The Impact of Monolingualism on English Speakers in a Multilingual World-Make-up

The following is excerpted from an article on a Web site devoted to higher education. These are troubled times for language programs in the United States, which have been battered by irresponsible cutbacks at all levels. Despite the chatter about globalization and multilateralism that has dominated public discourse in recent years, leaders in government and policy circles continue to live in a bubble of their own making, imagining that we can be global while refusing to learn the languages or learn about the cultures of the rest of the world. So it was surely encouraging that Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fixture of the foreign policy establishment, agreed to deliver the keynote address at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Annual Convention in Boston on November 19. Haass is a distinguished author, Oberlin- and Oxford-educated, and an influential voice in American debates. The good news is that in his talk, “Language as a Gateway to Global Communities,” Haass expressed strong support for increased foreign language learning opportunities. He recognized the important work that language instructors undertake as well as the crucial connection between language and culture: language learning is not just technical mastery of grammar but rather, in his words, a “gateway” to a thorough understanding of other societies. . . . Haass claims that in an era of tight budgets, we need convincing arguments to rally support for languages. Of course that’s true, but — and this is the bad news — despite his support for language as a gateway to other cultures, he countenances only a narrowly instrumental defense for foreign language learning, limited to two rationales: national security and global economy. At the risk of schematizing his account too severely, this means: more Arabic for national security and more Mandarin, Hindi, and, en passant, Korean for the economy. It appears that in his view the only compelling arguments for language-learning involve equipping individual Americans to be better vehicles of national interest as defined by Washington. In fact, at a revealing moment in the talk, Haass boiled his own position down to a neat choice: Fallujah or Firenze. We need more Arabic to do better in Fallujah, i.e., so we could have been more effective in the Iraq War (or could be in the next one?), and we need less Italian because Italy (to his mind) is a place that is only about culture. In this argument, Italian — like other European languages — is a luxury. There was no mention of French as a global language, with its crucial presence in Africa and North America. Haass even seems to regard Spanish as just one more European language, except perhaps that it might be useful to manage instability in Mexico. Such arguments that reduce language learning to foreign policy objectives get too simple too quickly. And they run the risk of destroying the same foreign language learning agenda they claim to defend. Language learning in Haass’s view ultimately becomes just a boot camp for our students to be better soldiers, more efficient in carrying out the projects of the foreign policy establishment. That program stands in stark contrast to a vision of language learning as part of an education of citizens who can think for themselves. Haass’s account deserves attention: he is influential and thoughtful, and he is by no means alone in reducing the rationale for foreign language learning solely to national foreign policy needs. . . .Yet even on his own instrumental terms, Haass seemed to get it wrong. If language learning were primarily about plugging into large economies more successfully, then we should be offering more Japanese and German (still two very big economies after all), but they barely showed up on his map. 
The much more important issue involves getting beyond instrumental thinking altogether, at least in the educational sphere. Second language acquisition is a key component of education because it builds student ability in language as such. Students who do well in a second language do better in their first language. With the core language skills — abilities to speak and to listen, to read and to write — come higher-order capacities: to interpret and understand, to recognize cultural difference, and, yes, to appreciate traditions, including one’s own. Language learning is not just  an instrumental skill, any more than one’s writing ability is merely about learning to type on a keyboard. On the contrary, through language we become better thinkers, and that’s what education is about, at least outside Washington.  

The following is excerpted from an online article in a British newspaper. Department for Education figures show that fewer and fewer of us are learning a foreign language, while more and more foreigners are becoming multi-lingual. This, say distraught commentators, will condemn us pathetic Little Englanders to a life of dismal isolation while our educated, sophisticated, Euro-competitors chat away to foreign customers and steal all our business as a result. In fact, I think those pupils who don’t learn other languages are making an entirely sensible decision. Learning foreign languages is a pleasant form of intellectual self-improvement: a genteel indulgence like learning to embroider or play the violin. A bit of French or Spanish comes in handy on holiday if you’re the sort of person who likes to reassure the natives that you’re more sophisticated than the rest of the tourist herd. But there’s absolutely no need to learn any one particular language unless you’ve got a specific professional use for it. Consider the maths. There are roughly 6,900 living languages in the world. Europe alone has 234 languages spoken on a daily basis. So even if I was fluent in all the languages I’ve ever even begun to tackle, I’d only be able to speak to a minority of my fellow-Europeans in their mother tongues. And that’s before I’d so much as set foot in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The planet’s most common first language is Mandarin Chinese, which has around 850 million speakers. Clearly, anyone seeking to do business in the massive Chinese market would do well to brush up on their Mandarin, although they might need a bit of help with those hundreds of millions of Chinese whose preferred dialect is Cantonese.  The only problem is that Mandarin is not spoken by anyone who is not Chinese, so it’s not much use in that equally significant 21st century powerhouse, India. Nor does learning one of the many languages used on the sub-Continent help one communicate with Arab or Turkish or Swahili-speakers. There is, however, one language that does perform the magic trick of uniting the entire globe. If you ever go,  as I have done, to one of the horrendous international junkets which film studios hold to promote their latest blockbusters, you’ll encounter a single extraordinary language that, say, the Brazilian, Swedish, Japanese and  Italian reporters use both to chat with one another and question the American stars.  This is the language of science, commerce, global politics, aviation, popular music and, above all, the internet. It’s the language that 85 per cent of all Europeans learn as their second language; the language that has become the default tongue of the EU; the language that President Sarkozy of France uses with Chancellor Merkel of Germany when plotting how to stitch up the British. This magical language is English. It unites the whole world in the way no other language can. It’s arguably the major reason why our little island has such a disproportionately massive influence on global culture: from Shakespeare to Harry Potter, from James Bond to the Beatles. All those foreigners who are so admirably learning another language are learning the one we already know. So our school pupils don’t need to learn any foreign tongues. They might, of course, do well to become much, much better at speaking, writing, spelling and generally using English correctly. But that’s another argument altogether. 

