Philippe Bérard: Navigating the Language Triangle in Argentina

Humans have been multilingual for millennia. So have the various forms of education in which they’ve engaged. Modern trends toward bi- and multilingual education may seem new to some, but are actually a part of a much longer historical arc. Case in point: English-Spanish education at the Westminster-Juan Bautista Alberdi School in Buenos Aires, in which half of the academic subjects were taught in English and half in Spanish. It was this program that Philippe Bérard attended in elementary and middle school years in the 1960s and 1970s. But wait—there’s more! Philippe’s father was second-generation French, while his mother emigrated to Argentina from France as a teenager. As a result, French, not English or Spanish, was the language of Philippe’s home. Each school day, he would leave his French-speaking home to attend the Westminster wing of the school, where literature and history courses were taught in English. That took care of the mornings. He would spend the afternoons at the Alberdi wing of the school, taking math and science in Spanish. He navigated this language triangle every school day until high school, where all instruction was in Spanish. Philippe would grow up to become a veterinarian, bringing to bear all three of his languages on his profession and his personal lives. We also discuss linguistic enculturation and linguistic acculturation.