Benn Williams
Introduction
Do foreign languages really matter?
High school me treated Spanish as a chore: short-term gains and grades, no long game. The summer before starting college, I met a German couple who embodied the importance of language – he was bilingual, she struggled despite a decades-long relationship with the US – so I added German to my studies. At first, communication was not fluid and I felt extremely ignorant, but with time, a minor in German became a major and a semester abroad with a rather good accent thanks to my (sole) American-born and -educated professor of German (Thank you, Herr Lloyd!)
A romance led me to French (mais oui) and France. The seeds planted thirty years ago, after only one year of intensive French study, have blossomed into lasting transatlantic friendships, fascinating archival research during my UIC doctoral studies, a life abroad, an unplaceable accent, over two decades of freelance translation, a Lireka habit, and an appreciation for multilingualism, for multiple selves, and multiple perspectives.
As a staffer at UIC, I work hard to send graduate students abroad for their research, for language acquisition or polishing, for possibly a lifechanging adventure. Learning new languages opens doors to new dimensions and dereifies the human condition. What’s the old joke? “What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. Someone who speaks just one? American.” Don’t be the butt of the joke, l’object de moqueries et de blagues.