. But the reason He gave was the opposite: because seeing they won鈥檛 see, and hearing they won鈥檛 understand.

The promise of Judeo-Christianity is that God will bring together all nations and tribes, all tongues and peoples. In building His house, God doesn鈥檛 mix us together in a sludge of unidentifiable cement: He keeps us as individual bricks, our distinctions celebrated.

At Pentecost, the apostles spoke in all different foreign languages. Listeners of all races understood in their own. All unified in diversity.

It鈥檚 obviously important the Chinese students understand the language they鈥檙e being taught and might work in. Equally important they enjoy and appreciate their own.

Our daughter talks to her toddler in English, our son-in-law in Norwegian. I don鈥檛 feel excluded because most of it sounds like, 鈥渟itte du p氓 potten lille mannen鈥�. In a few years, I鈥檒l be hopelessly left behind. And yet I find it one of my greatest pleasures: to hear this strange tongue spoken to such a small child in our home.

Presumably this is partly delight that a member of our family will grow up bilingual.

More, I suspect, is sheer joy at something so vitally different, so essentially integral to someone so close to me.

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