A Barrage of English

I will never forget the first time I ate a meal in the cafeteria at Liberty University.  Nor will I forget the killer migraine that accompanied it. 

By that point I had been back in America for about a month.  In that time I had managed to completely avoid the mall, and had almost escaped the nearby super Wal-Mart.  In fact, I had made a point of avoiding any loud places full of people as if they all had the plague.  As I sat down in the cafeteria with the chicken salad I had managed to cobble together (everything else was either drowning in grease or salt), I suddenly remembered why I had made such an effort to avoid these places.  It wasn’t because I’m an introvert who doesn’t always do well when surrounded by large groups of people, although that definitely may have played a part in it.  No, the real reason I had avoided such populated places was because of one simple side effect of having a large room full of American college students: everyone was speaking English.  Loudly. 

For most Americans, there isn’t a problem with that situation.  If you get a group of people together, they’re going to talk.  It’s inevitable.  But I had just spent two years out of the country.  After being surrounded every day by a variety of languages that I didn’t always understand, my brain had trained itself quite by accident to automatically pick up on any English nearby.  Then I was thrown back into an environment that was all English all the time, and suddenly I could understand everything that was going on around me.  My brain, trained to pick up on any and all English, was trying to process every single word it heard.  Needless to say, it went into overload.  As a result of that, I endured more than a few bad migraines during my first few weeks in the school cafeteria.  While my ears have grown accustomed since then, I still to this day don’t stay in the cafeteria any longer than I have to. 

The noise level also drove me crazy.  Sometimes it still does.  Americans are, quite simply, loud people.  Since they live in a loud culture, I doubt many of them even notice it anymore.  But having just come out of a much more reserved culture whose people generally only got loud when they were either drunk or over-excited about soccer, entering a place full of talkative Americans was like stepping into a room where someone had a stereo on full-blast.  I felt like my eardrums were about to explode.  I can still remember eating lunch with a friend in the cafeteria and having to use all of my concentration to drown out enough noise that my brain could actually process what she was saying to me. 

As annoying as the noise level can be, however, what really gets to me is the simple fact that it’s all English.  When I’m constantly surrounded by a barrage of language that I can understand effortlessly, I find my ears longing for the beauty of foreign languages.  English has become a flat language to me.  There is no longer any beauty in the sounds, no magic in the understanding.  It takes no arsenal of mental tricks to figure out what something means, and there is therefore no inner triumph in finally figuring it out.  A sentence in English is not an intriguing puzzle waiting to be solved.  It simply is, and that’s that. 

English to me is like a delicacy that has lost all flavor.  It lacks the firm assuredness of German, the posh nonchalance of French, the noble romance of Spanish, and the reserved dignity of Polish.  As a writer, I have been gifted with an ability to use English to create captivating works of verbal art.  But while the whole may be beautiful, the words themselves still seem bland and stale.  Even the foreign words whose meanings I know so well they take no thought to use still hold a spark for me.  There is just something beautiful about foreign languages, even those I don’t understand.  The idea that there are more ways to communicate than just my own is, for lack of a better word, magical. 

Living in a place that for the most part speaks only English, I have begun to desperately miss the music that is foreign languages.  In particular I miss Polish.  Despite all our efforts, my family is by no means multilingual.  When people ask how many languages I speak, I tend to tell them one and a half and a half.  (English, some Spanish from high school, and some leftover Croatian from my childhood.)  But our home is by no means strictly English.  We make a point of using the foreign words we do know in our everyday conversations.  When my parents call across the house for me, I tend to answer in Polish.  Sometimes we even call each other the Polish versions of our names.  When my brother and I are arguing for the sake of arguing, we often slip into Polish.  We also insult people in Polish, although neither of us knows how to say anything truly offensive.  Mostly we just call people blonde.  My family also says simple things like “hello”, “good-bye”, “thank-you”, and “I love you” in Polish.  In fact, we do it so much that I often have the urge to use the Polish versions with my American friends.  I have to continually remind myself that they won't have any idea what those words mean. 

During my last year in the U.S. I’ve had to find ways to surround myself with foreign languages.  When I get stressed, I listen to Polish worship songs.  When I get frustrated with America, I pull together all the foreign music on my computer and let it roll.  When I get homesick, I grab my DVDs of the first season of a brilliant Polish TV show and let myself drown in the language.  I even considered taking an extracurricular course in Russian until I saw the price tag attached to it.  While there is absolutely nothing on this earth more frustrating than attempting to communicate with someone in a language you don’t really know, there is also something incredibly nostalgic for me about being able to just sit back out of the way and listen to foreign languages flying by around me.  Something that makes me just a bit homesick. 

Worship is another area where I crave more than just English.  During the convocation services at Liberty, I often find myself longing for Polish songs.  I desperately miss the feeling of singing an English song that had been translated into Polish and being able to step back and just listen as the voices of the Poles mingled with those of the American missionaries singing the same song in their own language.  It’s a small glimpse of what it will be like when we finally stand around God’s throne and every nation from this earth comes together to praise Him in their own language.  I can only imagine how beautiful that will be. 

Missionaries often refer to something called a heart language.  Typically they mean the language a person grew up speaking.  Another definition I found, the one I prefer, described a heart language as whatever language makes a person feel most at home.  I’m not entirely sure what my heart language is, but I get the feeling it isn’t English.   If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably something Slavic.  Maybe even Polish, although I’m the first to admit that I speak very little of it.  Plus the grammar is a foreigner’s worst nightmare.  And yet despite all of that, there’s just something about the sound of Polish that I find beautiful.  But English is the language I’ve been given, so for now that’s the one I’ll use.  Maybe someday I’ll find a way to put the magic back in it. 

-Ash