Communication is Key
The importance of speaking someone else’s language
PICTURE THE SCENE: Thursday afternoon, sometime around 2pm. Stuffy classroom, not yet even the end of the day, let alone the week. Lunch has left you with serious drowsy numbness, and the bell went before you could finish that conversation with your friend. Now this: not only are you stuck in school, but you have to learn another language. As the teacher starts to explain how to give directions to the cinema in Toledo in Spanish, your brain simply shuts down. “Why?” I hear you cry. It seems so utterly futile. You’ve never been to Toledo and, even if you were there, you would be appreciating the sights, not going to the cinema, nor would you ever dream of actually asking a Spanish person in Spanish about how to get there. They all speak English anyway.
Most of us have felt this way at some point. For many of us, this is language learning: seemingly pointless skills with no real relevance to our lives, learnt just to get through the exams. Studying Modern Languages is for GCSEs and not much else! But what if there were another way to look at languages?
There are around 7,100 living languages in the world today. Although many of these are tiny minority languages, they are the mother tongue of the speaker and an integral part of their identity. As with every other part of our lives here on earth, we need to view this vast linguistic diversity through the lens of the Gospel. The place of Modern Languages in education here in the UK has long been under scrutiny and, compared to many of our European neighbours, we fall very short of their linguistic standard. An academic study of this doesn’t belong in these pages, but rather I want to examine how God wants us to view and interact with languages.
The first we hear of different languages in the Bible is the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Here we learn that the separation of language is a punishment for sin: “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech’”(Genesis 11:6-7). The sinful pride and ambition of the people brought upon them ruin, confusion and dispersion. Though made in God’s image, made - as we saw in Robert Drennan’s article - to communicate, the world now finds itself unable to do just that, and the nations are spread across the earth. The fallout from this fundamental change is one we still live with today – miscommunication and misunderstanding run rife.
Yet, as we look through the Bible, we see that the introduction of different languages is all part of God’s glorious plan of salvation. Dispersing humanity in this way was an act of grace, restraining the evil that man was attempting, and it set apart the children of Israel as God’s chosen. people: one people with one language. Jesus Christ’s coming breaks this separation. God’s family is now open to all who will hear and believe: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Throughout Scripture we see how God, in his infinite grace and wisdom, is in the process of bringing in those who were previously cast out. Even before the apostles and the early church began taking the Gospel to the Gentile nations, we see that God’s promises and plans are to be played out in every language; the Psalms clearly speak of the nations singing God’s praises (Psalm 22, 67, 72, 86 and 117 to name a few). In the New Testament, we see how God graciously and wondrously overrides the language block in Acts 2:1-11 – “And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.” Throughout Revelation, the phrase is repeated: “every nation and tribe and language and people.” Although the introduction of languages was a punishment, it is still part of how God is expanding his glory on the earth. So how does this bear on our understanding of languages?
Christ commands his disciples in Matthew 28:19-20 to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” How can we reach the nations if we aren’t able to effectively communicate with them? Paul, on his missionary journeys, proved himself to be a more than able linguist, speaking to Jews, Romans and Greeks; his multilingualism was a key asset in his evangelism. Nelson Mandela famously said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” There is something very special about the language we grow up speaking: foundational to our identity, it is the language in which we think, reason and best express ourselves. It will often be the language we come back to in prayer. How important, then, that we take the Gospel to every man in his own language! Learning a language also allows us to learn about and understand a culture. Language is shaped by the society around it, and often learning a language allows us to better grasp and deal with the philosophy that underpins the lives of those to whom we seek to witness. One could say that in today’s world everyone speaks English anyway, but can we effectively reach others if we can’t even make an effort to understand one of the building blocks of their identity?
Yet still we tend to leave languages to others – to those who have the ‘gift’. It may be true that there are people to whom language learning comes more easily, but, as with any skill, it requires work and commitment. God might never give that instantaneous gift of tongues that we see in Acts 2 again, and so we are called to labour at what we have. I’ve been learning French for 12 years and, though I consider myself conversationally fluent, I know I still have a long way to go. Maybe you don’t see yourself as a missionary but in our ‘Global Village’, we are seeing more and more people coming to us. Across the globe, immigrant populations are growing. You may never leave Northern Ireland, but the world may come to you – are you ready to engage with it? “All well and good,” you cry, “but they aren’t likely to speak French/ Spanish/German, so what good is it working at those in school?” Learning a language, no matter which one, will train your brain to think in a certain way; once you have got the keys to open one language, the locks on the others won’t seem so exhausting. Even for those of us whose school days are long behind us, it is never too late to start a new language (studies show it will do wonders for your brain, if nothing else!).
Not all of us are called to be polyglots. Not all of us are called to go to the unreached. Nevertheless, the next time you are sitting in that interminable language lesson, tempted to drift into daydream, or to put in just enough work to get by, consider this: how could God use this in my life to reach the nations for himself? Even if languages really, really aren’t your thing, is your negative attitude discouraging those who do have aptitude and passion? We need to build one another up, no matter what our skill set is (Romans 12:4-8). Looking forward to the day when we will all be united together, worshipping our God, the great multitude of Revelation 7, let us seek to use the opportunities given to us here to further his Kingdom.
