Let’s swap language and culture stories.
Themes that run throughout this personal reflection and invitation: Humor. Surprise. Vulnerability. Wonder. Personal growth. All are always aspects of the miracles of language and culture.
Throughout, I invite you to remember your stories. Share your adventures in language and culture with those near and far!
We all have such stories. Many of them. And this challenging time in our world is the time to reflect on what they have taught us, or what they could have taught us, what they have taught others, and if we can retell old stories and tell new ones to build up the human community, as language is designed to do.
Share your stories on my social media posts of this podcast, or write me directly at fluency.norahjones@gmail.com and we’ll gather up a treasure house!
Enjoy the podcast.
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Transcript
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0:00:00.0 Norah Jones: Well, I’m looking forward to sharing some language and culture adventures with you on this podcast so that you can share language and culture experiences in your own imagination and also with the others that are around you in your life. Let’s take a look at that together. And I’m recording this particular podcast at a time in 2023, when we have just heard news of plummeting language enrollment figures from 2021 in the United States. And although, that’s a United States specific data point and phenomenon, the idea of what role languages play in nations and globally is always an ongoing conversation. But let’s start with the fact that we learn about ourselves as individuals through language. We learn how to connect to other human beings through language. We learn how to identify ourselves with a culture through language. And even though language is an everyday miracle, or perhaps because it is an everyday miracle, we forget sometimes the important role that language plays in making us human as individuals, as members of families and communities, as members of a human family around the world.
0:01:36.5 Norah Jones: We forget sometimes that language seemingly so simple, is actually the key to every opportunity for health and wellbeing inside ourselves and outside in the world. So it seems timely that we should do a bit of an adventure reflection as we now take a look at some of the challenges around the world, both in say, language studies in this case as I gave for my opener, and also in the way that language and culture connects and sometimes, it’s in conflict. Let’s share those adventures. Let’s take a look at how it is, that language affects us. And have some fun, because language is so much fun. Let’s get started.
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0:02:29.1 Norah Jones: So, we begin the stories of our adventures in language and culture with me sharing a story from when I was a late teen when I met Homer. Homer is just so famous, the Odyssey, the Iliad and Greek and all the other languages in which is translated. I mean he is the poet, and thousands of years old, yet he came out of the mountain to meet me. I had been with my mother and father in my father’s natal village on the Dalmatian coast. We got into a fisherman’s boat and we tooled up the peninsula on the Adriatic Sea and moored at a place that still is a wonderful location for people to go and relax, although it’s more developed now, than when I was a teen, but it was called Divna. Divna had a wonderful bay like place where you could relax on the pebble beach and we set up a bit of a place to grill fish and we had brought the other two important necessities in the boat, namely good solid red wine and nice fresh bread that my father and I had picked up from the village bakery that morning.
0:03:49.3 Norah Jones: We put out our picnic and we enjoyed the water. And next thing smelling the fish and hearing the noise of people having a good time, a man came down out of the mountain. It was almost magical, frankly. He had on a, the traditional everyday work clothes of a person that lived in a small village and he carried in his hand an instrument with which you may be familiar, at least analogous. It’s called a gusle, G-U-S-L-E. The gusle is like a lyre. It has four strings and a bow in which the fret can be pressed and the bow is back and forth making just a simple series of notes to accompany sung recitation, sung poetry. In this case, our anonymous visitor sat down on the beach front near us, and began to sing the tale of the bravery of the local men and women in the face of various invasions during World War II.
0:05:10.5 Norah Jones: As he sang each stanza of this story, he connected it to the bravery of citizens of this region over centuries. He would sing and sing and sing this story and then once in a while, he would stop and we would then provide him a piece of fish and we’d provide him a little bit of bread and of course, we’d provide him a good goblet of red wine. And he would drink the wine, eat the bread, and eat the fish. And then he’d start right up and continue singing the story.
0:05:52.2 Norah Jones: I don’t know if you have read the book called Singer of Tales. It is authored by Alfred Lord of Harvard University. And it still tells the story though of Millman Perry who went to this area of then Yugoslavia when about the 1940s, ’30s and ’40s, and recorded these Guslar, those are the men and women, but mostly men that were sing accompanied by the Guslar. The Guslars used the same concepts that we see in the storylines of Odyssey and Iliad because the Odyssey and the Iliad are sung stories with repetitive motifs. And there was perhaps one Homer, but that one Homer was only captured as an amazing singer, perhaps if he indeed existed. Much like Millman Perry recorded some of these singers who could remember thousands of lines of Sung’s story. But in fact, what Homer, again, if he existed in fact was doing, was singing stories that had been sung long before. And those stanzas and those repetitive motifs, which in Croatian happened to be called Rec, R-E-C.
