I study in Leuven, in the officially monolingual Dutch region of Belgium, and for the first time in my life I have absolutely no idea what the people around me are saying. The initial sense of alienation and not belonging is difficult to describe aside from the obvious: you are a functional mute and deaf person. I never before realized the utter importance of being able to talk to someone else; I think that that was something I learned to take for granted from an early age. I never before realized to what an extent I had allowed myself to become comfortable in my language, to expect everything to be instantly understandable and in my native tongue. Which made coming here extremely sobering, as it forced me to recognize my previous passive comfort in English just as I lost it.

Immediately upon arriving in Leuven I understood just how all-encompassing my American cushion of language was: menus, street signs, fliers, songs on the radio, instructions for cooking food-- I could not understand any of them. To utter a word was to display my ignorance, to talk to another American was to demonstrate our foreignness, to go out was an exercise in bravery. The first restaurant I went to in Leuven had two gerbils in a cage in its foyer and we weren't able to read the nearby placard to know whether they were pets or dinner. The only reason that we were even able to order dinner there and have any degree of certainty that we weren't going to get gerbil was because our waiter spoke English.

This is not a complaint, it's a statement about the level of linguistic indifference that we grow used to in the States as natives. Everyone speaks English, and upon encountering someone who does not, the fault becomes theirs that they cannot understand you as opposed to you not being able to understand them. Misconceptions about how to overcome language problems seem to abound in the States and in the American mentality as a result: if we speak really loudly and slowly then everything that we are saying will become instantly clear, as though a change in volume and velocity are enough to bridge a communication gap. To a certain extent this is a fair practice, as much of the world now has a working knowledge of English, but when did Americans learn to expect-- demand, even-- that everyone speak to us in our language?

I admit that this expectation has saved me countless times while here in Europe and bumbling about with my infantile Dutch, elementary French, and fluent English. Even so, it comes as something of a shock when the cashier at a corner store can switch into well-versed English while I, an ostentatiously well-educated college student, can still only dream of being able to do the same in any other language besides my native tongue. Loyola does require a certain level of proficiency in a language for each of its students, but I doubt that even this can compare to the stores of knowledge that Europeans possess of their second and third languages. I see this daily in the English literature classes that I take with native Dutch speakers, classes that are taught in English and concern material such as the plays of Shakespeare. Knowing how difficult it is for me to work through the often archaic language of his plays, I cannot even imagine the stores of knowledge that a non-native speaker must possess in order to do the same.

While some of my initial reactions of lingual alienation and cultural ostracism strike me as extreme in retrospect, I think part of the reason for this is my American mentality that demands a certain level of homogenous existence. Not that we don't encourage individualism, but that this freedom of expression in daily life rarely extends to language. Sure, we can get away with saying just about whatever we want to, but the unspoken understanding is that it will be in English. This is obvious even in the microcosm of Loyola: foreign movies are sponsored through the Honors Program because of the perception that they are "cultural" and "artsy" as opposed to just good movies in another language, International Students had to arrange their own Fair to celebrate their culture because they would never have been given the chance otherwise, every class, advertisement, and sign at Loyola is in English even though our college houses an increasing number of international students.

I am not suggesting that we allow our country or Loyola to devolve into some strange melange of languages in order to make everyone feel more comfortable, as I realize both the impracticality and ludicrousness of that suggestion. But Americans do need to stop seeing learning a second language as some sort of remote academic endevour to be tolerated for a time and then abandoned. While our country has recently entered an era of "political correctness" in which pride in one's motherland is becoming vogue, this is still not precisely what I'm talking about. What I mean to address is the inherent demand that we make daily in America that those around us should speak fluent English. We instantly become frustrated and even exhibit anger towards those who cannot understand our English, and tend to dismiss or marginalize those whose English we cannot understand. The European mentality is completely different and infinitely more welcoming, resulting in continual exchanges of cultural information and linguistic idioms. In Leuven I can typically converse with anyone in English and my attempts (and mutilations) of Dutch are accepted with openness and an apparent lack of belittlement, the counterpart of which I can't acknowledge in our American mentality.

Studying in Leuven is intimidating, because I still don't know the language and struggle daily as a result thereof. It is also incredibly rewarding and continually eye-opening, as I begin to question things that I had never before even noticed about myself and my country. While I will be grateful to understand what is going on around me when I return home at the end of this year, I shall also carry with me a remembrance of being unable to do so. And I think that it is the latter that justifies my year here beyond anything else I have yet to learn or do.