Read time: approximately 12 minutes

This week

• Sunday, 25 January traveled to Oslo for church, brunch with a friend, and to pick up my wacky German uncle who was visiting me! 
• Monday, 26 January-Wednesday, 28 January Oslo with my wacky German uncle! We even did a sauna boat where we alternated between hot steamy sauna and jumping into the almost-hypothermia-inducing Oslo fjord! Same brunch friend came with us and we had a great time!
• Wednesday, 28 January co-facilitated a workshop on collaborative writing for teachers in the Romerike region with a colleague from the Fremmedspråksenteret at Sophie Radich Skole.
• Thursday, 29 January & Friday, 30 January facilitated workshops with 8th graders and 10th graders at Råde Ungdomsskole in Råde. 

I was waiting for a delayed train after teaching at Råde Ungdomsskole earlier this week and every now and again they were giving an update over the loudspeakers about what time the train was going to show up. These announcements were in Norwegian, and then English. When the train was finally arriving, the announcement stated, in Norwegian, that this train number heading in this direction, is now arriving on this track. I understood every single word in Norwegian. That was a huge win! I remember this same moment when I lived in Paris the second half of my junior year in college. Understanding the train announcement seems, for me, to be a mark that I am learning the language. 

Yesterday, I booked a massage appointment online. The masseuse messaged me on my Norwegian phone soon after booking and asked if I could meet at kl. 1800 (6p) rather than at 1730 (530p). I told her yup, no problem. She texted thank you and I returned with a you’re welcome. Even though the masseuse is a Thai woman, we were both texting in Norwegian. I checked my translator app to make sure I was spelling everything correctly, but I had another interaction where I used all Norwegian. My Norwegian isn’t completely fluent—I’ve just lived here for 6 months—but it’s really exciting what I can understand now. I mean, when I learned I got this gig about 9 months ago, I didn’t even know what Norwegian sounded like.

Even though I had these little moments this week that made me feel like I was progressing in my language skills, I had a few other striking moments that also made me feel unconfident and belittled. I was with 10th graders Thursday and Friday at Råde Ungdomsskole doing a Systems of Oppression workshop. Each day I saw two classes of 10th graders (and two classes of 8th graders for the What does it mean to be American? To be Norwegian? workshop). And these 10th graders were some of the meanest I have ever encountered. 

When I introduce myself to students, I tell them that I am living in Norway for the year and that I travel around the country, but mostly in the Østfold region, to give three kinds of workshops. I tell them, I go to ungdomsskole and videregåendeskole to give workshops on American life and culture. Then I pause and ask them how my pronunciation is. Most students are so gracious. Some say, great! with an enthusiastic thumbs up. Most say, okay, with the universal hand signal for so-so, with their palm facing down and tilting their wrist. Many 10th graders this week said my pronunciation was awful. In my first 10th grade class, a student said with a scoff, “bad.” Whoa whoa whoa, I said. Bad? Come on. Sure, I don’t sound like you, but it’s not “bad.” On Friday, students were straight up laughing at my Norwegian and then they were laughing at their classmates’ English. 

Every single time, I had to stop them to be like, what are you doing? Why are you laughing? We don’t laugh at each other and this is why. I said something like English is a world language and there are many ways that English sounds. Just because your English doesn’t sound like my English doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. And just because my Norwegian doesn’t sound like your Norwegian doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong. 

Here’s a fun fact: when human babies are born, they can make any sound in any language. Any. They just have to hear it. When they hear it often enough, they will start to mimic the sound. Once they start mimicking the sound, their lips, tongues, throat, every muscle in your face that helps you talk, will start taking the shape of that sound. Because all of those things in your face that help you make sounds are muscles that are waiting to be formed. Once you say a sound often enough, your muscles will basically fix into that shape. 

This is why it’s hard for people to make sounds they don’t grow up with: because your muscles are not accustomed to making those sounds. But you can learn. It’s just a matter of practicing and retraining your muscles. So any human baby can make any sound in any language. All humans can train their talking muscles to make the sounds of any language. Some people are really good at this and others need more work.

But when you are made fun of because of the way you speak, it doesn’t help you learn a language. Linguist Rosina Lippi-Green said that linguistic discrimination is one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination, and she’s right. People will laugh in your face if they think your language subpar. Laugh in your face. And it’s not just what I have witnessed and experienced in school this week. 

Many children of immigrants grow up not learning their parents’ language because their parents are afraid that the children will grow up speaking the new language with another language’s accent on it and then won’t be fully accepted as a child from the country the parents immigrated to. One of the reasons my first language is Thai is that my father in particular didn’t want to teach me English because he felt like his English was not just wrong, but also that his pronunciation was poor, and he didn’t want me to learn to speak the way he spoke, so he said that I would learn English at school. Some teachers give parents false information when they say that parents have to speak English to children at home so that the kids can learn English. Linguists have proven that speaking another language in the home does not impede the development of children learning another language outside the home. Uninformed, but well meaning, parents and teachers have given parents the wrong advice.

