The Connection Between Language and Culture

Language for me has always been really, really important. And although my most significant research interests have always been in multicultural education, for me, language is an essential part of that. I don't think that you can have multicultural education without having an awareness of language. Taking language into account is absolutely essential in education, not only bilingual education, not only multicultural education, but education in general.

How do we preserve that language, which we know language is always changing? So like in Spanish, for example, there are a lot of words that we call Spanglish because we have this experience of living in this country. Just like in Puerto Rico, there are a lot of words in English that have been sort of brought into the language. Language is always changing, but it always has a cultural element. So language is really important because language is culture also. You can't separate those two.