0:07:34.9 Norah Jones: So you don’t wonder about that word. That Rec word means, word. And the word is actually like a collection of a phrase, something that can be memorized and helps the thinker to think. We do that with our regular speech ourselves, when we use words that help us to take a little time to think of the next thing. A lot of folks use the phrase, you know, or even sounds like Um in English. These poems recited out loud are thousands of years old. The storytelling where people sat around a fire just like we were sitting, eating fish or meats just like we were sitting and eating fish, breaking bread together in fellowship just like we were doing. And yes, drinking wine and enjoying the fellowship of time. And then when you do that in this traditional approach to how humans learn together, which you have is some Homer that sits in the middle to tell a story, to sing a song, to keep the tradition going, to speak about those things that move our hearts, that make us cry, that make us laugh, that make us brave, that connect us one to another.
0:09:02.8 Norah Jones: Those around the fire and those that have preceded us by years, centuries and millennium. That was my Homer adventure. I met him indeed. I learned so much about the bravery and the sense of what is honored in my Croatian background culture through that man who’s only asked that day was an audience, some fish, bread and wine. Who are the storytellers in your life? Are you the storyteller that passes on the history of the family, the history of the community, the history of the culture, the history of human beings? Is there someone else that you’ve come across that has played that kind of role for you? That role of Homer? Remembering what needs to be remembering, helping to add the details that only an individual actually singing or speaking that story at this time can do. And thereby adding to the history of humankind that present in all of its power. Who are the homers in your life? Could be you, could be someone you’ve met, but please let us remember them. Let us encourage them. Whether we read homers out of a book in front of adults or children, whether we tell stories ourselves, we are the connectors through language to what it means to be human. Who are the homers in your life? I had a chance to meet him. I hope you do too.
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0:10:48.9 Norah Jones: I taught eighth through 12th grade students for over 20 years. And one of the things that just made me feel so tender towards them, probably why I stumbled into education in the first place and wanted to be in front of young people is that I recognized how tender our psyches are, as adolescents and how we just know we’re going to die if we embarrass ourselves and how through God’s grace and through the background that I had, that I had an opportunity to experience that I didn’t die from linguistic and cultural embarrassment. So, I’m going to swap a couple stories with you. Let’s see which one or ones of these relate to something you may have done or to the stories that you’ve heard from others including say young people in your family or if you’re an educator in your classroom or just taking a look at what is it we’re very afraid of, and yet when we go down into it, the language and culture relieve us of that fear?
0:12:12.4 Norah Jones: Let’s take a look at it. First of all, and my first story is when I was in late elementary school. One day, I was looking at the table in our kitchen and there was a loaf of bread sitting on it. It was a typical, I might say, US loaf of bread, a kind you buy in plastic and it’s pre-sliced. And I had finally at that particular age realized that my dad was not from the United States originally and that he had a background that made him sound a little different to my friends and that he would go downstairs and listen to interesting music that I liked wonderfully, but it certainly didn’t sound like the kind of music we listened to on the radio. And so this particular day, I looked at this bread sitting on the table and it came over me that I wanted to know how it is that my dad’s language background would say this thing. So I said to him, as in when he walked into the kitchen, I said, dad, how do you say bread in Croatian? That’s a pretty good question for a sixth grader, don’t you think? And my dad said, “It’s kruh.” I’ll spell it for you today, K-R-U-H, Kruh. And I went, oh cool, Kruh.
0:13:38.6 Norah Jones: Then I said the following, but deep down, dad, they know it’s bread, right? I always remember that happening to my mouth and my brain. Deep down, they know it’s bread, right? Before we’re exposed to anyone else’s language, if we’re brought up in a monolingual household, we think of what’s in our head as being the reality. Of course we would. Why would we not. The same as we feel culturally that what we are eating is the way everybody eats. I have a blog and video about some of these concepts and one of the blogs that I wrote on my website is about the tuna fish sandwich challenge. Namely, if you use tuna to make a sandwich salad type thing that we all make it differently, but when we grow up we think there’s only one kind of tuna fish salad sandwich, until we get to somebody’s house or we go to college or we get married and we have a significant other somewhere and they just don’t know how to do it right. That was the mood. It wasn’t a nasty mood, obviously I was a child. Deep down, they know it’s bread. That’s linguistic funny money, I called it. When I was in my educational space where hear this word and it doesn’t resonate with us that it’s real to speak about that. So how do they say bread? Kruh. That’s nice, but deep down, they know it’s bread.
