SPEAKING IN TONGUES

Dan Hamilton spends most of the year in Washington, serving on the policy-planning staff of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. But in July, as he has for the past 16 summers, he will pack his bags and disappear into the woods near Bemidji, Minn., where he will assume the identity of Karl, dean of Waldsee (lake in the forest), a village where everyone speaks German.

Founded as a language-immersion program of Concordia College, Waldsee is one of 10 foreign-language clusters of Concordia Language Villages, where authenticity is a watchword. When 5,200 children (ages 7 to 18) "cross the border" into their respective villages for one to four weeks, they will be issued passports and exchange U.S. dollars for the appropriate foreign currency. Newcomers will be advised that speaking English is verboten. Speaking German, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Chinese or Japanese is de rigueur.

While these virtual expatriates will find shops, cafes and banks in their villages, they won't find a schoolhouse. Rather, they'll be living in the language of their choice: playing sports, re-enacting historical and political events and tuning in to their village's simulated radio and TV stations. There is little point, reason Concordia's leaders, in becoming proficient in a language and not absorbing some of the Weltanschauung of the country in which the language is spoken.

Their approach bears the most fruit in the popular four-week high-school-credit courses. Nine hundred villagers, ages 14 to 18, will be in one of these $1,850 sessions (some financial aid is available). "We try to get the credit villagers using the surroundings to experience the language and culture as intensively as possible," says Hamilton. "Nature is to German culture and history what the Wild West is to Americans and the ocean is to the British." To this end, some credit villagers will take part in Grune Welle (green wave), an immersion program in environmental studies. "We don't flinch from the more difficult topics either," reports Hamilton. "This summer we'll be doing a Holocaust memorial service with the four-week people."

Not every activity is quite so earnest. In the middle of one night each summer, campers will be roused and taken to an unlighted soccer field, where they will be instructed to wait for the sound of a horn. When it sounds, a torch-bearing stranger, dressed in medieval garb, will arrive to blindfold the young Schuler and lead them to the Marchenwald (fairy-tale forest), where they will be treated to a medieval German play.

Concordia Language Villages, 800-222-4750. The Japanese-language credit program is closed out for 1997.