Owning up: When you earn your living from a language that was systematically denied to its owners
September 30, 2022
Learning languages and becoming a language teacher are common activities around the world. Many people learn languages that are not spoken in their homes. They might study a new language at school, or they might move somewhere for a short or long time and learn a new language. It is estimated that 60% of humans are bi/multilingual; some of them live in communities that use two or more languages every day.
It is important to acknowledge a case like mine in the U.S., which also exists in other parts of the world. I was raised monolingually in English; my grandparents made the decision to stop speaking Lithuanian because “You just didn’t do that in Brooklyn in the 1950s… you spoke English and assimilated”. I started learning Spanish in school at age 11, and in adulthood I lived for periods of 1+ years in Spain and in Mexico. I learned it well enough to eventually become a linguist and a professor of Spanish.
However, many children in the U.S. today whose families speak Spanish do not get the opportunity to study it. They are required to take classes only in English; they and their families are mocked and bullied for speaking Spanish; they often experience other kinds of structural racism and hardships that prevent them from developing Spanish proficiency.
Non-Latinx language professionals need to acknowledge our privilege in being able to learn Spanish, especially the particularly painful irony that so many of us end up teaching Spanish to the very people it was stolen from. And landing high-paying gigs in translation/interpretation, consulting, and other language-related services.
I don’t believe that this constitutes an argument against learning other languages; it does not suggest that your white high school Spanish teacher ‘stole’ Spanish from anyone or is culturally appropriating it; nor does it deny that many people worked hard to acquire their language abilities and now make excellent teachers, linguists, writers, translators/interpreters, scholars, etc. In fact, people who learned a language via study are often particularly well-equipped for some jobs, including teaching it as a new language to others. I learned this while teaching English in Spain and Mexico: some of my non-native-speaking colleagues offered clearer explanations about how English works than I could, because they had studied it. Also, languages do not have sole proprietary “owners.” However, I think it’s clear that something is very wrong here. As a fellow white colleague told me, she got into Spanish because, like me, she enjoyed the language/linguistics aspects of it, how second language acquisition works, and teaching it to other beginners. “I would very much like to stay in my lane and only teach beginning anglophones, but I often have to teach heritage Spanish speakers because there are so many,” she added.
We non-Latinx language professionals must be allies. I believe we should think very hard about our role in the system that allows us to earn money using a language that we had the privilege to add (and if we are white/white passing, we likely do not experience bullying for speaking it) while others who arguably have more of a right to that language face profound challenges to accessing the same privilege.
We should be working to build structures within which Latinx children and families have abundant access to high quality education in Spanish should they choose it, such that THEY can be the owners and keepers and teachers of the language within their communities. Until that happens, we are merely guests, which also means that we must be respectful of the ways that Latinx individuals speak (or do not speak) Spanish. Also, when we gather data about Spanish within U.S. Latinx communities and publish things that advance our careers, what are we doing to give back to those communities?
This says little about how we must also combat structural racism, economic marginalization, and the xenophobic ideologies that plague this country, but it is a start.
Related references:
The ethical responsibility of researchers to the communities we study has been discussed before and far better elsewhere; I will be uploading some references here soon.
A TikTok criticizing how Spanish teachers privilege white students’ Spanish and denigrate U.S. Latinx’ varieties/show ignorance about ways of speaking Spanish around the world. P.S. With an estimated 41,757.391 Spanish-speakers, the U.S. is the 5th largest national population in the world after Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Argentina.