0:15:38.6 Norah Jones: The same kind of thing. At least a different level happened after I started taking languages, I took Spanish and in middle school and then Russian added to that once I got to high school. So by the time I got to Croatia and met my cousin, I was more prepared for the fact that she was going to be making sounds that meant something to her that I didn’t know. But here’s the next thing that I did, let’s see how it resonates for you. Namely, as soon as I got off the ferry boat into my dad’s village, there was my cousin that I’d never met before and I had prepared a sentence to greet her and just talk about how small the village was, which now I realize was also culturally kind of clumsy. But I had prepared it in Russian because hey, that’s a Slavic language. And I spoke this nice clear, correct Russian sentence to my cousin and she looked at me like, well, like you would look if you didn’t know Russian and I gave you a full complete Russian sentence to greet you and you didn’t know Russian, how could it be that even though Russian is a Slavic language, that she didn’t understand any of it? The whole concept of languages are different from each other and cannot be just guessed at, was still something that I had to learn at my young age.
0:17:12.8 Norah Jones: That kind of mood got into also what happened when I was in my courses. I watched that in my students. Like I say, I think this is one reason why I resonated with the students so much, wanted them to speak, wanted them to understand that where they were going was an adventure of learning how people thought and sounded differently and it was meaningful to them. Not linguistic funny money, not cultural funny money. So, here’s what happened. One day I was, in this case, teaching my Spanish one class and I had students in the classroom and then there came a knock on my classroom door. I turned to the left and looked at through the window there and there was my French colleague. So, I gestured for my French colleague to open the door and she did. And I asked her in French if I could help her with something.
0:18:06.1 Norah Jones: And she answered me in French, what she needed to know, do for the day or whatever it is that was on her mind, I have actually forgotten. And we had a bit of a conversation where she got what she needed, I understood what she was looking for, we maybe had a couple of pleasantries and I had kept my attention focused on this colleague of mine while speaking French. And then she closed the door. I turned back to face my classroom. And every single eye of that young group of level one Spanish students, their eyes were just bugged out. And luckily, happily, and this is how we grow, as parents, as community members, as educators, as employers and as colleagues. Happily one student spoke up and he said, senora, you were really talking something, weren’t you?
0:19:13.6 Norah Jones: And I said, yes, that was French. But what was going on in his mind? And what happened to every single student basically in that class that day was they realized that the sounds that they were making, like the sounds that I was making were actually communicating something, were actually exchanging the information that they were used to exchanging in English. It was their moment where they got out of, but deep down they know it’s really bread, right? That moment. That moment when they realized there’s a whole new way, a whole new code to be able to dig down deep into someone else’s life. And they were off and running.
0:20:02.0 Norah Jones: It was wonderful to watch. All right, fourth little vignette. Let’s see if you can relate to this. Which story in your life are those of others about this whole idea of embarrassing yourself or making yourself realize that you were actually supposed to be communicating something and getting into it. And here we go. I have in front of me right now a crystal award, the kind you get at trophy stores. It was made for me by my father, and it has the phrase that happened when at age 16, completely shy, completely. I’m definitely in the adolescent nervous system setting that we know happens neurologically of rather die than make a linguistic mistake than rather than be in front of people. The whole nine yards of really devastating what we call shyness. But I wanted to shop in a city to buy an anniversary present for my parents while we were visiting Croatia during their anniversary.
0:21:17.8 Norah Jones: So, I steeled myself against those that would want to talk to me, so that I could avoid humans as much as possible while still doing this task for myself, by memorizing in Croatian the phrase, I’m only looking. Very much of an American cultural thing, by the way. But still, I didn’t know that then either. I’m only looking. I went to the first store and indeed and adult male came out and he was approaching me and oh, I didn’t want anything to do with the human. So I used my phrase, I’m only looking, and his eyes widened and he stepped back a little bit and then he walked back towards the back of the store and he left me alone. Perfect. I looked around, but I didn’t find what I wanted there. But emboldened now, over being able to take control of my own avoidance of humans, I went to the second store, same thing.
