Language, Culture and Preservation

“If you destroy an entire generation of people’s culture, it’s as if they never existed.”

I recently watched a video, a TED talk to be precise, about the importance of our mother tongue or native language. As someone who feels passionate about how much language widens horizons, the title “Don’t kill your language” quickly caught my attention. I questioned the arguments before even hearing them. How could learning languages kill our own language? Despite my sudden objections, I watched the video.

Suzanne Talhouk presents this TED talk in Arabic, which quickly puzzled me. All the TED talks I had seen were in English. I felt bothered by the need for subtitles, but this helped prove her point. Talhouk began by sharing a story. She went with a friend to a restaurant in Beirut and asked the waiter for a menu; however, she didn’t say the word “menu” as it is commonly used in Beirut. She used the Arabic word. The waiter looked at her discriminately even though she was in her own country speaking her own language.

As I listened to her voice in a language beautiful yet unknown to me, I understood what she meant. Arabic is a beautiful language, one that only until recently I have been exposed to. However, Arabic faces the same dilemma a lot of other languages do: It must compete with English even in its own turf. English has provided us with so many new words in the areas of science, technology and social media, and we have quickly adopted these words without considering the repercussions of it. We talk about computers, posting, Facebook and selfies every day.

As we become a globalized society, we risk losing our language, which in turn means we will lose much more. Our native language is connected to memories, smells, sights, noises, people and stages of our lives. We are surrendering all of these if we willingly let our native language fade away. This language death is true for many of us that migrate to new countries. In an effort to adapt, we sometimes forget where we come from. 

Talhouk mentions in the video the importance that developed countries give to their language. With the high numbers of immigrants around the world, the need for them to adapt is understandable. Learning your new country’s language will help you find a job, move around, study and become an active member of your community. (Side note: I read this morning an article about the increasing number of accidents at work due to language barriers in the Netherlands.) Therefore it is the job of the immigrant to not only learn a new language in order to adapt, but also to preserve its own language and pass it on to future generations. We should be proud of where we come from, where we are now and where we will go.

If you are interested in hearing this TED talk, please click on the following link: Don't Kill Your Language by Suzanne Talhouk