But we also live in a world where we find it okay to react negatively to people who are trying to use the language we are intimately familiar with. I was sitting at the bar at a restaurant in Oslo earlier this week when the French couple next to me was debating whether to order the fish soup, which the restaurant is famous for. I had just finished a bowl, but my empty bowl had been whisked away. I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said, in French, the soup is very well. In my nervousness to talk to an actual French person I didn’t remember to agree my noun and adjective (soup is feminine in French so needs an adjective that has a feminine ending. I also used an adverb). Oops. She looked at me like I was unhinged. Truly. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I have no idea what was going on in her head, because if I do say so myself I think my pronunciation in French is pretty good. But my words came out ungrammatical. Speakers who grow up speaking the language do not make “simple” mistakes like neglecting to have their nouns and adjectives agree. 

When another 8th grade teacher came by their colleague’s classroom after my lesson at Råde Ungdomsskole, he looked at the slides on the screen and said, wow, you’re doing complicated stuff with them. I’m doing prepositions. I told him that prepositions are also actually very hard because it isn’t always easy to know which prepositions to use. I laughed and said that in Norwegian when I don’t know which preposition to use, I just use på, because it seems to be a catch-all anyway. And if my lack of Norwegian vocabulary didn’t already give away that I am not a fluent Norwegian communicator, surely my unconventional use of prepositions would.

So here’s the point: there is a relationship between language, identity, culture, and power. In a class I usually teach at CSU in the spring, I attempt to encourage students in the class to not give in to linguistic discrimination, that many Englishes are grammatical (they all follow rules) and that many things that we consider “rules” in English are simply conventions that have calcified over time. My favorite example: we can definitely end sentences with prepositions: you want to come with? Like literally the language will not break if we end a sentence with a preposition. See? I ended a sentence with a preposition and we’re still using the language. The “rule” that we can’t was made up by a British clergyman in the 18th century to make the English language more like Latin and so that uneducated (poor) people could be made fun of and kept out of spaces reserved for the educated and wealthy. That’s what linguistic discrimination does: it keeps people out.

And there are consequences for thinking that there are some people who should be kept in and others who should be kept out. 

I am particularly sensitive to this idea that we use language to keep people in and keep others out because a) I am a former English teacher; b) I am currently a teacher educator who teaches others to teach English in explicitly justice-oriented ways; c) I am a child of immigrants whose parents didn’t feel comfortable enough with their own language to teach it to me and my brother and that just kills me that they felt that way about their language; d) English is my second language, learned in school; e) I am multilingual. 

But you don’t have to be a teacher or multilingual or have immigrant parents to be sensitive to the idea that we use language to keep people in and out. You just have to be a caring and empathetic human to know how language is dangerous. Not just because words are amazing and can put amazing ideas into the world, but because people in power use language or the perception of having another language besides English as an excuse to demean and persecute and terrorize others who they don’t think belong.  

See: ICE agents of terror in Minneapolis, circa: now. The pictures I’m seeing that are coming out of Minneapolis look like the set of Hunger Games. Trump, his supporters, and other far-right nationalist groups have continued to perpetuate a narrative that immigrants are scary, are dangerous, are ruining the United States. It’s heart- and gut-wrenching to see these images and hear his unhinged talk. To hear news stories about yet another person executed. To read about Representative Ilhan Omar being attacked. Trump and his far-right nationalist cronies have perpetuated a narrative that people who aren’t white and people who speak languages other than English don’t belong in the United States. His language is dangerous. He uses language as a marker of who’s in and who’s out. 

Yet Trump does not get the last say in who belongs in America. We are a country made up of immigrants; of refugees; of those descended from formerly enslaved peoples; of those descended from Indigenous peoples, who were the first stewards of the land. 

When Norwegian students ask about ICE, and Trump, and Greenland, and guns, and healthcare, and school shootings, I always tell them that it might seem like the US isn’t all that great a place to live in. And if you just focus on those things, of course it doesn’t sound good. But, I tell them, I love living in the United States and will defend her until my last dying breath and I will continue to make it my life’s work to build her into a place where she lives up to the promises she has made to all of us. What has always, I think, made the United States special, is the idea that we are all welcome there, can make a home there, belong there. No matter who we are and where we came from. But this is not to be taken for granted. This is neither the first nor the last time we will fight for our rights. And fight we will—in protests in the streets of Minneapolis, in protests in the streets of Norway, by teaching students and adults about our full history, by honoring students’ language in the classroom. 

Bonus: I finished Illegal this week and I just cried and cried and cried. I cried for the boys in the book. I cried for people who endure dangerous passage to get to a place with more opportunities than the lands they left. I cried for the little boy in the blue rabbit hat who has been detained by ICE (who was recently released). I cried for people terrorized by ICE. I highly recommend this book, especially for students (and people) who have little sympathies for those who emigrate. Excellent pairing with Solito, another book about enduring dangerous passage and after which I cried for days afterwards. 

When you’re done crying, read this. You’ll cry some more, but I hope you will let the rage from injustice and the hope from the beauty of other humans sustain you.