More Americans need to speak second language
“El hombre no es conservador.”
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the guy who used to be the front-runner in the 2016 GOP presidential race, said those words a couple of weeks ago in reference to the guy who has become the Republican front-runner – you know, the mogul from New York with the curious tonsorial arrangements. Roughly translated, it means “The man is no conservative.”
The man in question – really, haven’t you seen his name in the paper enough already? – responded with typical bombast and condescension. While conceding that Bush was “a nice man,” the front-runner trumpeted the latest presidential aspirant in the Bush dynasty “should really set the example by speaking English in the United States.” Then, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who seems to be trying to worm her way into the front-runner’s good graces, said a few days later we all should, um, “speak American.”
Palin and her pal are both wrong. More Americans should be speaking another language, and learning that language at a younger age.
Just as we are unique in the developed world for our lack of a national health care system and our preposterously easy access to all kinds of guns, the United States is also an outlier for its relatively monolingual ways. Some of this is a result of geography – here in Southwestern Pennsylvania, for instance, you’d have to drive almost 10 hours to get to the predominantly French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, and undertake a full 24 hours of uninterrupted driving to get to the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, which sits across the border from El Paso, Texas. This stands in contrast to Europe, where French, Belgians, Spaniards, Dutch, Germans, Latvians and so on, are all in relatively close proximity and share a common currency. When your neighbors speak another language, learning it becomes more imperative.
And, traditionally, Americans have started learning languages other than English too late in the game. If a student enrolls in a French or German class in high school, they are usually past what renowned linguist Noam Chomsky has called the “critical period” between birth and puberty when acquiring a second language is much easier thanks to neural pathways that are being opened in the brain. True, some thrive even when they start learning a new language at age 15. But, more often than not, high schoolers or college students forget most of what they learn in foreign language classes within a year or two and can recall just a handful of random words later on – not nearly enough to be fluent.
That’s putting our young people at a disadvantage compared to their competitors in the global economic arena, many of whom are bilingual. If all other skills are equal, and even if English is the “lingua franca” of international commerce, a job candidate who can speak another language and possesses a broader understanding of another culture will have an edge.
Then there’s our own particular strain of parochialism. As Shuhan Wang of the National Foreign Language Center told the magazine Pacific Standard in 2010, other countries recognize the value of foreign-language study as “a tool for economic competitiveness and national security.” Meanwhile, in the United States, “We have xenophobia and are always using English as a badge of national identity and expression. … People understand us, but we don’t comprehend them. We are losing so much and are not aware of it.”
So Bush shouldn’t cower when the front-runner and his compatriots thump their chests and taunt him when he speaks Spanish. If he becomes president, Bush should encourage deeper and more widespread foreign-language instruction.
In fact, Bush should tell the likes of Palin and the front-runner, in no uncertain terms, “Callate la boca!”