Learning Otherwise · Urban Humanities
I once interpreted for a man who practiced architectural ornamentation — the carved, molded, detailed plasterwork and stonework that can turn a plain ceiling, archway or façade into something extraordinary.
It is a disappearing craft in many parts of the world.
He had learned it from his father, who had learned it from his grandfather, in Syria. It wasn’t simply a trade. It was a family language, passed from hand to hand long before it was ever written on a résumé.
Then the war came.
He fled Syria, rebuilt a version of his craft in Turkey with different materials and different clients, in a language that was not his own. Eventually he was accepted as a refugee in Canada — a third country, another set of tools, another unfamiliar system.
I met him because he needed an Arabic interpreter.
Not for his work. For a doctor’s appointment.
At the time, his English was very limited.
His craft was not limited at all.
Within a few years of arriving, he had built a reputation working on high-end homes and restoration projects. His skill — the kind very few people in Canada could reproduce — made him difficult to replace. His clients didn’t need him to describe his work in polished English. They needed to see it. And once they saw it, the conversation was already underway.
A language that doesn’t need words
He taught me something I have encountered again and again in twenty years as an interpreter:
A person’s ability to speak a dominant language and a person’s ability to contribute meaningfully are not the same thing.
I’ve met Syrian refugees who arrived with very little English but with considerable knowledge in their hands: mechanics, tailors, cooks, builders, repair workers, craftspeople. Their English developed at different speeds. Their livelihoods often could not wait. They communicated through demonstration, repetition, trust, photographs, gestures, tools — and, eventually, language.
In some cases, their skills were the first language through which Canadian society came to know them.
That distinction matters. When we describe someone as having “limited English,” we may be accurately describing their English — while accidentally implying their capabilities are limited too. Those are two very different statements.
The accent that doesn’t slow anyone down
I think about the craftsman when I meet IT professionals from India, China and across Africa working in tech companies throughout North America. Many speak English extremely well. Some have strong accents. But few people working alongside a brilliant engineer think, for very long, that the accent is the important story. The code works. The system runs. The problem gets solved. The accent is simply the sound their competence happens to arrive in.
The craftsman and the engineer look like they belong to different worlds — plaster and stone versus algorithms and code. But something connects them: their competence exceeds the linguistic signal through which other people first encounter them.
That is where our conventional idea of fluency starts to break down.
We’re still using an old definition of fluency
When a government form, school assessment, employment application or healthcare intake asks about someone’s English level, it’s measuring one narrow thing: can this person understand, speak, read and write English effectively?
That’s a legitimate question — sometimes an essential one. But it isn’t the same question as what can this person do, and it certainly isn’t the same question as how capable is this person of participating in society.
I call the bigger idea civic fluency — the ability to participate in, contribute to, navigate and be recognized within the economic, social, cultural and institutional life of a community. Language is part of it. It isn’t the whole of it.
A person can have high professional fluency and low dominant-language fluency. High cultural fluency and low institutional fluency. High economic fluency and developing civic fluency. High digital fluency and limited linguistic fluency. These aren’t contradictions — they’re ordinary features of life in a multilingual city.
The question isn’t whether someone is simply “fluent.” It’s: fluent in what?
The problem of recognition
But having a skill isn’t always enough — the skill has to be recognized, and that may be the most consequential hidden challenge immigrants face. An employer doesn’t recognize a foreign credential. A tradesperson can’t navigate a licensing board. A business owner can’t parse a regulatory system built in someone else’s second language.
There’s a gap between what a person knows, what a person can do, and what institutions are equipped to recognize. That gap shapes employment, income, entrepreneurship, belonging — and, ultimately, how well a city uses the human capability already living inside it.
I’ve spent twenty years standing in the places where these definitions of fluency collide — doctor’s offices, courtrooms, schools — watching capable, sometimes remarkable people get reduced to a checkbox: Limited English.
That checkbox may accurately describe one thing. It cannot describe the whole person.
The danger isn’t in measuring English proficiency. The danger is mistaking one measurement for the whole person.
Civic fluency is not an excuse to abandon language
One qualification matters here: saying English proficiency isn’t the same as overall capability does not mean English doesn’t matter. It matters enormously — limited proficiency creates real barriers to healthcare, education, employment, legal protection, political participation. That’s precisely why interpreters, language education and accessible institutions exist.
The goal isn’t to replace language learning with a romantic idea that “skills are enough.” It’s to hold two truths at once: people need language access, and people already possess capability before they acquire it. Those truths coexist.
What recognizing civic fluency could actually look like
If “limited English” is the wrong single measure, what would a better intake question look like — in a clinic, a classroom, an employer’s HR form?
Something closer to this:
What do you already know how to do, in any language?
Who in this community already trusts your work?
What have you built, repaired, taught or cared for — before you had the English to describe it?
What credential, license or system stands between what you can already do and being recognized for it?
None of this replaces an English assessment. It sits beside one — because the two questions answer different things, and institutions built to ask only the first one keep missing the second.
Back to the craftsman
I think about him still — not because his story is unusual, but because it’s ordinary in a way our institutions haven’t caught up to. He walked into that doctor’s office needing me because a health system, quite reasonably, runs in English. He walked out of it into a city full of homes that needed exactly what his hands already knew.
Two different fluencies, moving at two different speeds, in the same man, on the same day.
If a city measures him only by his English, it sees a man with a limitation. If it looks at what he actually built, it sees a master craftsman. Most of what he brought to Canada — the skill, the training, the eye — never showed up on that checkbox at all.
The World Is the Lesson.