Bringing the World Together One Question at a Time

Chad Witt (2008)

The year 1999 was an especially significant year in my life. The second millennium of the Common Era was quickly drawing to a close amid great fear of a global computer meltdown and the Armageddon that would ensue, but more importantly, I was graduating from college. I had learned everything there was to learn, or so I dared to think, and decided to celebrate the end of my educational journey by exploring the world with my college roommate. Little did I realize my education was only beginning!

We made plans to trek across Western Europe with nothing but our overstuffed backpacks, unlimited rail passes, and the resolve to see all we could see in four short weeks. Of all the things we did to prepare for this trip, our wisest decision was to buy a Lonely Planet travel guide to Europe and use it to its full advantage. One of our favorite parts of this particular book was the language section at the end of each country’s chapter. At that time, my only foreign language experience came from two years of Spanish class in middle school nearly a decade earlier! On top of that, we were not planning to visit any Spanish-speaking countries, so the little bit I did know was of no use on this particular excursion. My friend, Kevin, had taken a few years of German instruction in high school, which would come in handy during our time in Germany, but that only comprised one week of our trip, so we knew we needed help. The travel guide highly recommended learning several useful phrases and key words, such as numbers and directions, in the native language of each country visited, and we took that advice to heart. Each train ride from one country to the next invariably served as a crash-course session on the language we were about to immerse ourselves in.

Our first international experience on this adventure was a three-day stop in London, England, followed by several days exploring the Republic of Ireland, which helped us acclimate to the sensation of being aliens and strangers in another culture. The language of these neighboring countries—on paper so familiar and comfortable—often flowed from the lips of their people in a nearly incomprehensible stream of foreign syllables; it might have well been Arabic for all we knew! To our advantage, the British and the Irish consume plenty of American media, so our dialect—“plain” English in our minds but clearly not so those who actually live in England—was easy for them to understand. Our local counterparts amicably teased us for saying American words like “vacation” and over-accentuating the letter “a,” but for the most part we were able to communicate without great difficulty. It was, however, an odd experience to be the subject of joking just for speaking in the way we had been taught; growing up as privileged members of the dominant culture back home, we never considered our way of speaking to be even remotely odd, let alone wrong! I had just learned my first lesson on cultural relativism and communication styles without even knowing it.

The greatest lesson I learned came several weeks into our trip. We had just spent a week in the city of Paris, in the Alps of central France, and in the French Riviera, thoroughly enjoying the country and marveling at the unexpected courtesy and hospitality afforded us by its notoriously rude citizens. Sure, we occasionally met a cold or abrupt store clerk, yet we remembered how often that happened in our own nation as well. We attempted to make our way to the costal village of Vernazza, Italy but were delayed by a transit strike and did not arrive until late that evening. Lodging was completely booked everywhere we inquired, but we ended up making friends with two other Americans in the same situation and joined forces to find a place to stay for the night. These two young women from Louisiana, Sonya and Susan, found a four-person room for us to share in home of the local laundromat owner, and they became our travel partners for several days.

I’ll never forget the conversation we had one evening, sharing our European travel experiences up to that point. As we began to talk about France, Susan expressed her disgust with the people there:

“I can’t believe how rude the people are in France!” she exclaimed. She went on to tell several tales of poor customer service, the refusal of the French to speak to them in English, and the perceived contempt of the French people toward them as Americans. Like many other travelers we had spoken with over there, these two women had a very arrogant, culturally-biased worldview: they believed their own way of life was superior and they expected people in other countries to relate to them according to American social norms. Rosado (1994) discussed such an attitude in his identification of the negative aspects of ethnocentrism, calling it a “failure or refusal to view reality from the perspective of the other, thereby causing one to reject the other’s contribution as valid, simply because it differs from one’s own” (p. 3). After reflecting on the very different experience Kevin and I had in France, I probed deeper:

“Did you ever approach them in their language?” I asked. Her forehead crinkled as though she was confused by my inquiry.

“N-o-o-o…?” Susan said in a slow, up-turned manner that resembled a question, as though she wondered why I had asked—and as though I was out of my mind.

I began to share with her our positive experiences with the people of Paris and mentioned what we had learned from Lonely Planet: the importance of learning simple phrases and key words in a country’s native language and always approaching strangers in that language first. A simple bon jour, even when spoken with a thick English accent, was enough to disarm all but the most skeptical or prejudiced Parisians, I told her. We had found that regardless of how poor our communication skills were in the local language, people genuinely appreciated our attempt to speak it. After greeting and asking them in their own language if they spoke ours, many people would do their best to switch the conversation to English, and for those who could not, most would politely tell us—in words we did not understand—that they spoke no English. In those cases, we tried our best to communicate using what little bit of French we had learned from our travel guide earlier that week. We never assumed that the local citizens should relate to us on our terms as English-speaking Americans and we expressed gratitude whenever they did.

This proved to be a universal concept throughout our subsequent travels to five other countries in which English was not the native language. No matter where we visited, we consistently had more positive experiences with members of the local community than did the other Americans we spoke with. I often found myself embarrassed to be labeled an American after seeing the lack of respect these fellow citizens showed for the cultural differences throughout Europe and after hearing the negative stereotypes Europeans had of us. I then realized why our more considerate Canadian neighbors were so eager to stitch those embroidered maple leaf flag patches prominently on their luggage: they did not want to be mistaken for Americans. How could I blame them? I thought about sewing one on my own bag as well!

There has always been a concern in my heart for people of other cultures. Since I was a child, I longed to travel to Africa and was inspired by stories of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Later, I was one of two nominees chosen to represent my high school on the YWCA’s city-wide multicultural diversity task force. I also served on the Multicultural Committee at my school. However, despite all my involvement in the struggle for equality and reconciliation between different cultures, I still had never truly experienced another culture. Traveling to Europe gave me my first taste of living outside of the dominant culture; I had never experienced that before and it was invaluable in my personal growth and cultural sensitivity.

In his analysis of the link between communication styles and academic achievement, Taylor (1990) lists regional location as one of the determinants of culture, in addition to the more common ones of race and ethnicity (Ch. III, “Sociolinguistics,” para. 6). I had never thought about it before, but that is exactly what I experienced in a Dublin bar nearly a decade ago. I may have fit in with the dominant culture of Ireland in terms of ethnicity and race (and even language), but my dialect instantly revealed the culture I truly belonged to, and it made me stick out. I realize now how culturally insensitive I have been toward those in my own country and of the same race who come from other areas with different dialects, priorities, and experiences. I found it easy to discount those things as silly deviations from the norm—my norm. I was more sensitive to those who were outwardly different than I was toward people that looked like me but acted or talked differently. It is my goal to treat all people with the same (high) level of dignity and respect, be they French, white, Southerner, Asian, Latino, Nigerian, New Englander, or Thai. I know that it will take a conscious effort on my part to battle the deep biases of my own culture and to expose them for what they really are: biases and not absolutes. I realize now that I must gain proficiency in another language, a language that supercedes every tongue on earth. It is the language of the Father. It is the language of love. It is the one language that needs no translation. Au revoir!

References

Rosado, C. (1994). Understanding relativism in a multicultural world: (Or teaching the concept of cultural relativism to ethnocentric students. Department of Behavioural Sciences, Newbold College. Retrieved from http://www.rosado.net.

Taylor, O. L. (1990). Cross-cultural communication: an essential dimension of effective
education (revised edition). The Mid-Atlantic Center. Retrieved from http://www.maec .org/cross.