AHMAD | A Letter to Multilingual Students

This past weekend, the internet informed me about yet another native-English speaker lashing out at someone for being able to speak more than one language. Unfortunately, this is not a novel incident. Over the past few years, we’ve all become accustomed to various instances of people who are a little bit too in love with the English language. What makes this particular incident different, however, is the fact that the perpetrator was not some screaming dude in a mall being filmed on a bystander’s iPhone. Rather, it was Duke University Prof. Megan Neely, biostatistics, who sent an email to her graduate students advising international students to stop speaking Chinese amongst each other and instead speak English at all times.