Making the Foreign Familiar through Language
If you’re reading this in English, you probably know how easy it is to travel around the world and be understood by one of your fellow, billion-plus Anglophones. You can traverse metropolises and countrysides alike and still find someone who knows how to greet you, show you where the bathroom is, or help you with directions.
In our increasingly globalized world, learning a local language has become less of a necessity for survival, but it is an often-forgotten means of developing empathy and insight. While you can get by in many corners of the world with just English, knowing a few key phrases in the local language will undoubtedly enhance your travel experience and your understanding of the places you have the privilege to traverse.
Need some inspiration? Learning a new language is like “imbibing a culture” (not literally, although it can be quite useful to know how to order a cold beer, too!). Learning a local language as a foreigner will show people that you care not only about taking stunning photos or getting another stamp in your passport but also about appreciating people and their cultural values in the region they call home. Plus, learning a new language can even be quite fun and beautiful!
When you start investing in learning a local language (yes, it’s a process), it will help you recognize some of the cultural — and even public health — implications of language.
Take Lugisu, a Bantu language spoken in five districts in Uganda, the “Pearl of Africa.” Uganda’s official languages are English and Swahili, and it can be easy to rely solely on one of these when you travel to Lugisu-speaking areas in eastern Uganda such as the beautiful Sipi Falls, Mount Elgon National Park, or the city of Mbale. But what are you missing out on if you only revert to what is comfortable?
If you are studying non-communicable diseases that are on the rise in Uganda and worldwide yet you only speak English, you won’t know that in Lugisu, the word for “very sweet,” awooma, is the same as the word for “delicious.”
If you care about famine or climate change in regions susceptible to drought yet you only speak English, you’ll miss that in Lugisu there are several words for ifula (general rain) such as kumoseseli (raining with wind) and kumiyaka (raining with stones). There is even a vivid expression, ingwe ili khusaala, which denotes when it is rainy and sunny simultaneously and is literally translated to “a leopard has given birth.” (Similarly, in Setswana, a Bantu language spoken in the Kalahari Desert and in parts of southern Africa, the word for rain, pula, is also the name of Botswana currency.)
And if you are a health practitioner or infectious disease researcher yet you only speak English, you won’t know the implications of the phrase for “I love” in Lugisu (and several other Bantu languages), ingana, being the same as the phrases for both “I like” and “I want.”
Learning even a few phrases of the local language — in whatever corner of the world you find yourself in — can help prevent harm that can arise from blindly traversing “foreign” places with little respect for the people who live there. Even if you just invest in learning the basics, greetings and showing appreciation, you will be surprised by how much better you can come to know a place and its people, how you can elicit a contagious smile before taking a photograph of someone, or how you can make someone you meet along your adventure laugh unexpectedly when you ask for help with something.
Lugisu is just one of the African continent’s more than 2100 languages and one of more than 7,100 languages spoken worldwide. When you travel outside your home, take a few minutes to embrace discomfort and step away from the comfortable veranda of English. You might just find yourself imbibing in something truly remarkable.
Megan Slavish is a Global Health Corps fellow in eastern Uganda. She created a list of the top 50 Lugisu phrases as well as an audio accompaniment recorded by a native Lugisu speaker available on YouTube here.
