Languages at Grace: The Community Speaks
Art provided by Juliette Robertson ‘25
Languages are doors to foreign lands, vibrant cultures, delicious cuisine, and fascinating histories far beyond the walls of Grace. Knowing a language other than English can help people immerse themselves in other cultures and expand their worlds.
Around the world, people speak a plethora of languages, forming the basis of personal and global communication. At Grace, students and teachers speak a variety of languages at home from around the world. The dialects extend past the ones taught in Grace classrooms—French, Spanish, and Mandarin—reflecting a wide range of countries, continents, and cultures.
Ali Al-Maqtari, a Grace French teacher, is fluent in French, Amharic (the national language of Ethiopia), and Arabic. When considering the value of learning foreign languages in modern life, he explained that “the value of learning another language is to know the people from this language, not just the people, the mindset, the culture, the food, the music.”
Likewise, Adrian K. ‘26, a fluent Russian speaker, identified culture as a driving motivator for his love of the language. His mother grew up in Moscow, moved to the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and spoke Russian with him as a child. When describing Russia, he said , “I think culturally it’s such a great nation. Being able to understand and speak Russian, you’re able to immerse yourself in it a little bit more and get to appreciate the culture on a higher level.”
Jade C. ‘27 speaks Korean. Her family is Korean, and Jade explained, “I could say something, and then they’d be like, what? And then I’d have to brokenly translate it into Korean. So I figured, you know what? Maybe I should just try to become fluent in Korean again. So I just started learning.”
She explained how learning Korean can be relatively easy: “Well, I don’t mean to brag, but Korean is one of the easiest languages to learn when you’re an English speaker,” she said. “It has the same amount of characters (26) as English does. And it’s a relatively easy language to learn just in general.”
Gustavo Jimenez, a Spanish teacher, published fiction in the regional language of Basque, spoken in the Basque region of Spain. He discussed how languages are not word-for-word translations of each other. Languages have many nuances, interesting structures, and cultural influences informing how a language is spoken. “It’s not just the ability to say things in a different language,” he said. “That’s what I try to teach my students. If we could really pick a word for every word in another language, that would be great, but it just doesn’t work that way.”
Today, the need to learn languages may seem obsolete with the advent of technologies and artificial intelligence that do the translation and conjugations for you. However, Grace’s students and teachers are proof that the only way to really understand a foreign culture is to immerse yourself in its language.
| Language | (phonetically) |
| Hindi | Dhanyavaad |
| Gujarati* | Shurkran |
| Russian | Spaceeba |
| Hungarian | Köszönöm |
| Portuguese | obrigada/o |
| Amharic | Amasaginalo |
| Arabic | Shoukran |
| Dutch | Dank ya |
| German | Dánke |
| Korean | Gam sam mi da |
| * state in western India |
Wilson Urist ‘27, the author, is a staff writer for The Grace Gazette.