The World Doesn't Speak English

And that's a good thing.

I was born in Madagascar, so my first language is Malagasy.

The language I spoke with my mom, my dad, my entire family, every day. Then, because Madagascar is a former French colony, I learned French. I speak it pretty well. It’s a beautiful language.

Years later, I learned English. I still remember my silly method: during university in Canada, I would play TV shows like “Three’s Company” and “Family Ties” in the background, even while I slept - immersion through magical osmosis, I thought. LOL. It took a bit more than that. But today, I speak English too.

Life has its funny turns. I later went to Italy as an expat, and I learned Italian. Another beautiful language.

And here I am.

I speak four languages. Two of them very decently, the other two rusty—but they’re there, somewhere in me. Madagascar handed me Malagasy. France’s colonial reach handed me French. Canada gave me English. Italy gave me Italian.

None of it was a plan. All of it was serendipity. A gift.

And that gift gave me something more than vocabulary.

It changed the way I think. The humor I can access. The grief I can name. There are things I can say in French that simply don’t exist in English. Malagasy concepts with no translation -not because the words are exotic, but because the worldview is different.

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Right now, in our newly connected world, English is winning. And I think that is narrowing us all.

Not because English is bad. It is not. It’s the global language of business, the language of Shakespeare and Hemingway- flexible, efficient, economical.

The danger is in dominance. Dominance can make the English-speaking world believe that their window is the whole landscape. It is not.

Most of the world does not operate in English. Most of it doesn’t think in Anglo-Saxon frameworks, doesn’t laugh at American references, doesn’t grieve in an English register. There are entire philosophies, entire ways of being human, that exist only in other languages.

The growing global English-speaking world is not the standard, not the default, not the measure of everything else. It is one part of it. One beautiful, powerful, limited part.

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When you speak someone’s language, you enter their world. You see, however partially, through their eyes. And you become humble - because you know what it feels like not to know. To fumble. To hesitate. To reach for a word and come up empty.

That humility is not weakness. It’s what we all need today.

So yes. Learn a language. Any language.

Not for your résumé. Not to seem interesting at dinner parties.

Learn one because it will break something open in you that nothing else can. Because it will show you that the world you’ve been living in is a fraction of the world that exists. Because it will make you a little less sure of yourself - and that uncertainty, that humility, that empathy, is exactly what we need more of right now.

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