PM’s globetrotting brother speaks at teachers’ language conference
Self-professed language “floozy” Alexandre Trudeau, brother of the prime minister, spoke at a gathering of teachers in Edmonton Friday, saying language education can help unite a divided world.
“I’ve begged for my life in Arabic in Baghdad, I’ve retranslated Chinese poetry, I’ve whispered sweet nothings in Serbian, I’ve learned the 60 or 70 words for fish in Japanese,” said Trudeau after a keynote address at the Languages Without Borders conference, organized by the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers and Edmonton Public Schools.
“I call myself a language floozy,” he said jokingly. “I’ve had many
In some sense (Syria) was kind of the Cuba of the Middle East — kind of socialist, strong education system. It was actually very multicultural …
short, passionate affairs with many different languages.”
A documentary filmmaker and a director of the Trudeau Foundation, Trudeau was invited to speak because of his focus on language and intercultural education, school district director Janice Aubry said after the keynote at the Shaw Conference Centre.
Trudeau speaks fluent English and French, as well as eight other languages with varying levels of proficiency, and shared stories about communication and misunderstandings during his travels.
While filming a documentary in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion in 2003, he pleaded in broken Arabic with a grief-stricken man whose family had been killed in an explosion. The man had a gun and thought Trudeau was responsible before an Arabic-speaking friend diffused the situation.
He spent time in Syria, and in 2006 produced a film on the Canadian government’s detention of refugees.
“At that time it was a peaceful place,” he said. “In some sense (Syria) was kind of the Cuba of the Middle East — kind of socialist, strong education system. It was actually very multicultural and very tolerant.
“What’s happened there is a disaster, it’s terrible.”
Around 48,500 Edmonton Public School students are enrolled in second-language courses, which are mandatory in between grades four and nine. Seventy-eight per cent take French, while Spanish, Chinese and Arabic make up around three-quarters of the remainder.
Trudeau likened learning a new language to turning on a light in a dark room.
“You’re lighting up things you never knew before, sides of yourself you didn’t know.”
Brother Justin Trudeau gave a keynote at the conference on his father’s legacy and official bilingualism before becoming prime minister.