0:22:23.6 Norah Jones: Man comes from the back, approaches me. I use my amazing phrase, he too, his eyes widen. He backs up. I figure they can tell I’m not Croatian. So, they’re probably surprised that I can speak Croatian. Now I’m starting to feel not only protected a little bit, but pretty saucy as well. I went to five stores doing the same thing each time in order to be left alone. And in the fifth store, I found what I wanted, gestured to have it wrapped up. And that night I brought that present to my parents where they were celebrating their anniversary dinner. And my father, who always was delighted to see his daughter engaged in anything having to do with language and culture, was shocked that I was able to go shopping in the big city by myself. And without knowing Croatian, have purchased this item. So he asked me to tell him the story.
0:23:19.9 Norah Jones: So, I began to tell him the story using, as I have done with you, the phrase in English, “I’m only looking.” And he said, no, no, no, no. I want to hear it in Croatian. So bear with me, I’m going to give you the Croatian in order to make the point about language and how we don’t die. Here we go. I said, okay. I came up whenever they came towards me, I said, Ja samo gladam. Now, I apologize to those of you that know Croatian, okay? Please do not delete this podcast. Alright, please. Okay, put up with it. Because my father’s eyes widened. My father backed up his chair a little bit and he just was staring at me. And I thought oh, this looks a lot like each of the men that came forward from the back of the store in each of the five places that I went and used this phrase.
0:24:24.6 Norah Jones: And then my father clearing his throat a little bit said, “Ah, so what you were saying should have been Ja samo gledam.” Now let me reproduce the sound for you. The last word that I actually was saying was pronounced, or I was pronouncing it gladam. It should have been pronounced gledam. Ja samo gledam with the eh sound means I’m only looking. Ja samo gladam with the ah sound means, well, it means literally I’m only hungering. But there is a, shall we say, an underlying less than happy meaning for this particular verb. And I, a 16-year-old was walking into stores with men proprietors pronouncing this sentence. So, I managed to embarrass myself and luckily to meeting wonderful gentlemen in each case that did not take advantage of my, shall we say, linguistic problem.
0:25:57.1 Norah Jones: I realized that I had managed to embarrass myself deeply all over the city in Croatia. I didn’t go shopping in that city again for at least three years. And then I think I wore like a hat just in case they remembered me. But here’s what else I learned. I learned how to say Ja samo gledam. I learned the importance of the small sounds that change meaning, and that I try to reproduce them as best as I can and teach them as best as I can and keep my mind going carefully into the accuracy that speakers actually expect in order to be able to communicate clearly. But the key thing that I learned was that we don’t die of trying to speak a language when it is clear that we’re trying. We sound like people that are eager to connect to humans, that are eager to understand new ways of speaking and thinking and acting, understand to add them to our lives, not to change into anyone else, but to add them to our lives.
0:27:16.1 Norah Jones: I’ve used the phrase before in my other podcast, language is additive. Cultural understanding is additive. I became more myself and I became more myself by crashing through that barrier of embarrassment. Once I realized I wouldn’t die of linguistic embarrassment, I then became fearless. And I’ve watched students do that too. The young man in my Spanish class who did not even want to come into the door, who could barely be heard if he answered one word at the beginning of my Spanish one class, who through careful, incremental, and loving growth in the way that language works, was standing up at the end of that year to talk for two minutes in Spanish about himself using props. To this day, I’m so proud of him for what he accomplished, how he learned that you don’t die of embarrassment when you use language, when you grow your skillset in front of people that are accepting you and going to let you live through it.
0:28:33.6 Norah Jones: To this day, I honor the fact that the guidance counselors took me seriously when I said, put those students that you normally don’t allow into language classes because of their lack of accomplishment in some of the, what we would call maybe core courses, especially English for example. Let them in, and let’s watch what happens. And they always resonated with the language. They always understood that there was a magic here, to help them to manipulate life in a new way. They weren’t always A students by the time they got done, but they never failed, and they didn’t not fail because I was just like, I’m going to give them a path. No, they worked. It was a new way of being able to express their humanness, to understand others, to enter into new cultures and to begin to share the culture that sometimes they had been embedded in because of their own struggles. And watching their guardians, their parents, their siblings, rejoice with them over the fact that they didn’t die of linguistic embarrassment.
