Speak Real!

Long ago I had a student in Spanish who asked me: “Why can’t they just speak Real?”

I wondered what she meant and then I realized that she meant . . .English.

At her age this was harmless enough. She had known few people who did not speak English as a first language in her hometown of  Rochester, New York, and so she assumed English was the default language for everyone. This poor student was speaking from her experience, but her experience was limited . . . which was why she was in school! There is no language now spoken by mortal men that is real . . . all the relics of Babel.

We are one race separated by language, but united with a common soul. We are all created in the image of God, but to each of us what is familiar feels like what is real. This mistake is funny in children, but dangerous in adults. If we think another human is less “real,” then we may hurt them and that is a great evil.

Though less important, there is also a great loss to any person who does not understand that no language or culture summarizes the entire divine image. None of us speak the language of Eden, the language that sang the world into being. Each fragment from Babel contains a piece of the whole and each together gives us a glimpse of the perfect speech that is to come.

Someday I will hear my name in Real. . . but it will not be English, Spanish, Swahili, Chinese, or German. God will speak our names in the true Word that has been lost and that every language reflects imperfectly.

Why learn a second (or even a third!) language? When we read Homer in ancient Greek, or Don Quixote in Spanish, English speakers get a larger image of God. We lift our eyes from the home truths, and the homely errors, to new truths (and new errors!). We learn, because we see something new.

There is nothing more false in most high school or college education in the United States than language study. We give out units in languages to students who could not ask directions to a restaurant, let alone read great literature in another tongue. This lie is so widespread that it does not even bother us. Most graduates of our colleges and high schools have credentials to speak two languages, but can scarcely read good literature in their mother tongue. We walk them across stage as bi-lingual, but it is a cheat.

This lie is killing us.

We are cutting our brightest and best off from reality by limiting them to the pieces of God’s truth, the language that made the world, still floating about in English. We must do better or at the very least stop telling lies. Any school that cuts their language requirements is fake, a fraud peddling credentials and not education. They are dooming us to mediocrity, repeating old errors, and seeing less than we might.

Until the city of God comes, we will not speak “Real.” Is it not time to demand our leaders speak or read at least two of the fragments of God’s tongue?