This semester has certainly been a journey in learning the Persian language, but also in self-discovery. Unlike many of the people enrolled in the self-directed language program at the University of Richmond, I had a background in Persian, built up over years of hearing my family members speak to each other. Throughout the semester, from what I learned in both the 105 and 110 classes, I slowly began to understand my family’s culture, language, and how those affected their viewpoints on life that I couldn’t previously understand.
Probably the biggest message that has been imparted to me this semester is how closely entwined language and culture are with each other. One simply does not exist without the other. Growing up, though I could not understand my parent’s language, I tried hard to understand the culture, but it never truly clicked with me. Now I understand that it was because I did not know the language. I couldn’t really appreciate the meaning of cultural traditions like our Norooz, or New Year, ceremony without knowing the meaning of the words that accompanied it. Many of the mannerisms and behaviors of my extended family, who mostly do not speak English, confused me, and I now realize it is because I was not familiar with their language, and therefore culture, and they were not familiar with mine. I am looking forward to being reunited with my extended family in the future, and being able to more sensitively appreciate their culture, along with being able to better communicate with them in their native language.
This semester, I also learned to appreciate why my parents never taught me Persian. Most of my friends who have foreign parents grew up bilingual, and I was envious that I didn’t have that opportunity. But through learning about the experiences of “culture shock” and the New York Times article about bilingualism and the negative views of it in the twentieth century, I can better understand my parents’ rationale. They thought that by knowing only English fluently, I could better integrate into English-speaking society and not have to go through the disorientation of culture shock like they had. Also, neuroscientists previously thought that multilingualism would diminish children’s cognitive capacity, and my parents may have subscribed to that theory. Knowing all of these things from our class readings has taken away my resentment towards my parents about not knowing the language of my ancestors, and has made me more determined to keep studying at it to be able to understand my family better.
Finally being able to understand my family’s culture was hastened by being in the MLC 105 class. Every week, we would talk about the cultures of our target languages, which was our assigned topic. But as many of us also came from other diverse cultures, those would creep their way into the conversations. So even though we were studying Korean, Bosnian, Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Gujarati, we also learned about Turkish and Mongolian, and our classmates’ personal experiences with things like “cultural competence” and “culture shock” – things that we were learning about in class, but for some of us, had actually lived through. Just being able to talk with this group of people weekly for an hour was really enriching, and opened my eyes to the diversity of cultures just in our small class on the small Richmond campus. By learning about such different cultures, I was able to better understand and analyze my own.
I am excited to continue learning Persian in the future. It has given me another way to connect with my parents, even though I am living apart from them for the first time in my life. The better I can understand the Persian language, the better I will be able to understand the Iranian culture and my family, along being more sensitive to the cultures of others.
