The Department of Information and Culture, Vocational College, Universitas Diponegoro, held a series of public lectures titled “Guest Lecture on: Understanding the Needs of Multilingual Skills in the Globalization Era” which took place on 22 – 23 August 2023.
The aim of this public lecture is to provide knowledge to participants about the importance of foreign language skills in the era of globalization. As is known, studying a language gives us insight into many things, whether in the form of culture, thought, world issues, and so on. The speaker at this public lecture is an assistant lecturer from the Faculty of Humanities, The University of ELTE named Mr. Aron Bence Laki.
Before the presentation, Mr Aron asked what the participants’ goals were in learning a foreign language. The participants gave their personal reasons such as wanting to seek contacts from abroad, traveling around the world, studying or pursuing a career abroad, and so on. Mr Aron himself added that the important goals in learning a foreign language are that language is a means of communication, understanding specific professions, being able to work in a company or multicultural environment well, and also getting to know different cultures.
“You get to know what they’re thinking, you can learn the language from them, you develop your way of thinking, you understand their culture better,” he said. Apart from that, he added, “There are different lingua franca in the world, lingua franca refers to a language which was agreed to be officially used in a big area, it’s like people from many different countries that use one particular language to communicate with each other, for example; Indonesian. There are a lot of languages spoken in Indonesia but we all agreed to use Indonesian to communicate therefore it became the national language.”
There are many lingua francas based on regions such as Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Tagalog, Persian, Spanish, French (in fact French is widely used in various countries on the African continent due to French colonization in the past), Swahili ( a language widely spoken in east African countries, such as Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and others), Hausa (used in west African countries, such as Nigeria, Burkina faso, Niger), Russian, and Mandarin. The only and first language in human history to become a world’s lingua franca is English, which was influenced by British colonization and also the influence of the United States.
The real goal of the Department of Information and Culture so that students know the importance of learning languages as a basis for intercultural communication. The participants enthusiastically participated in discussions on this topic, contributing to the discussion during the event.
Authors: Misykah Auliya Ghifara & Adena Trya Ramadhanty
Editor: Jihan Ainiyah Firdaus
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