By Monica Apondi
This Fall we will be publishing a series of spotlight articles about multilingual students and faculty at DU. These articles are based on interviews that Dr. Kamila Kinyon and a group of multilingual students conducted about interviewees’ lived experiences, including continuing connection to heritage languages, role as writers and teachers at DU, and thoughts about multilingual and multicultural identity. This project is funded by a Faculty Research Fund Grant awarded to Dr. Kinyon for 2023-25. We welcome this opportunity to celebrate DU’s multilingual community.
Samantha Tshibanda is from DRC Congo. She was born in Congo and grew up in Zambia. She and her family moved to Zambia when she was 2 months old. She does not have any memories of Congo at that age or moving to Zambia. But her household was very much Congolese despite living in Zambia. They ate Congolese food and kept the Congolese culture which she finds to be very similar to the Zambian food and culture. She expresses that her parents did a great job incorporating the two cultures.
She speaks 3 languages which are Swahili, French, and English. Swahili and French are both spoken in Congo and English is spoken in Zambia. She mostly spoke French at home. Her parents would sometimes speak to her in Swahili, but she would respond in French. As she grew up, Samantha and her sister would mix a lot of English and French in their conversations sometimes and people would get confused, something that she says she found funny and liked very much. Samantha learned all these languages at the same time.
For her schooling, she went to a French school, where everything was taught in French. Her parents put her in a French school so that she could at least speak French, since French is the main language spoken in her country Congo. But the country she lived in (Zambia) spoke English, so she had to attend English classes from kindergarten while her parents at home spoke to her mostly in Swahili. Similarly, her grandmother could not speak French fluently or English, so Swahili came in handy. Her grandmother can understand a few words in French, so she would sometimes mix Swahili and a bit of French. Her extended family mostly speaks French mixed with Swahili. She did not go to school to learn Swahili, but she learned by listening to her grandmother and by her parents speaking to her in it.
Learning English was hard in the beginning, because English was not spoken at home for her. It was French or Swahili. Back in school it was French, and she was not allowed to speak English in school. So, there was no way for her to practice in English apart from the sessions in English class. She could try to speak English in the grocery stores, but she was very shy and limited her English whenever she was out.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she spent most of her time watching numerous English shows and this made her more comfortable speaking English. She believes watching the shows made her English better.
Samantha grew up speaking all three languages and mixed them sometime, but contexts and situations would call for specific languages to bring the point home. She says: “If we wanted to say some jokes, we would say it in Swahili because it sounds funnier in Swahili or if you are fighting, you would fight in French because it hits harder.” She also says that she finds Swahili more formal and more expressive compared to English and French. For instance, saying sorry in Swahili is very strong. She says: “It’s like, ‘please forgive me,’ while in French it’s like ‘Ok, sorry’. But English is like the lowest level of ‘sorry.’” She always felt that if she says “sorry” in English, it does not come out as deep as it would in Swahili. In as much as she understands and speaks Swahili fluently, she says that different countries that speak Swahili have different accents and pronunciation of Swahili words. The Swahili in Congo is mostly mixed with French, so there’s some words she may not know in Swahili, because the ones she knows are a mix of French and Swahili.
She is however not as fluent in Swahili, compared to English, because she is not sure she can understand all the different Swahili accents that exist. She says: “to be fluent in a language you should be able to understand other people’s accents, and I don’t think I could understand the Kenyan Swahili, because they have different accents.”
She however says she can read Swahili because it’s very simple and read as written. “It’s kind of like Spanish, where what you see is what you read, unlike French and English which have accents, and different letter combinations make different sounds.”
In the French School she went to, students were not allowed to speak English in school; they were required to speak only French, which she thinks makes no sense. She and her fellow students preferred to speak English, because it was easier than French.
Samantha feels that she has mostly been dominant in English, just because of the places she has lived in. Even when she went to a French school, she was still most comfortable speaking in English, because that’s what most people speak, not just in the school setting but also in the outside world. And now that she lives in the US, she mainly speaks English. In her last 2 years of high school, she switched schools, so she started learning everything in English.
She also says that in Zambia there are native languages there that are very predominant, which are Bimba and Yanja. She had a Zambian friend, and she would sometimes speak to her in Nyanja, and some words in Nyanja are very similar to Swahili. One thing that she found challenging about incorporating these two cultures was that in Zambia she is not considered Zambian and in Congo she is also not considered Congolese, because she cannot speak the native languages in either of the two countries, and if you don’t speak these countries’ native languages, you are then not considered to be from these countries. So, since she couldn’t speak the language in Zambia, she cannot be considered Zambian, and since she did not grow up in Congo, she is too Zambian for Congo.
When she switched schools, she joined an American school, because she knew she wanted to continue her higher education in English. At this point, she was much better in English and the only thing that was challenging for her was doing math in English, because she had never done that before, so that was a hard switch.
Moving to the US was not a challenge for Samantha, regarding language requirements and communication, because she had already switched to an English-based school in the last 2 years of high school, which gave her a chance to practice more English. She did not take a language class which is a requirement for non-English speaking students. Samantha says that she has met a few people who share a similar language to her own in the US, and since language and culture are very intertwined, it makes her feel at home. According to her, being multilingual has been very advantageous. She did not have to take English classes, hence less workload, and she could probably get an opportunity to help other people learn new languages by tutoring different languages.
She then switched to the American School. It’s just called the American school, but the school is not based on the American system and therefore does not teach American Standard English. So when she moved to the US, she asked a friend to read her paper, and she had several spelling mistakes, because she was not using the standard American English in her paper. For instance, she would write “emphasise” instead of “emphasize.”
She was not aware that there exist different versions of English.
Thanks to technology, she quickly set up her computer into American Standard English, and this was very helpful.
Samantha says she is expected to write papers in Standard American English a lot of the time, and it’s not hard for her, because she has already been doing school in English, and it will be 3 years soon. Her professors are not aware that she speaks a different language: “A lot of people don’t know I can speak different languages. They know I am from a different country but do not know I speak a different language because apparently an accent.” She is aware of the language center where students get help with writing if they need it. She says it is great and helpful but hasn’t used the resources yet because technology has been sufficient for her, so she does not find it necessary. However, she encourages other students who didn’t grow up speaking English to optimize on these resources at the language center. She also feels that at DU, there is freedom of speech, and not like high school back in her home country where she was restricted to speak a particular language. Even though her professors do not know she is multilingual, she feels that they still assume she comes from a different country due to her accent, so if they see the spellings errors in her papers, they will probably let her go. She thinks that there’s not a lot of clubs that incorporate language at DU. But there are many clubs that incorporate culture, which she appreciates because she can meet her fellow Africans, but they all speak different languages except English, so she thinks having clubs based on languages would be a great idea.
She expresses that the university is good at bringing people together and suggests that the university could do better to support and celebrate multilingual students and shouldn’t assume that everyone just came from a different city within the U.S. and can speak Standard American English. She would also like an opportunity to share her background through the Language Center.
Finally, she would like everyone to be mindful of where someone comes from, because sometimes little things can hurt a person. She advises her fellow students to be mindful of their surroundings and not assume that everyone is from the same place as them, because language and accents have a direct relation to culture. By saying something about someone’s language or accent, you could be saying something about their culture.