At the Safai Coffee in Logan Street Market last week, Nathalia Egan leaned forward and furrowed her brows, trying to remember the French phrase she learned minutes before. In the background, sounds of Arabic, French and Korean filled the room, punctuated with laughter and the aroma of fresh coffee.
“Uhhh, comment…allez vous?” she said, hesitating.
Her instructor gave her an encouraging nod and participants at her table grinned. Egan’s answering smile appeared to reflect a sense of accomplishment.
Egan is from Namibia and lives in Louisville. She’s the co-owner of Ziba’s Bistro, also in Logan Street Market, and said the French she learned would come in handy to communicate with her business partner.
“He's from Burkina Faso, and he lived in France. So it will just be nice to even understand when he's speaking,” she said.
In an effort to improve language access, Louisville Metro’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in collaboration with Kentucky Refugee Ministries, is hosting Global Language Cafe events across Louisville this summer.
Participants get to dabble in Arabic, Korean, French, Somali, Spanish, Portuguese and Vietnamese.
It’s led by Monica Lakhwani, language access coordinator at the Office for Immigrant Affairs, and Jesse Sanders, cultural orientation coordinator with Kentucky Refugee Ministries.
Lakhwani said the Louisville program is modeled on one from the Netherlands, where people come together at cafes in The Hague to learn Dutch and meet new people.
“We're opening up access to community members who might not otherwise be able to learn a language or be able to even understand the culture, or be familiar with the cultures and the languages that are here in Louisville,” she said.
The free program is funded by a Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund Fulbright grant, Lakhwani said. Lakhwani and Sanders are Fulbright alumni and their project got one of less than four dozen grant awards that are meant to support public service projects.
The program is low stakes – no classrooms, no tests, no pressure to perform.
Participants don’t just learn a language, they learn about different cultures and ways of living.
Back at Safai, at the table from across the French language cohort, students leaned in to hear the Arabic language instructor explain how driving tests in Iran work.
Participants can hop from table to table and sample different languages, which Egan did by choosing French this session and Spanish the previous week. She said she loved the camaraderie and ease that came with learning as a group.
“You're trying some words, it's like we don't pronounce correctly, and then we laugh at ourselves. It was really just a good table,” Egan said.
At another language session across the room, flash cards with basic Korean phrases lay sprawled across the table.
Instructor Soo Young Cho gave her cohort a crash course in Korean sentence structure, speaking softly and deliberately as she arranged the flash cards in order.
The sessions are held in immigrant-owned cafes across Louisville, including Cho’s, KIWA on Frankfort Ave. She said she never expected to find herself teaching people her mother tongue.
“You know, it's the Midwest. So I didn't expect people to be so interested in both Korean languages and cultures, and they actually know a lot about Korean culture. Probably because of K-Pop and Korean dramas,” she said.
As the session wrapped up, the French instructor Stephi Wolf said she learned a lot from her group.
“Everybody in the world, if we could all speak more than one language, I think people would get to know each other a lot better,” she said.
The Language Cafes meet on Tuesday and Thursday starting at 4 p.m through mid-September. More details on signing up and the languages offered are available here.
