Summer Blog Post

A few days ago I returned from my trip to Italy with my family, we went to a city that I had wanted to visit for a long time, Milan. In the few days building up to my trip, I spent my time frantically planning and researching. I wanted to fit as many things into our trip as possible, a typical habit of mine. But for some reason, I forgot a major detail: language. I am fluent in English and Arabic, and I can speak a little bit of French; but I knew nothing of Italian. I remembered this while I was at the airport, with a few minutes to board and barely had time to try and look up a few common phrases which I could use. Italian was not a language I was familiar with at all, and when I arrived at Milan Malpensa, I knew two words, "grazie" and "ciao". 

The city was beautiful, it really was. On the first day we visited the nearby Lake Como, which was a beautiful lake surrounded by several small towns. Communication in those towns proved impossible very quickly, they were very small towns with not many residents and English was not commonly spoken. Still, since it was a tourist area, I didn't understand the full extent of this language barrier until I got to Milan. Although it was the financial capital of Italy, many people in the city did not speak English, especially in the smaller stores. However, we did get by, and we were able to have full meals in restaurants who had no English speakers. 

This brought my attention to two things. The first was our ability to communicate, two groups speaking completely different languages were able to somehow understand each other. And in a world where "broken English" is deemed unprofessional or unacademic, that seemed like an amazing thing. That leads me to the second thing, that despite that they were not able to speak English, they were all working and doing perfectly fine. Speaking English wasn't a requirement for them, and not having this ability certainly didn't make them any less successful. This meant that anyone who wanted to work or live in Italy, would have to learn Italian. And this creates a sense of identity for the country which I believe is a huge advantage for them. It allows them to hold on to their culture, history and traditions, which strengthens them as a nation. Furthermore, it encourages more people to learn their language in order to benefit from what Italy has to offer, and this makes the language stronger and more popular. I felt this within my first few minutes in the airport, where most signs had large Italian labels followed by smaller, less obvious English translations. I quickly learned that "uscita" was exit, and although that wasn't very helpful in my upcoming interactions with natives that didn't speak English, it just showed how important the Italian language was for its people.