The Mother Tongue in Foreign Lands
Malgorzata Budzynska Dora Hamisson
I am from Poland, a country very homogeneous from the point of view of national minorities and languages.
Polish language is spoken by around 38 million people in Poland and several million Poles throughout the world.
Today, the world is dominated by English language.
It’s is a global language which has become the primary language of science, medicine, technology and of course culture.
The omnipotence of English is not a bad thing - indeed it facilitates the development of technical thought andresearch.
It also facilitates the international exchange of new ideas in the global market, resulting in expansion and dissemination of knowledgeof different cultures.
Other languages suffer from such a quick, vast and powerful expansion of English language and as a result, small and not-so-small nations face a big problem.
There is a danger that over the next century, many of national languages may disappear.
Such a slow “linguistic fading” can become a disaster for many cultures.
The development of the culture and of the language are strongly related to each other. We all know the cases when the language disappeared along with a culture.
In the daily life English slowly, step by step, dominatesthe whole areas such as banking, financial services, international trade, or medicine and technology.
Today we observe a lot of borrowings from English language to Polish language. Rapid emergence of new equipment and technology does not leave enough time necessary to create and implement a series of new, our own polish words.
For example, we say "computer", "pen drive" "hover board". And we do not have its polish equivalents.
So now we can see the important role of people who write in polish language, who create novels and books that are read by polish people in the country and aboard.
At the beginning I mentioned a large emigration of Poles. Most emigrants went to the USA, Great Britain and Germany.
It is characteristic that the first generation still speaks fluent Polish. For the second generation - learning the language of their parents is a difficult task.
Polish language becomes for them a foreign language, and the learning of it does not come naturally.
What we would need in our days is a Mother Tongue Based Multi-language Education.
My native language belongs to the family of Slavic languages. It is difficult to master - there are very few foreigners who speak Polish fluently. And there are very few truly outstanding translators from or to Polish language. And we owe them a lot.
We are proud of our literature - 4 Poles received the Nobel Literary Prize (Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905, Władysław Reymont 1924, , CzesławMiłosz in 1980 and WisławaSzymborska in 1996).
I strongly believe that this prestigious award contributed not only to a renewal of polish literature but also to disseminate grater knowledge about it in the whole world.
I am graduated from Warsaw University, Spanish Language and Literature. My interest in Spanish Language started after reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude", written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
It was a 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize.
The impact of this great novel, one of the most significant in Latin American Literature was so strong, that I took a decision to learn Spanish and to study Latin American Literature.
Why I am telling you this story?
Because I hope that the Nobel Prize for Sienkiewicz, Reymont, Miłosz and Szymborska contributed to the fact that somewhere in the world a few people started to learn Polish.
I am happy that being polish and writing in polish, I can be now here in Shanghai and join the group of writers from so many countries.
Thank you very much for creating such a possibility, it is an amazing feeling to be able to say a few words in my own language, here in China.
I really appreciate that a country with one of the world’s oldest culture, a country with a language most spoken in the world (14.1% - a fraction of world population) invites writers from other countries.
The program of Shanghai Union of Writers becomes a kind of a linguistic bridge, a bridge of understanding and appreciation of other cultures.
Thank you very much.