SoAMERICANS are often told that in today’s globalized world, we are at a competitive disadvantage because of our lazy monolingualism. “For too long, Americans have relied on other countries to speak our language,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at the Foreign Language Summit in 2010. “But we won’t be able to do that in the increasingly complex and interconnected world.”

The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true?

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Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English?” The bureau reports that as of 2009, about 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. This figure is often taken to indicate the number of bilingual speakers in the United States.

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But a moment’s reflection reveals that the bureau’s question about what you speak at home is not equivalent to asking whether you speak more than one language. I have some proficiency in Spanish and was fluent in Mandarin 20 years ago. But when the American Community Survey (an ongoing survey from the Census Bureau) arrived in my mailbox last month, posing that question, I had to answer no, because we speak only English in my home.

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I know I’m not alone. There are countless Americans who speak languages other than English outside their homes: not just those of us who have learned other languages in school or through living abroad, but also employers who have learned enough Spanish to speak to their employees; workers in hospitals, clinics, courts and retail stores who have picked up parts of another language to make their jobs easier; soldiers back from Iraq or Afghanistan with some competency in Arabic, Pashto or Dari; third-generation kids studying their heritage language in informal schools on weekends; spouses and partners picking up the language of a loved one’s family; enthusiasts learning languages with computer software like Rosetta Stone. None of the above are identified as bilingual by the Census Bureau’s question.

Every census in the United States since 1890 (except for one, in 1950) has asked about language characteristics, and its question has always seemed to assume that English is the only language relevant for the aspects of life that take place outside the home. This assumption, though outdated, is somewhat understandable. After all, the bureau’s primary goal in asking this question is not to paint a full and complete portrait of the language proficiencies of Americans but rather to track immigrants’ integration into mainstream American society and to ascertain what services they need, and in what languages. (In October, for instance, the Census Bureau released a list of jurisdictions with large numbers of voters who need voting instructions translated in a language other than English.)

Nonetheless, to better map American language abilities, the census should ask the same question that the European Commission asked in its survey in 2006: Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue? (The answer, incidentally, dented Europe’s reputation as highly multilingual: only 56 percent of the respondents, who tended to be younger and more educated, said they could.) Until the census question is refined, claims about American monolingualism will almost certainly be overstated.

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The celebrated multilingualism of not just Europe but also the rest of the world may be exaggerated. The hand-wringing about America’s supposed linguistic weakness is often accompanied by the claim that monolinguals make up a small worldwide minority. The Oxford linguist Suzanne Romaine has claimed that bilingualism and multilingualism “are a normal and unremarkable necessity of everyday life for the majority of the world’s population.”

But the statistics tell a murkier story. Recently, the Stockholm University linguist Mikael Parkvall sought out data on global bilingualism and ran into problems. The reliable numbers that do exist cover only 15 percent of the world’s 190-odd countries, and less than one-third of the world’s population. In those countries, Mr. Parkvall calculated (in a study not yet published), the average number of languages spoken either natively or non-natively per person is 1.58. Piecing together the available data for the rest of the world as best he could, he estimated that 80 percent of people on the planet speak 1.69 languages — not high enough to conclude that the average person is bilingual.

Multilinguals may outnumber monolinguals, but it’s not clear by how much. The average American may be no more monolingual or less multilingual than any other average person elsewhere on the planet. At the very least, we can’t say for sure — not in any language.

