Photo Courtesy of Britannica
By Victor Meza
Soccer at Southwestern College is almost always fun to watch.
It can be even more fun to listen to.
Our polylingual college can sound like the United Nations or the Tower of Babel depending on one’s language orientation. Don’t bother bringing a translator, things move way too fast.
Last year’s soccer team led by former Turkey national team player Cem Tont was a lesson in the unique culture of the borderlands. Coaches instructing in English. Players running the field in Spanish. Fans cheering in Tagalog, Chinese and Somali. Coaches cheering in Turkish, Spanish and English.
Unlike most American professional athletes, elite soccer players are as talented with language as they are the futbol. Lionel Messi speaks Catalan, Spanish and passable English. Liverpool superstar Mohammed Salah, an Egyptian, is fluent in Italian, Arabic and English. Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal speaks Italian, Spanish and English besides his native Portuguese.
Belgium legend Romelu Lukaku may be the world’s most linguistically gifted soccer player. Born in the Belgium Congo and raised in Belgium, the goal scoring machine speaks Congolese, Italian, French, Swahili, Lingala, English, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish and Portuguese and can fake it in most African Bantu languages.
Southwestern’s bilingual soccer teams generally practice with their coaches in English, though they switch back and forth between English, Spanish and borderlands Spanglish while running drills. When it’s game time their coaches give them final instructions in English, often with a verbal pat on the back in Spanish.
Defender Miguel Perez said Spanish is the default tongue once the whistle blows.
“Usually we decide to speak Spanish on the field because most of us are not as good at English as we need to be to speak quickly in English,” he said. “We are thinking in Spanish on the field. In other parts of our lives we have that little extra time to slow down and translate the Spanish in our head to English.”
Tont, an international soccer player and citizen of the world, is pragmatic about language.
“Southwestern is an English-speaking school with tens of thousands of people capable of speaking many different languages,” he said. “Communication on the field is different than communicating in other places. It has different connotations and emotions.”
Last year demographic data reported that Southwestern College students and staff speak 57 languages. (The staff of the Southwestern College Sun can speak 11.) Legendary biology professor Dr. Nouna Bakhiet was a native Somali speaker who learned Arabic to earn her Bachelor’s degree from a university in Libya. She earned her Master’s in biology in Germany after learning German. She then moved to the United States and earned her doctorate at an English-speaking university. She spoke English—her fourth language—perfectly and used it to create the biotech program at SWC.
Bilingual Jaguar goalkeeper Mateo Ponce is from Mexico City. He said he enjoys the back and forth between the two great languages of the coastal borderlands.
“Most of the players are good in English and Spanish,” he said. “It might be just a couple words we don’t understand sometimes. If we don’t understand we just go with the flow of the match and it is solved.”
Slangy expressions like “tranquilos” (stay calm), “subimos” (an acknowledgement of success) pepper matches, along with praises like “bien” or “eso!” (There are occasional outbursts of saltier Spanish expressions not fit for a family newspaper.)
Women soccer players are Southwestern are also mostly bilingual, though there are a few more players with limited Spanish. The women skillfully—almost intuitively—switch between English and Spanish depending on who they need to communicate with at a given moment.
Lady Jaguars coach Carolina Soto is bilingual and switches languages as needed. SWC’s Lady Jaguars Soccer Team is the reigning league champion, so whatever languages its players use seems to work.
Tont said language is secondary to the run of play and the quality of the players. The upcoming World Cup will frequently feature players and head coaches from different nations trying to negotiate language. The United States recent had coaches whose primarily language was German. For years African and Asian teams that were relatively new to elite global soccer competition had coaches that spoke European romance languages and translators chasing around after them.
“Soccer is great because it is popular around the world,” said Tont. “I like to think futbol is the universal language.”
