The more languages you speak, the more world citizen you are. (English)

      According to ancient religious myths, the origin of the diversity of languages comes from a divine punishment imposed on the human race because they were building the Tower of Babel. Before receiving that “penance”, it is said that people at that time used to speak only one language around the world and that as they wanted to build a tower so tall that it could reach the sky, God punished them by forcing them to speak different languages so that they could no longer understand each other. Nowadays, there are citizens who are still convinced that communicating with a single “universal” language, such as Esperanto or Latin, would be the easiest and the most beneficial solution for humanity. However, there are several reasons why we can affirm that multilingualism is the best option for global understanding and for defining the concept of world citizen. What are these reasons? In the following essay I will explain and reflect on how being multilingual can help understanding and world citizenship with illustrative examples from my personal experience, academically, culturally and nationally, here in my country.

    Firstly, the terms which are going to be employed should be defined. With the term “multilingualism” we can refer both to a person that knows several languages and to a place where different languages are spoken. “Multilingualism”, in both senses, is essential to world idiosyncrasy. On the contrary, “monolingualism” consists of speaking just one language in order to communicate.

        Focusing on the reasons for being in favour of multilingualism, one that supports that speaking different languages benefits global understanding is that the more languages you speak, the more realities you are able to discover. Languages, either through a novel, a film or a play, open doors to other ways of seeing the world, that is to say, to other cultures. For instance, I adore reading, and if I can, I read books in the language in which they were written. When I read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen in English, I could comprehend, not only the period in which the story took place, but also the way of thinking at that moment, of seeing reality and how the characters expressed themselves through dialogues in a language which was of vital importance during the period. At the same time, when I read that story and was capable of producing a speech like the one of the characters, I felt that I could be part of that age.

      The otherness, which I used to regard as something alien to me, after learning the language, became as something closer, and even of my own, because I identified with it.

Something similar happened to me when I read a few poems by Charles Baudelaire from Les fleurs du mal in French with the Spanish translation on one side. The way of organising the ideas in the text, the syntactic structure and pronunciation distilled the cultural spirit of that time, as opposed to the translation into Spanish, which seemed to me to be closer to my own culture and where I could appreciate different shades to those in the original poem. In addition to literature, reading newspapers or watching movies in their original language also provides much more cultural and linguistic wealth than reading a translation or watching them dubbed.

       In this way, multilingual people, as they are familiar with other realities, are more tolerant and have a further understanding of the way of thinking of the speaker of those languages. Therefore, interpersonal and communication skills with the rest of the world are improved. When somebody is learning a language, there are readings and talks in that language on diverse topics that vary depending on the level. The more the level increases, the more complicated the issues are. As a result, learning a language properly also makes students, especially if they are young, mature. In my case, I remember that when I was 15 years old the environment had never interested me until I read a simple text about global warming at my academy of English and then I realised the importance of pollution at present and how unaware the population at large is of the problem.

      Another remarkable factor is that it is scientifically proven that people who speak more than one language have a more developed brain, more memory, are more open-minded, more creative and think faster, with more agility than those who are monolingual.1 Personally, when I began studying German at University I found that it was a very organized and rigid language in terms of the structure. This peculiarity struck me because the Spanish language, my mother tongue, has a less fixed syntactic order which is more flexible. As a consequence, the type of syntactic structure helped me to understand why, generally speaking, German people are highly organized and disciplined, as well as their language. Nevertheless, I would like to remark that this cannot make us fall into determinism or stereotypes because one of the most rewarding matter about speaking different languages is the opportunity of go in depth in other people lives by living with them or traveling to their countries you can observe the enormous diversity of ways of thinking and seeing reality. Soon I realized that knowing English, because of its similarity; having studied Latin, due to the cases and their uses; and speaking a little bit of French, as far as the vocabulary is concerned, helped me a lot in learning German. Therefore, having knowledge of other languages makes it easier to learn a new one, because it helps to synthesise concepts and to distinguish them from others. In the same way that similar or distinctive traits between different languages can be observed, for the people who know many languages it is easier to appreciate the cultural features that are latent in the languages: for a Spanish person ser is not the same as estar but for an English speaker it is (verb to be).

      Another reason why multilingualism contributes to global citizenship is related to the concept of identity. The big question and the main quest in the inner journey of human beings is who am I? In my humble opinion, knowing different languages helps an individual to find their own identity as a citizen of the world. In my case, comprehending other languages, writing and speaking using specifics codes, did not lead to the loss of my initial identity, the one that the language of my parents gave me, but it has given me the opportunity to recognize other identities and develop my identity by creating a completely new hybrid identity. Neither by speaking Valencian do I feel that I have betrayed the Spanish language, inherited from my parents from inland Spain; neither by speaking English have I lost my Spanish identity, nor by speaking Chinese, if I could, would I be less European, because more than Spanish or European, I consider myself a citizen of the world. The sooner the languages are learnt, the sooner that values of tolerance, identification and distinction will be created, always from respect. All of this will help to establish the identity of the individual and to understand each other as well as to create universal consciousness.

One of the most important places where we can find multilingualism and its explicit contribution to global understanding and citizenship is the most important centre of knowledge and education of the world: University. Education is very important to promote multilingualism, not only in universities, but also in schools and high schools, as well as in language schools and academies.

      At the University of Alicante, where I study, the same subjects can be conducted in several languages, such as Valencian, Spanish or English, and in the classes one can see the change from one language to another when students debate or interact with the teacher. In this way, language is not an impediment to obtain knowledge, but enriches and increases it and both students and teachers become more tolerant with other languages. For example, this year I have had the opportunity to participate in a language tandem with a girl from Vienna and it has been a very enriching experience, both personally and linguistically. Thanks to this activity, organized by a professor from the University I could experience the German language at first-hand, learn about their way of life, of thinking and share mine. In addition, I was specially fortunate as Ava Maria, my tandem partner, was born and lived for a long in Serbia and shared the language and culture of her parents with me. Through activities like these and others such as the Erasmus or other scholarships, multilingualism is promoted in the educational field and encourages not only to physically leave our country, but become more open minded as regards the knowledge of languages and cultures.

      It is clear that new technologies play an important role in the development of multilingualism at present, because if there were not programs like Oovoo or Skype it would have been impossible to talk to Ava Maria. Therefore, taking into account new technologies, in particular Internet, other areas in which we see the benefits of multilingualism are social networking, specifically Facebook and Twitter. In them, the young and the not so young share concerns, opinions, events, accomplishments or jokes, and many do so in different languages. There are people who publish the same text in different languages, such as athletes, politicians, writers and actors so that information reaches more citizens and others vary the language used according to the person that they address, the place where they are or the language that seems most appropriate to express themselves at any given time. Both the first and the last foster multilingualism and help to create the concept of world citizenship and facilitate understanding. These new technologies gives us more new opportunities to learn different languages and to become multilingual that previous generations, like my parents and grandparents, could not have when they were young.

      In conclusion, we can state that knowing and speaking different languages has many benefits, both at a personal and cognitive level; one’s sense of identity is something that develops and evolves when you learn other languages; the University is a place where information is continually exchanged in different languages where, as in schools and high schools, education has a key role to make students aware of the importance of being multilingual in relation to global understanding and citizenship. New technologies are an element to highlight in the procedure of language learning and in the development of multilingualism as it can be seen in social networks. Therefore, through education and with the help of new technologies we can build together a global and multilingual society with bricks from the Tower of Babel. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.