In our ever-interconnected world, Cultural Intelligence, or “CQ”, is supposedly the latest measure that attempts to quantify one’s awareness and understanding of cultures other than their own. Professor Hu Ying-Hsueh of Taiwan’s Tamkang University, a distinguished linguist, advocated for its importance in a recent lecture at Wellesley College, entitled “How to Cultivate Cultural Intelligence”. I attended the lecture under the impression that I’d learn how one can best develop a tolerance of other cultures. Instead, I simply heard Professor Hu make her case for the development of Chinese Cultural Intelligence in a world where she believes Chinese is steadfastly rivaling English to become the world’s global language, otherwise known as a lingua franca.

A lingua franca is a language that two non-native speakers often use to communicate with each other, which thus has a purpose beyond its native community. Lingua francas exist on every continent, but English is the ultimate lingua franca; it is the language of international relations, business and science. Hu explained that Mandarin currently operates as a lingua franca on a smaller scale than English, and that she believes it will rise to challenge English in the future. This would mean that Mandarin speakers would soon stretch to every corner of the globe, and that Mandarin would replace the international command of English.

In Hu’s opinion, Mandarin establishing itself as a lingua franca would allow the masses to develop a Chinese CQ. She bases this belief on the Whorfian Hypothesis, the social theory her latest research has explored. The hypothesis stipulates that the linguistic patterns of a language lead the speaker to assimilate the structures of the language’s culture, that in turn influences how they see the world. To test this, Hu ran an experiment which entailed teaching a class of international students about Chinese culture, coupled with intensive Mandarin language training. She tracked the progress of the students through surveys and journal reflections, and came to the conclusion that her results proved the hypothesis correct. These foreign students believed that they developed a greater understanding of Chinese culture as their Mandarin skills grew; and according to their reflections, this shaped how they viewed the world around them. The more Mandarin they learnt, the higher their Chinese CQ grew.

Although this experiment seems to rely heavily on her “Mandarin as a lingua franca” theory, I found the results unsurprising. They easily could be explained without a fancy hypothesis as backing. It seems obvious that the students would learn more about China as they continue to learn Mandarin, because without the language skills, foreigners are automatically barred from many “culture-learning” experiences. How can one fully appreciate Chinese culture in all its nuances if they can’t understand museum plaques or read a menu, much less interact with locals? Language is what bridges the gap between being an observer and being a participant. However, Hu uses her linguist background to argue that the the Whorfian Hypothesis is the reason why the students’ Chinese CQ developed. She argues that the construction of the Mandarin language itself plays a significant role in developing this cultural intelligence, because it drives one to grasp the template of Chinese culture.

Both of Hu’s theories-that Mandarin will replace English as a lingua franca, and the validity of the Whorfian Hypothesis- were presented in a convoluted fashion, leaving the audience wondering if we need Chinese CQ in the first place. It’s also clear that her theories come with their flaws, though Hu was reluctant to admit as much. Not only were her experiment’s results entirely based on her students’ self-perception and subsequent self-reporting, she also eventually conceded that “the class was easiest for the Japanese students” on account of the numerous similarities that Japanese and Mandarin share. Hu elaborated on the struggles faced by the European students in the class, taking to the blackboard to illustrate how the construction of Chinese characters can pose difficulties for foreign learners with no grounding in a language that lacks an alphabet. She showed us how the meanings of “radicals”, components that form a character, can be derived, allowing Mandarin learners to develop cognition patterns. She then illustrated how these same radicals exist in characters with irrelevant meanings, undercutting the argument she had just advanced. By conflating oral and written language by assuming one must know how to write a language in order to speak it, Hu’s Chinese CQ theory is only muddled further. If one can already speak Mandarin, why would the Whorfian Hypothesis not be in effect if one simply struggles to write the characters?

Moreover, Hu’s “radical” example only illustrated how far Mandarin is from English, and inadvertently challenged her belief that Mandarin could replace English as a lingua franca. We can look to the dominance of English to garner what makes a successful lingua franca, and perhaps its greatest quality is how similar it was to its predecessor. English succeeded French in lingua franca status, and it can be argued that the similarities between the two languages allowed for this worldwide transition to occur. Hu unearths the stark differences between English and Mandarin, and the challenges in adopting a character-based language if the learner has no basis. If Mandarin was significantly easier for the Japanese than the European students in Hu’s class to acquire, I’m left wondering whether or not it truly has the power to dominate English as the world’s global language.

Despite being central to her lecture, Hu fails to identify if Chinese CQ is something we should be actively developing through our own undertaking of Mandarin- in an attempt to see the world from another perspective- or if it is something we will inevitably adopt if Mandarin becomes the next world language. Will Mandarin ever defeat English to achieve true lingua franca status? Will the Whorfian Hypothesis then cause us all to develop Chinese Cultural Intelligence? I’m unsure. Although Professor Hu’s experiment seems to raise more questions than it answers, it does invite us to consider the value of a linguistic perspective on cultural understanding.