The following is excerpted from a Weblog maintained by NAFSA, a leading professional association based in the United States and dedicated to international education. It seemed a notably strange coincidence that the day after the Chronicle of Higher Education’s fascinating article about foreign-language acquisition and its remarkable contributions to the human mind and to society, Inside Higher Ed reported that George Washington University’s arts and sciences faculty had voted by an “overwhelming” margin not only to remove its foreign languages and cultures course requirement, but also to set up the new requirements in such a way that introductory foreign language courses can no longer count toward fulfilling any degree requirement in the college. At the same time, GW’s curricular reform is apparently “designed to promote student learning in areas such as global perspectives and oral communications.” One wonders how “global perspectives” can happen without foreign language. But Catherine Porter (a former president of the Modern Language Association), writing in the Chronicle, puts it rather more bluntly. The lack of foreign-language learning in our society, she states, is “a devastating waste of potential.” Students who learn languages at an early age “consistently display enhanced cognitive abilities relative to their monolingual peers.” This isn’t about being able to impress their parents’ friends by piping up in Chinese at the dinner table—the research is showing that these kids can think better. Porter writes: “Demands that the language-learning process makes on the brain . . . make the brain more flexible and incite it to discover new patterns—and thus to create and maintain more circuits.” But there’s so much more. Porter points out, as many others have, that in diplomatic, military, professional and commercial contexts, being monolingual is a significant handicap. In short, making the United States a more multilingual society would carry with it untold benefits: we would be more effective in global affairs, more comfortable in multicultural environments, and more nimble-minded and productive in daily life. One of Porter’s most interesting observations, to me, was about how multilingualism enhances “brain fitness.” My own journey in languages is something for which I cannot claim any real foresight or deliberate intention, but by the age of 16, I spoke English, Hungarian, and French fluently. I’ve managed, through travel and personal and family connections, to maintain all three. One thing I know for sure is that when I get on the phone with my mother and talk to her in Hungarian for 20 minutes, or if I have to type out an email to a friend in Paris, afterwards I feel like I’ve had a mental jog on the treadmill: strangely energized, brain-stretched, more ready for any challenge, whether it’s cooking a new dish or drafting an op-ed. And the connective cultural tissue created by deep immersion in another language cannot be overstated. When I went to Hungary during grad school to research my thesis, I figured: no problem, it’s my native tongue. Yes, but I first learned it when I was a toddler, and never since then. The amount  of preparation I had to do to be sure I didn’t miss nuance or cultural cues and didn’t draw conclusions based on erroneous translation, was significant, but well worth it. Time and again, I’ve realized how language can transform our interactions with one another. Porter’s article is a wake-up call that neglecting foreign-language learning is hurting our country in more ways than we realize. 

Population 5 Years and Older Who Spoke a Language Other Than English at Home by Language Group and English-Speaking Ability: 2007 (For information on confidentiality protection, sampling error, nonsampling error, and definitions, see www.census.gov/acs/www/) Characteristic Total peopleEnglish-speaking ability Very wellWell Not well Not at all NUMBER Population 5 years and older 280,950,438(X)(X)(X)(X) Spoke only English at home225,505,953(X)(X) (X)(X) Spoke a language other than English at home 55,444,485 30,975,474 10,962,722 9,011,298 4,494,991 Spoke a language other than English at home 55,444,485 30,975,474 10,962,722 9,011,298 4,494,991 Spanish or Spanish Creole 34,547,077 18,179,530 6,322,170 6,344,110 3,701,267 Other Indo-European languages 10,320,730 6,936,808 2,018,148 1,072,025 293,749 Asian and Pacific Island languages 8,316,426 4,274,794 2,176,180 1,412,264 453,188 Other languages 2,260,252 1,584,342 446,224 182,899 46,787 

Even the nation-states and empires most committed to promoting particular tongues have invested considerable resources in ensuring that their cadres could speak other languages. Whatever pride they took in Latin, educated Romans also always learned Greek. However invested absolutist France was in promoting French, Louis XIV was also well aware of the need to train diplomats and interpreters, and set up schools to this effect. The modern French and British empires created a constellation of institutions to teach colonial officials the languages of their subject peoples, including the school known as Langues O’, in France, founded in 1795, and the School of Oriental and African Studies in Britain, founded in 1914. U.S. military and intelligence agencies have never given much credence to the notion that English suffices. Several generations of American graduate students pursued language immersion studies abroad thanks to the cold-war Foreign Language Areas Studies fellowships. When the U.S. intelligence establishment discovered itself to be woefully understaffed with Arabic-, Urdu-, Pashto-, and Dari-speakers after September 11, 2001, it poured enormous resources into language training. The annual budget of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center alone is today over $300 million.

The masters of the universe who gather each year at Davos may converse in English today, but nothing guarantees that they will still do so several decades from now. Like Summers, ancient Romans, early modern Spaniards, the eighteenth-century French, and nineteenth-century Britons, too, imagined that the sun would shine forever upon their linguistic empires. This is both to mistake the factors that transform particular languages into widely used media for communication and to neglect the rapidity with which particular linguistic dispositions can change. The rise and fall of major international tongues is always a complex and unpredictable process. Powerful states are often responsible for the dissemination of particular idioms. Latin would never have spread had Rome not carved out a Mediterranean empire. But many widely spoken media for communication came into use largely independent of state frameworks. Arabic was the language of pilots across the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern periods, well beyond the reach of Arabic-speaking states. Thanks first to Venetian sea traffic, the idiom derived from Venetian dialect and known as Lingua Franca became a widely used medium of communication between speakers of different languages across the eastern Mediterranean from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries (thus offering a generic name for all such vehicular idioms). French slave traders negotiated the purchase of slaves on the Angolan Coast in the eighteenth century in Portuguese, well after the Portuguese had ceased being the dominant commercial presence there. Chinook Jargon, a contact language born of interactions between Amerindian communities in the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century, served as the region’s principal trade language well into the twentieth century.