Club Profile: Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors
Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors occupies a unique position in Reed’s bevy of student organizations, both in its status as a program run within the Linguistics Department and its particular mission. In the past few years, the program has worked to educate the community while bringing people together through constructive social events. Through these efforts, the goals of Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors have centered around combating linguistic discrimination.
“Our whole goal is spreading awareness of … linguistic diversity and linguistic discrimination on campus and in academia as a whole because a lot of people are not really aware of what linguistic discrimination is,” said Lead Ambassador Daniela Buchillon-Almeida. “They don’t see it [to be] as bad as social discrimination, despite the fact that often linguistic discrimination stands in for other forms of discrimination.”
Aidan Mokalla, another of the program’s Lead Ambassadors, related the concept of linguistic discrimination in terms of academic settings like Reed. “There is an ethos or an understanding that you’re supposed to write or speak or talk in a certain way in conference, in your essays, in your papers, projects, that’s very formal and very similar to how white Americans – upper-middle-class white Americans – speak,” Mokalla explained.
Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors have worked with the Reed community in a variety of ways to build awareness of linguistic discrimination. This includes presenting to faculty and staff on the ways linguistic bias presents itself in academia and the diverse linguistic backgrounds that students bring to campus. Additionally, events for the program’s student volunteers have focused on embracing individuals’ unique linguistic differences through activities and movie nights.
“The goal is to hold [linguistic diversity] up on a pedestal as a good thing, a cool, interesting thing that happens when we have all this diversity in how people speak and all these cool ways to communicate similar information,” said Mokalla.
At the moment, the program aims to expand its reach to the greater Portland community with a project to distribute multilingual science dictionaries for elementary schoolers, in collaboration with the Science Outreach program. “If you don’t have the technical, really specific vocabulary to talk about science, you can’t help your kids with their homework and you can’t help them when they have questions,” Mokalla explained further. “So we’re compiling a dictionary of translations of the thousand most commonly used technical terms in 5th grade Portland curricula into written Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, [and] Russian.”
Reflecting on her time with Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors, Buchillon-Almeida described the program as “a really good experience for learning how to work independently with other people,” while “a lot of [the work] has been us trying to figure out organizing our own time and creating things just from scratch on our own.”
Summarizing Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors’ mission of publicizing linguistic discrimination, Mokalla stated, “If you understand what someone is trying to say, then they did their job of communicating to you successfully.”
Anyone interested in joining Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors can email Aidan Mokalla or Daniela Buchillon-Almeida. Alternatively, they can add themselves to the Google Group (lingambassadors@groups.reed.edu). Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors is also currently looking for someone to check Chinese and Spanish translations for their dictionary project with Science Outreach.