0:29:49.4 Norah Jones: So when you think about some of these stories, when you think about how we think about how others sound and when we understand that language has meaning, and we understand that when we try that, that we’re entering into an opportunity to connect with people and that we don’t die from the embarrassing mistakes that we will inevitably make. And when we bring that understanding to others, our colleagues, our community, our family, our students, if we’re educators. Which story or stories do you resonate with? Which experiences have you had? Which ones have you observed? And how does language then, language and cultural understanding make it so that there’s power in your life and the life of others? And if you let me know about it, I might send you a plaque. I know I’ve enjoyed my plaque, which is engraved with the exact wrong phrase in Croatian that my father managed to repair in me those many years ago.
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0:30:56.8 Norah Jones: So we’ve had a couple of linguistic adventures. Let’s see. Which ones of these cultural adventures prompt your experience in your travels or life and community or family? My first is, going back to my father’s natal community, a fishing village in Croatia. When I first came, that same visit in which I regaled my cousin with Russian, though she doesn’t actually know that language, this was my first meal. The meal where the family and extended community was all gathered together to celebrate the return of my dad to his village. My grandmother was just so delighted to welcome him and his wife and her granddaughter. Wow. And so, food on the table, plates are filled. We begin to eat and I pick up my fork and I begin to eat. And as soon as I begin to eat, the whole place stops. Everyone is staring at me.
0:32:06.2 Norah Jones: I don’t know why. Next, all eyes turn to my grandmother. She’s staring at me with that look that older family members get when they’re kind of judging whether or not this child is actually going to make it in the world or not. And then she turned to the rest of the folks at the table and she said in Croatian. So I didn’t understand what she was saying, but she said it in such a regal matter of fact, grandmother voice, “This is my granddaughter, therefore everything is fine.” And everyone went back to eating. I asked did I, though wondering what had just happened. And my father told me later that it was because I had picked up my fork and was eating with my left hand. Coming from the United States, culturally, that meant nothing outside of the fact that when I was little, they kept in school trying to change me into a right-hander, which didn’t work. But when I was in this more traditional setting at the time, left handedness still had the sense of potentially being about evil. But my grandmother had declared me clean. And so I was able to eat thereafter, drink thereafter, used thereafter my left hand with all of my cousins and aunts and uncles and community members with nothing more being said.
0:33:42.4 Norah Jones: That was in my Croatian cultural community. Many years later, our elder daughter went to Japan to work two years with the Japanese Exchange Teacher program, the JET program. And we wanted to visit her, we as her parents, her younger sister. And so she told us that we would have to prepare Omiyage, that is to say gifts for the various folks that we would be introduced to that were part of her life living and teaching in Japan. She mentioned that not only did we need to get gifts, but the gifts needed to be, for those of you that know Japanese culture, you could tell me many more stories. But she mentioned that the gifts needed to be sort of leveled to the role of the person in our daughter’s life and work. Well, that was about as nerve wracking a trip preparation as I had ever been through.
0:34:54.5 Norah Jones: We would say, can we bring this item here? No, that’s too much for that person to which you intended it. Can we bring these items here? No, that’s too little for the persons that you intended it. And one thing we did do then was to get what we thought was the perfect Omiyage for the town’s mayor, namely a coin that was minted specifically for the 250th anniversary of the town in which my husband was working as an administrator. It was small, it was very nice, and it was municipal to municipal. And when we got to Japan, of course everybody was wonderful and welcoming. And though I know we missed the mark from time to time, the gifts, the Omiyage were well received and our welcome was warm. And our time there was just delightful. And it was delightful in the situation, I’ll tell you now too. But when we went to the mayor’s office and my husband handed the coin to the mayor, the look on his face changed to a sense of, well, we only could interpret it there as embarrassment. He then recuperated a little bit, took us into a room, set us into chairs, had tea brought and engaged us in conversation with much translation by both my daughter and use of English by some of those that knew some English there in the mayor’s office.
0:36:34.1 Norah Jones: We had inadvertently provided a gift that he perceived as being extremely valuable. And it had brought him, for a moment, a sense of losing face in front of us because he didn’t have an analogous gift. So he provided us an opportunity to spend time and speak with him. And all was well. It worked out fine. We all understood that we were all of goodwill. But it was interesting to watch that this particular cultural practice of this, what I’m calling leveled gift giving, was something that was fraught with anxiety for those of us that are from a culture that did not have that same kind of gift giving background, and that despite our best efforts, that we nevertheless crossed a cultural line that created a little bit of problem for our host inadvertently. I wonder if either of those two aspects you have come across where you have been part of a cultural scene where someone has crossed a line, not meaning to, but something that makes you uncomfortable or that makes it confusing for a while.
