By: Lydia Estes, staff writer
Chinyere Victoria Nwankudu did not know that she really liked languages until she began taking her Spanish courses—and subsequently her own Igbo heritage—seriously.
When presented with the opportunity to conduct an independent research project abroad, Nwankudu was interested in exploring the interaction between language and culture. Personally, she hopes to pass her language on to her kids and to preserve as much of her heritage from her grandmother because she recognizes that some languages, like Igbo, are deeply attached to a culture.
As Wofford’s 2017-2018 Presidential International Scholar, Nwankudu was curious about “what happens when tiny languages are put to the test, oppressed or confronted by social movements which manifest in more global languages.”
The scholar is a Spanish and international affairs double major. Before her selection as the Presidential International Scholar, Nwankudu studied abroad and completed research in Argentina. This experience led her to include Peru in her list of places to explore the purpose of language. Then she looked to South Africa and the apartheid movement, investigating the functions of English, Afrikaans and Zulu. Lastly, she wanted to travel to Morocco to study the Arab Spring.
“Did I know what I was getting into at the time? No, but that’s how I came up with the idea in the end,” Nwankudu says.
Part of the challenges Nwankudu faced included not knowing where to start and studying languages she doesn’t speak. Nwankudu is grateful for her experiences which led her to understand that “knowing a project won’t look the way it started once its finished doesn’t mean you failed.”
Nwankudu says by doing research you learn so much about yourself. “You learn how to establish your limits which aren’t learnable in the classroom or through regular research projects. You learn how to think differently,” she says. To Nwankudu, “research is performing the act of thinking; you think as you write, you think as you interview, you think as you edit and revise. And the goal of any educational institution should be to change how students think.”
In Nwankudu’s opinion, Wofford, as a liberal arts institution, should continue to fund the scholarship since “funding a student to change how they think is of the highest academic pursuit a university can offer its students.”
In her research of language, Nwankudu anticipated that she would pinpoint why languages are used in various cases, or to explain their “purposeful purpose.” She found that “it just doesn’t work that way in real life,” and her findings suggest that language is sometimes a causal consequence of generations using the language which their parents taught them and less of a conscious decision. This changed the direction of her study from finding and explaining a purpose to a more comparative study of the different uses of languages across the world.
“Getting on a plane does not necessarily change your life,” Nwankudu says. The traditional abroad experience can be like a “glorified Wikipedia.” Nwankudu explains that, “when you arrive at a random guy’s house in Morocco and you have to interview him, that’s when you learn cultural customs in Morocco.”
Understanding that typically only the elite in Morocco tend to speak French is part of what a student learns abroad inside the classroom, but interviewing a Moroccan who states that he “purposefully banned French from [his] video” puts that classroom knowledge into perspective for Nwankudu. NShe hopes that her project inspires other students to consider opportunities they once thought weren’t possible, “especially since Humanities research is rare.”
