Speaker 1: I was born in New Delhi, India, and moved to the suburbs of Houston, Texas when I was around six years old. I spoke no English, and my parents only spoke Hindi or Punjabi at home. It drove me insane. While I obviously ended up learning English, it took me years to get rid of my accent, something that was a point of contention between me and my parents for so long. But then one day, a switch flipped. When I was around 10 years old, my friend Karishma had just come back from India, and I asked her to recollect her stories. To my surprise, she didn't begin with a wide-eyed grin like I typically have, but instead a look of frustration. She said it was hot and polluted, and I could barely understand my relatives, and I have no idea what my grandma even said to me. And that's when I realized what my parents were doing. They weren't trying to prolong my accent or make school harder for me. Instead, their rule was simple. You forgot your language, you've forgotten your heritage. I was fortunate enough to retain and be proud of both. That's my name in Hindi, by the way. So I stand before you today to talk to you about how language and culture are constantly molding each other, and how multilingualism helps you dispel prejudices and biases and go beyond boundaries. From a simple scientific standpoint, there's enough reasoning for you to learn a language. Multilingualism is correlated with higher cognitive ability and problem-solving skills. So those two years of foreign language requirement are more than just two years of online homework. Now, because you took that Spanish class, can you finish your econ problem set 20 minutes before it's due? Si, se puede. Yes, you can. But I'm here to tell you about the more exciting part of language learning, one that's more thrilling and more powerful, and that is to establish an intercultural connection, an intercultural understanding. Through the use of language, you're creating a bridge of familiarity and trust, not just between two people, but between two different worlds. By using someone's mother tongue, you're creating a level of comfort and trust that's simply unparalleled. And if you're not using it to gain access to their culture or traditions, well, at least realize that it helps you gain favor. And every good mafia movie has taught you that you can never accrue enough favors. Because you see, learning a language is much more than just asking where the bathroom is or how to order the right type of kebab, a point I'll touch upon later. First and foremost, learning a language helps you either grow into an identity or potentially even create a new one. The former happens when you've developed interest in a culture, but you realize that your access to that culture plateaus without knowledge of the language. For example, if you're a huge Francophile, chances are you love macaroons and baguettes and think it's acceptable to not wear deodorant. But you realize that you don't actually have access to what it means to be French until you've mastered key slang terms and mannerisms. Also, you'll understand the French part of partition by Beyonce. And that's an equally important cultural feat. So give yourself a pat on the back. Now, how many of you in the audience are on a Bhangra team or listen to a lot of Bhangra music? For those in the audience that are unaware, Bhangra is a bombastic music from northern India, from a region called Punjab. Bhangra is commonly found in places, in Indian dance parties or anywhere there's a surplus of Johnny Walker Black Label, which is to Punjabis what espresso is to Italians. Now, in Bhangra music, there's an oft-repeated phrase that is chak de fatteh. The literal translation of this is to pick up the bench, which is very confusing because you're dancing, so you're not going to get pumped up about lifting a bench. But the real meaning of this is to elevate your party, to raise the roof and take your party to the next level. And it's a prime example of needing both language and cultural context to truly understand the situation. Now, when you move to a new country is when you subconsciously develop a new identity. You're learning the language at the same time that you're picking up specific parts of the culture. However, locals often don't have the time to sit down with a new language learner. So you use music, movies and TV as your crutch. When I learned English, my two biggest resources early on were Rush Hour and Snoop Dogg, who to this day is my father's favorite rapper in as much as an Indian man in his 50s has a favorite rapper. Rush Hour was important for me because when I was engaged in a conversation and myself and the person I was communicating with lost track of what was going on, I would simply imitate Chris Tucker and say, do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? Which as a grown man comes off as aggressive, but as a kid, it was cute and endearing. And as far as rap music goes, most of my life is spent trying to live out one rap song or which is what happens when the most influential doctor in your life is Dre. I was tossed into a country without any prior language knowledge again, right after graduation, when I moved to Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. While the technical role of a Fulbright scholar is to be an English teacher, your actual job is to be an American cultural ambassador. And I was stationed in a town called Erzurum, which is in the northeastern corner of Turkey, closer to Tehran than it is to Istanbul, a fact that made my parents very happy. In fact, Erzurum is the eastern most NATO base in the world and the closest to Iran, which is why it's commonly referred to as the rock. Now, before I went to Turkey, I had a couple assumptions. One, I thought a religious society would be cold to someone who's so immersed in Western culture and frankly, not Muslim. I also thought that as one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, it would have a heavy level of English speaking. I could not have been more incorrect. So my first two months, I learned Turkish by using books and a software called Pimsleur, both of which were great resources, but only gave me a surface level knowledge of Turkish. When the conversation got out of hand, I would just nod my head and repeat the phrase to mom, which means okay. And that's when I stopped using books altogether. And I did what every young American male does. I started going to Turkish tea houses or chai houses. A chai house is generally an older building full of lots of rugs, mostly retired Turkish men, some TVs playing a local soccer match, and an endless supply of three things, chai, gammon, and cigarettes. This is what the typical chai house looks like. It was at these chai houses where I would spark up conversations with elderly Turkish men referred to as amcas, which means uncle, because they're like everyone's uncle. And every conversation started in the same way. I would tell them I'm American and I speak broken Turkish. They didn't believe me. Then I