0:37:53.8 Norah Jones: Now, culturally speaking, we don’t have to go overseas, do we? I happen to have grown up in Washington DC and related to more of the, say, if I can say it this way, the northern cultures, my mother was from New Jersey, for example, with the German father. When I met the man that I ended up marrying, he came from the south, and that was a brand new culture for me. And so I went to, oh, here I go again. Apparently, I am not real good at these family gatherings. I was at the dinner table. I sitting at one end as it were of the table, and my father-in-law sitting at a distance there at the fairly large family table in this southern area of Virginia. And my father-in-law kind man always, looked at me down the table as we were beginning our meal. And he said to me, thank you for the salt.
0:38:58.8 Norah Jones: Well, I thought that was an interesting thing to say because I hadn’t actually passed him the salt. I hadn’t actually done anything. I was just beginning my meal and eating along. And so again, looking at me kindly, he said, “Thank you for the salt. At this point, I didn’t really know what to do because I looked around and down and I realized that the salt was next to me and I clearly hadn’t passed it to him. So, at that point, beloved said to me, he wants you to pass the salt to him. Oh, oh. So, I gladly pick up the salt and pass it forward. But that was my introduction to what could be considered interesting southern speech. Oh my goodness. I could do many podcasts about that. But I think it’s probably best that I introduce you for just a moment to my husband, Willie, who can bring on his own southernism now that I now know how to say, thank you for the salt.
0:40:05.9 Norah Jones: Okay, so I have the southerner here, right with me. Willie, when we have green beans, you don’t let me call them green beans. What do you call them?
0:40:18.4 Willie: Snaps.
0:40:18.7 Norah Jones: Tell me about the snaps. How do you fix snaps?
0:40:22.7 Willie: When you pick the beans, you snap the ends of the beans off and then you break the beans into two or three pieces, depending upon how long it is.
0:40:33.1 Norah Jones: And how do you cook them?
0:40:36.2 Willie: Oh, they can only be cooked with a piece of salt pork and boiled until a good and tender.
0:40:41.0 Norah Jones: Now, I tried to make you what is sometimes traditionally considered a southern dish, chitlins. When we first got married, what happened?
0:40:52.7 Willie: You turned as green as the grass outside. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very successful meal. I fried up a few after you had boiled them, which was the first mistake. Chitlins are always supposed to be boiled outside. Then you fry them inside.
0:41:10.2 Norah Jones: So, Willie, you got a story about chitlins, don’t you?
0:41:14.2 Willie: A friend once told us that when he was a little boy, they would always have hog killing in early November. And he said they would have a couple of men from the community come in to help them with the killing. Said he and his brother got the wise idea that when their mother made the chitlins for these men, they would go and sprinkle corn in and among the chitlins. The two men sat down to eat the chitlins. And one of them said to the other Joe. And he said, yeah, so I thought you said you washed these things out. He said, “I “. He said, well, look here, there’s corn in them. So the little boys who were listening to all of this under the house were just dying laughing. Next thing they heard were us, the two men went outside and they didn’t finish eating the chitlins.
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0:42:13.0 Norah Jones: Thank you for that story, Willie. Appreciate every bit. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to a few adventures of this podcast, and I am especially hoping that as you were listening to the adventures, they made sense to you and in your experience of language and culture. And I hope that you were able to think of cool stories that you can tell about maybe your own, but, and others cultural linguistic adventures because that’s what they are. They’re adventures in humanity. Again, as I mentioned at the opener, we’re facing a interesting time in the world. We’re understanding each other linguistically and culturally can make such an important difference in how we live together peaceably. 0:43:06.3 Norah Jones: We also take a look at the enrollment in languages and the United States, which again are growing a little bit. But the report that has come out this year about the 2021 cataclysmic frankly drop off, especially for those that are entering adulthood and who can use language and culture to connect, to provide opportunities to be better adults, better parents, better community members, better employees through using language and culture to connect more deeply with themselves, more deeply with their everyday colleagues and family members and more deeply with the world. We need it. Language is the everyday human miracle. We have to cultivate it in order to be able to be kind to ourselves and kind to each other. Thank you so much for thinking about the stories in your life that you can tell to others that help to bring this important result to pass in our world. Thanks for listening, and until next time
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