The US armed forces have personnel stationed around the globe. There are tens of thousands in Germany and Japan, one lucky naval representative on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, and one (possibly unwelcome) marine in Russia. And then there are the places where troops are engaged in active war zones: Afghanistan (about 10,000 personnel), Iraq (nearly 5,000), and Syria (several hundred).
In most of the 150 or so countries hosting—willingly or not—US military personnel, English is not the native language.
Every year, the Department of Defense (DoD) issues a strategic language list a rundown of the foreign tongues it considers in urgent demand (such as Arabic and Persian), as well as those in emerging (Burmese, Hindi) and enduring (Sudanese Arabic, Japanese) demand. The army reportedly has 14,000 soldier-linguists—just below 3 percent of its active duty roster.
Since 2009, BU has been part of a program giving future officers a solid grasp of these critical languages. Project GO— the GO stands for Global Officer—is a national DoD initiative that funds language lessons and overseas immersion trips for Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) students. BU, which is one of 25 institutions taking part in Project GO—, has awarded 138 scholarships to students learning languages such as Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Hausa, and Wolof; it also offers free online tutoring to program alumni.
“We’re talking about future military officers, for whom the peaceful negotiation of conflict is pretty much number one on the list,” says William Waters, an associate professor of German & comparative literature and executive director of Project GO-BU. “An officer who knows enough of the language to size up situations immediately—and interact appropriately and directly in them—is a vastly more effective officer, one who may literally save lives with that single skill.”
Waters says the centerpiece of BU’s program is the scholarship for domestic or overseas language study. Students traveling overseas complete a year of language study at home before heading to their host countries for eight weeks, taking part in intensive classes and living with host families—even their teachers might not speak English. Students who complete a scholarship are then eligible for maintenance and peer tutoring. The Project GO grant, which has awarded $2.8 million to BU since 2009, also funds CAS faculty development.
In summer 2017, students will have the chance to pick from intensive BU programs in China, Japan, and Estonia—the closest to Russia that the DoD will allow ROTC students to study.
Second Lieutenant Tyler Tweedel (CAS’16) took advantage of Project GO twice. After his freshman year, he had two US-based semesters of Turkish and, in his sophomore year, traveled to Jordan for an intensive course in Arabic. Although his ROTC scholarship means he’ll start out as an armor officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard, he hopes his language skills—he also speaks Spanish—will broaden his career opportunities, and make him a better officer.
“On the one hand, helping us be a more effective fighting force,” says Tweedel of his advantage in understanding local cultures. “And then also preventing misunderstandings, making sure we don’t come across as lumbering evildoers or anything like that.”
According to Waters, the bilingual brain is faster and more flexible.
“Conflict resolution is another skill that’s enhanced by learning new languages,” says Waters. It forces the brain to think in fresh ways: if you’ve learned it’s okay to postpone verbs or skip tenses, the brain is open to different ways of seeing the world.
“Once a person has gone through this process of disrupting and rebuilding bedrock assumptions about what it means to think and communicate, I just don’t think that person could ever be as rigid or as blinkered as they may have been before,” he says. “Once you’ve been immersed in one foreign language and culture, you develop a measure of cultural sensitivity that will go with you everywhere—because it’s you who have changed.”