By Monica Friedlander
Berkeley, April 19, 2011 — We master its extraordinary complexity before we are even old enough to walk or tie our shoe laces, yet we take it for granted like the air we breathe. It becomes part of who we are and shapes our relationship to the world around us. By the time we go to college we build on this mastery to read and write poetry and communicate sophisticated concepts in multiple disciplines. We even use artificial versions thereof to give instructions to computers.
This miracle tool is language, a uniquely human endeavor in its complexity, linking minds to each other both here and now and across the vastest expanses of space and time. We speak thousands of them on this planet, yet find means to understand each other. And in few places on earth is language diversity more evident than at UC Berkeley — a veritable meeting place of languages and cultures, where more languages may be spoken and taught than at any other institution in the world.
It is thus fitting that next fall language itself will take center stage at Cal thanks to the On the Same Page program sponsored by the College of Letters and Science. Every year since 2006, On the Same Page has given incoming freshmen something to think and talk about — a book, a film, or a timely topic of discussion. Next year’s program, entitled “Voices of Berkeley,” will give students a chance to talk about how they talk.
“Voices of Berkeley considers the tremendous linguistic diversity of our campus community,” says Undergraduate Dean Tyler Stovall. “We speak many different languages, have a variety of distinct accents, and often shift between alternate means of expression. Our program will explore how our different languages enrich the university experience and how we are able to form a community across linguistic boundaries."
Timothy Hampton, a professor of French and Comparative Literature, came up with the idea for this year’s theme. He also took an informal survey of students in his classes to determine how many of them come from family backgrounds or social environments in which a language besides English is spoken. He found that a staggering 60 to 70 percent of them do so.
“That’s an extraordinary thing in itself,” he says. “We talk a lot about diversity at Cal, but not necessarily about linguistic diversity. This is an amazing resource that we should call to our attention, explore, celebrate, and try to learn from. The multiplicity of languages and sounds and traditions is part of what students bring to Cal.”
What’s more, Hampton says, students continue to acquire languages or enrich their own during their time at Berkeley. Language, after all, is a living thing, not a static code. We all change the way we speak based on everything ranging from who our friends are to where we live or what we study in school.
“It’s interesting to think about this not only in terms of something students bring to campus as part of their backgrounds, but also something they dowhile they’re here,” Hampton says.
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To best illustrate and study this linguistic mosaic, On the Same Page will launch the program with an invitation to students to contribute to a “Languages of Berkeley” database, or digital map. Before they arrive on campus, freshmen will have the opportunity to record bits of speech that will be collected and analyzed to create a virtual map of Berkeley’s linguistic diversity. English will be represented in its endless variety of accents and unique speech patterns, as will foreign languages spoken by multilingual students. This cutting-edge experiment is the brainchild of Linguistics Professor Keith Johnson. He, along with several departmental colleagues, are an integral part of the faculty team helping to implement the program this year.
The purpose of the project is two-fold. First it will create a portrait, or snapshot, of the students’ array of accents and wealth of languages when they arrive at Cal. Beyond that, the project will continue to systematically observe the evolution of this “map” over the course of four years to determine how students’ ways of speaking changes over time.
During their time at Berkeley, students may learn a foreign language, study Shakespeare, learn professional jargons unintelligible to those outside the profession, or even communicate with machines via html or java script. Whatever their interests, students are almost certain to leave Berkeley with a new or enriched vocabulary. This digital database will give researchers new insights into how American English itself changes over time.
On-campus activities will begin in September with a public event featuring well-known linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor in the School of Information and popular radio personality. Nunberg will lead a discussion with distinguished professionals whose identities and careers shape and are shaped by the multiple languages of California.
Reading materials for Voices of Berkeley will consist of a “virtual bookshelf” rather than the standard single text used in years past. Included will be articles and book excerpts on every conceivable topic touching on language and linguistics, from memoir literature — such as writings by immigrants who have written about their personal experience of integrating themselves into an English-speaking society — to scientific works in cognitive psychology, which deal with issues such as perceptions of language and reality.
Also part of the program will be Freshmen Seminars, discussion groups, and a video contest for students. A variety of other public discussions and lectures will address topics such as the neurobiology of language, language loss, and linguistic rights as human rights. Hampton, for instance, will teach a course whose title alone should draw a crowd: “Polyglots and Vagabonds in the Renaissance.” If you wonder what language they spoke in Utopia, sign up.
With this year’s theme, On the Same Page has cast the widest net yet, as the topic of language doesn’t lend itself to being restrained to narrow areas of study. Depending on their personal backgrounds and interests, all students will be able to find a niche of interest to them.
“This year's topic is especially exciting because literally everyone will have something to contribute to the discussion,” says Alix Schwartz, program coordinator for On the Same Page. “Each new student is linguistically unique, and each is about to be surrounded by other students, faculty and staff from an astonishing range of linguistic backgrounds.”
Looking towards the future
Dimensions of language range from the hard sciences to social sciences and to languages themselves, with UC Berkeley priding itself with one of the richest traditions of teaching languages in the world. And never before has the need to speak more than one tongue been greater than in today’s multicultural, global economy.
English used to be so dominant that most for most native English speakers, acquiring a foreign language was a luxury, not a necessity. That’s changing. Recent surveys show that even the web is not the realm of English speakers any longer. In fact, English is now used in less than 30 percent of websites. The world may be getting smaller thanks to 21st century communications, but the linguistic diversity is more apparent than ever.
“Our students will be going out into a multilingual world — not only a globalized economy but a globalized culture, one that only 15 years ago people thought would be uniquely Anglophone,” Hampton says. “Nobody thinks so now with the rise of China, India, Latin America. Many of our students will go get jobs in places where English may be the lingua franca of the workplace, but they will still live in a multilingual world. So the more we can do to make them think about that from the very beginning of their time at Cal, the better prepared they will be no matter what they end up doing.”
For more information about On the Same Page visit the program website or contact Alix Schwartz at alix@berkeley.edu, 642-8378.