would start speaking Turkish and they would say, you're Iranian. And I told them I'm American, they didn't believe me. Eventually you'd make it past this initial stage of the conversation. And I noticed how the amcas made their voices intentionally deeper and used more aggressive vocabulary. Men and women changed their tone and their vocabulary based on the gender with whom they're conversing, a norm I'm sure is not isolated to Turkey. But these amcas taught me so much about Turkish culture that books simply could not. First they started to destroy my biases. Simply because I was American and of a different religion, they were even warmer to me than I had expected. In fact, I had piqued their curiosity because they hadn't met anyone with my background prior to that point. Then they started teaching me how to order kebab in the right way, ajula and pishmish, which means well done and spicy. Then they taught me about arabesque music, which is so depressing that it makes Adele sound like Flo Rida. So depressing, in fact, that the lead arabesque singer has a phrase tied to them, which is bir bilet alana, bir cilet bedava. What that means is with every ticket you buy, you get a free razor. That's so bad, even Evanescence is not that depressing. The amcas would then ask if I would convert, marry their daughters, and take them to America, to which I politely refused. I then used the cultural learnings from the amcas in class to create a deeper exchange between myself and my students. And this helped facilitate a more personal touch in the classroom. My students gave me the music of Tarkan and Hadise, along with the comedies of Cemil Maz. In return, I gave them fresh prints of Bel Air episodes and rap music, which led me to receive this text earlier in the summer. For those of you that can't read it, it says, bro, I have started to listen Drake and Kanye because of you, how beautiful they are, thank you so much. With the blessed hands. Those are your tax dollars at work, America. And then I started to incorporate topical debates into the classroom, mostly centered around student life, like should homework be mandatory or not. But then I had a student approach me about Ferguson. Started asking questions about race relations, guns, the police, et cetera. So we held a debate on Ferguson, which led my students to create the following sign. It says, we are all Michael Brown. And this, regardless of your political beliefs, stood out to me as a very powerful moment. Because our classroom went from just learning a language to establishing a greater cultural exchange and understanding. We went from covering present progressive tense to voicing present progressive ideology. These students, many of whom left their birth cities for the first time, took learning a language from a classroom chore to a greater cultural connection and wholly embraced the idea of going beyond boundaries. And the student who exemplified this most was Farooq. Farooq came from a family of seven in Kars, a town even more remote than Erzurum. His family was very conservative. His parents got married when they were around 14 years old and started having children shortly thereafter. As a result, Farooq held certain beliefs that are quite common of people from big families and rural areas. He was conservative, both religiously and culturally. And early on in the course, he didn't really participate, barely made any semblance of effort. But then as the class proceeded, he became more active, more engaged, he started watching TV shows and movies, he started coming to my office hours. So I asked Farooq when he stopped being so shy, and he looked at me kind of confused. Told me he was never shy, he's been an extrovert for most of his life. So I asked why he didn't speak in my class earlier. And that's when he told me it was because he used to not trust people who didn't believe in the same God he did. And he especially didn't trust Americans because they were going places and trying to take over. Keep in mind, in villages like Farooq's, fear of losing their state or religion were a reality only a few decades ago. There are pockets of America where people hold comparable beliefs simply because they don't have the exposure to believe otherwise. However, in my class, Farooq learned that people of other religion will not always try to convert or corrupt you. That Americans don't always look like imperialists. Sometimes they're petite Indian gentlemen with dense beards. Through learning English, Farooq found access to a world unbeknownst to him. He started with more formal classroom English and then started watching How I Met Your Mother and other sitcoms. He started listening to American music. I made a belieber out of him. Farooq started showing American movies to his family that they'd previously banned to show how Americans can, in fact, be a friendly people. None of this would have happened had he not started taking the course, but then started taking the extra initiative to explore a culture that goes beyond his comfort zone and everything else he's learned prior to that point in his life. Beneath each of these anecdotes lies an example of how language learning has led to greater cultural exploration. Music not only helped me make friends, but it also helped me be more introspective while I learned English. Movies helped change the demeanor of how I speak to people. Even events in the news helped my students explore learning a language and then also explore a culture and the deep nature behind a nation's cultural fabric, both what makes it great and what tears it at its seams. We are about four months into the new year. Your resolution of going to the gym more often has gone to the side for Giordano's lunch special. I mean, who can resist, right? But you can take on a new challenge. Instead of stopping at learning a language, try to take a deeper understanding of a culture and see how you can destroy your preconceived notions. In my case, my time in Turkey and my relationships that I'd built with the students helped me have a greater appreciation for the deeply religious. They helped me realize that a strong adherence to one's faith is not always at odds with intellectual curiosity. Standing out to an unfamiliar group of people or in an unfamiliar country can make it easier for one to be judged. But it can also make it easier to show what you represent, the values you stand for that inspire you, that inspire a nation. While learning English, I was able to convey Indian traditions and culture to the elderly Christians of Houston in the same way I was able to convey American culture and traditions to the elderly Amjas of Erzurum. Because language and culture are constantly molding each other, which is why you have a different vernacular than that of your parents, because language isn't just a set of words. It represents who we are at different stages of our lives. Language and culture help us understand ourselves and our neighbors better, and that is how we go beyond boundaries. Thank you.