Our Land of Many Languages

It's almost time for the Super Bowl again, and neither of my home teams - the Bucs from Tampa where I was born, and the Rams from St. Louis which has become my home - will be playing in the game.  But the thought made me remember a speech I gave shortly after the 2014 Super Bowl on behalf of the University of Missouri - St. Louis for their ceremony honoring high school juniors who excelled in the study of foreign languages.

In my remarks, I made reference to the Coke commercial during the Super Bowl that featured people singing America the Beautiful in multiple languages.  There was quite a backlash after it aired, lots of people were really upset that an American song was being sung in a language other than English.  To a certain extent, that was not surprising.  There has always been intense pressure in our country to assimilate, and language is an especially useful tool for that to occur.  To a certain degree, assimilation is a good thing.  For a national identity to form, for a country to hold together, most of the people in the country have to generally agree on core values and principals, about how you work together to get things done.  But we are being short sighted when that pressure extends to extinguishing the speaking of other languages.  In fact, we are ignoring our own history.  As early as 1664, when the colony of New Netherland was acquired by the British, eighteen different languages were spoken on Manhattan Island.  That doesn’t even take into account the Native American tongues which numbered more than 500 in North America at the time.  In fact, some linguists believe that the United States has been the home of more bilinguals than any other nation in world history.  This is one of the reasons that our Constitution does not speak about an official language.  The researcher D.F. Marshall wrote that, “The Founding Fathers of our country did not choose to have an official language precisely because they felt language to be a matter of individual choice.”

This attitude largely held sway in the U.S. until the time of the First World War when fear about all things German and, by extension, foreign influence led to many state rules about using only English.  And while we have resisted any national policy about an official language, that change in attitude has had an effect. In the most recent numbers I could find, less that 20% of the U.S. population is bilingual.  Compare that to 53% of Europeans who speak at least two languages.  That’s sad.  Speaking another language allows you to connect with a wider range of people and better understand a culture.

It's also good for our country. Donna Kimmel, the senior vice president of global human resources for Sensata Technologies, the world’s number one supplier of sensors and controls, says, “The United States is not well prepared for a 21st–century world in which economic competitiveness is central to our security and well-being.”  To reverse that, she says, “We need people with a global mindset, and a global mindset comes from stepping into a new area and learning a new language.” George Voinovich, the former Senator from Ohio, stated that, “Without foreign language skills and cultural knowledge, businesses face greater difficulties in exporting to overseas markets and competing against foreign-owned firms.”  Given that almost a third of the U.S. economy is connected to international trade, you can see how important it is for our country that we have more multi-language speakers.

On top of all of this, there is increasing evidence of non-linguistic benefits as well.  Studies are now showing that being bilingual makes you smarter by having a profound effect on your brain and improving cognitive skills not related to language.  As pointed out by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in the New York Times, the collective evidence from a number of studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind, like when you remember directions for how to get from one place to another.

The bottom line is that the last thing we should be doing is telling people just to speak English. Our country has always been a land of many languages and we should encourage our children to continue that tradition, adding their our own voices to those that have come before, using the languages they learn to add richness to their lives and build a better future for themselves.