Life & Language: Navigating the Language Barrier

I’ll never forget the day when an interesting combination of words came from a family friend’s mouth.

“Estoy muy ‘embarazado’ porque no sabía que eres bilingüe” (I’m very ‘pregnant’ because I didn’t know that you are bilingual).

I’m sure my face was a combination of bewilderment, interest, confusion and intrigue all at once. I came to find out that this particular family friend had traveled to Latin America and thought he had a strong grasp on the Spanish language.

This story and many others mark the wonder of words that appear to be cognates, but clearly are not—what some Spanish speakers call “los falsos amigos”.

In this case, a Spanish speaker would know that embarazada is the Spanish word for “pregnant,” and “embarazado” does not exist because, well, maybe that goes without saying. At any rate, my family friend thought it sounded like a good guess for the word, “embarrassed.”

In the United States, when someone refers to a “language barrier,” chances are that person is referring to a non-native English speaker who does not understand U.S. English.

“Careerealism”, a business blog that deconstructs some unacknowledged business taboos in the U.S., identified some interesting facets of language barriers in the workplace. According to the report, which was written in August of 2013, one in 10 people in the U.S. also spoke Spanish in the household and self-reported that they spoke English “less than well.”

Beyond that, the idiomatic, trite language to which U.S. English speakers often cling is not exactly conducive to clear communication. “Some abbreviations can cross over Spanish language barriers, like ‘etc.’, but for someone who speaks a non-European language like Chinese, Arabic or Hindi, it is simply a clump of meaningless letters,” writes Joshua Turner, the article’s author.

Which brings up another interesting point: according to Ethnologue, an organization that gathers and catalogues world language data, Chinese and Spanish are the two most widely-spoken languages in the world, followed by English, Hindi and Arabic, respectively. According to the data, almost two billion people in 33 countries reported a Chinese dialect as their first language, 414 million in 31 countries self-reported Spanish and 335 million in 99 countries self-reported English.

Language barriers are tricky to navigate, yes, but, to borrow my family friend’s wording, it looks like the future is pregnant with solutions.

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