Privilege and Language

I live a fairly privileged life.

Sure, I have overcome some hardships and bad relationships.  I grew up spitting distance from the reservation of one of two tribes that my family belongs to.  I was a single mother barely scraping by.  I have even been dealing w/ the diagnosing of a fairly debilitating illness for several years now.

But my life is privileged all the same.  

I now have a happy marriage, which is privilege all by itself, being that I am heterosexual.  We were able to solve some immediate problems in a way that some of my friends and loved ones currently can not.  While I identify as a WoC, others don’t see me as such, having inherited a lot of my father’s non Native traits, and I often benefit from white privilege.  I was able to secure funds and scholarships to send The Kid to a very nice private school, and I had the time to volunteer to help keep that scholarship.  My husband has a secure job (it doesn’t get much more secure than a military paycheck) that allows us to get by on one income, which is good since it is hard to hold down a job w/ my illness and w/ us moving overseas right now.

And that in and of itself is a privilege.  I am living overseas on a government dime in a beautiful country that I have always wanted to see.  My husband speaks the Native Tongue and is able to help teach me enough to get around.  I will also have classes available to me to help me learn more if I want (and I do).

Which brings me around to a form of privilege that I haven’t really thought about too much.

I grew up speaking English in the United States.  By the sheer chance of proximity of my hometown I grew up watching Sesame Street in Canadian French and was able to use quite a bit of it for some time.  I never knew that Le Petit Prince was ever in English until I was an adult.  My Great Uncle John, who is both a tribal Medicine Man and a Catholic Priest spoke Ojibway to us (but I shamefully never picked much of it up).  Language was all around me.

When I was in Fourth Grade I was part of a Talented and Gifted Program through Jackson’s public schools.  It offered an after school French program taught by the librarian.  When I got to High School and had the option of German, Spanish or French, I chose French to fulfill my graduation requirements since I had already learned quite a bit of it (although, I painfully discovered that Canadian French is not the same as European French).  I was lucky enough to go to a public school w/ three languages offered to me.

As an adult when I joined the Navy I learned Mandarin.  How privileged that is can be argued, but the education was free and I attained a fair level of fluency.  When I met The Guy and we formed a relationship he was already speaking Korean.  Now I am no longer in the Navy, and we are living in Korea, and I am picking up another language.  The opportunity to learn a foreign language isn’t a privilege that I have given much thought to.

When The Kid started school here I was looking over her curriculum, and was a little surprised to see that she was learning Spanish as opposed to the Host Country language.  Since she is in a Korean cultural studies class I just assumed that they would study Korean.  The fact that I was upset by this surprised me and gave me needs to check myself a little on why I reacted that way.  Renee offered to me in chat that perhaps this is some sort of unacknowledged privilege on my part, which makes sense in a way (other than the fact that being upset over which language is taught to my child is a privilege all its own, thanks RQ).  I never considered that preferring an Asian language be taught to my kid might mean that I was prejudiced in some way towards Spanish.  I think that learning Spanish in the US has received an unfair stigma in that people see it as a language of the uneducated, which simply isn’t the case.  When we lived in California it would have been practical to pick up some Spanish had my brain not been overloaded so w/ all of the Chinese that was being forced in.  I like to pick up what is local and useful (when in Sault Sainte Marie, French can’t be a bad idea), but I simply didn’t have time.  I can think of countless ways that life and communication would have been easier had I bothered to pick up a little bit, had I the time to devote to it.

It probably doesn’t help that when in our rigorous language training we learned one of the ways by which language learning is categorized.  Spanish is considered one of the easiest languages to learn for a Native English speaker.  It is an Indo-European based Romance language.  Some of the sounds are similar.  The grammar patterns are identical.  Spanish has grammar (something that was a struggle for me during Chinese) and verb conjugation.  By that same standard, Chinese is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn for a Native English speaker, second only to Korean (which has so many conjugations that a few of them aren’t taught at all).  The sounds are foreign to an Indo-Euro based tongue, the grammar patters are almost the complete opposite of what we are used to if they exist at all (for instance, you can leave the object and subject out of a sentence altogether), and there is no standard alphabet.  So perhaps that standard put some prejudice in my brain, but I have never been willfully biased against the teaching of Spanish in school.  I was just surprised given the setting and timing.  Perhaps b/c of this I somehow view it as less useful.

I don’t know.  That is kind of what I am trying to work out.

And I firmly believe that if we were stationed in South America or Spain, or Texas that I would be working as hard to learn functional Spanish as I am to learn functional Korean, and to teach it to The Kid.  I am not sure that privilege works that way, in the big “what if”s…but that is how we learn to acknowledge things…by thinking them through and mulling them over.

The option and opportunity to learn a foreign language is definitely a privilege.  While I might not have unchecked bias against Spanish (although I am not entirely sure as it seems) I certainly have taken for granted the way that one of my greatest loves, the learning of a way by which to communicate w/ someone different from myself, is a form of privilege.