Alex Henderson

Fear of Foreign Languages: Why Are Some Americans So Proudly Monolingual?

By Alex Henderson
Sex and Politics, January 2012

When Barack Obama was on the campaign trail during the Summer of 2008, he started a controversy without intending to be controversial. Obama, reflecting on the fact that people in parts of Europe are much more likely to speak three or four languages than Americans, recommended that foreign-language study become a much higher priority in the United States. As Obama saw it, American parents would be doing their children an enormous favor by seeing to it that they learned Spanish as a secondary language and studied one or two other foreign languages as well. Obama made it clear that immigrants who wanted to live in the United States needed to learn English as well as they possibly could, but Americans, he said, would ultimately be much better prepared for the workplace if they could speak two, three or even four languages fluently.

Obama asserted: “It's embarrassing: when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German—and then we go over to Europe, and all we can say is merci beaucoup.” And Obama elaborated: “We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job. You are so much more employable. You can be part of international business. So we should be emphasizing foreign languages in our schools from an early age, because children will actually learn a foreign language easier when they’re five, or six, or seven than when they’re 46 like me.”

Obama made perfect sense. In fact, he was advocating something that conservatives claim to believe in: more skills, more knowledge, more education. But Obama’s detractors didn’t see it that way. From Bill Bennett to the late activist Joey Vento (who owned Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia and was a big supporter of Republican causes) to Bay Buchanan to Americans for Legal Immigration, the radical right immediately went into attack mode and insisted that Obama was bashing Americans. Vento’s comments during a Fox News appearance were especially inflammatory: “This man is a sick man. He is a scary man. I am outraged. I'm really mad.” Fox News’ Sean Hannity called Obama’s comments “insulting,” and Americans for Legal Immigration president William Gheen said, “It is outrageous that a candidate for president would ridicule Americans on this topic.”

Obama was offering Americans career advice and educational advice, but as many Republicans saw it, he was pandering to illegal immigrants and trying to marginalize or even eliminate the English language in the United States (never mind the fact that Obama was quite firm in his assertion that immigrants needed to learn English). However, the attacks on bilingualism from the right neither started nor ended in 2008. From the English-only movement to protests against Arabic and Chinese courses in public schools, there is a widespread belief on the far right that equates being monolingual with patriotism.

Not all conservatives are against foreign-language study; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who has studied Russian, French, German, and Spanish) is very much a proponent of Americans becoming bilingual or trilingual, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush speaks Spanish fluently and has been interviewed in Spanish on Univision (the largest Spanish-language television network in the U.S.). But for some Republicans and Tea Party members, the very existence of foreign languages on U.S. soil—even as secondary languages—is threatening.

                             Earlier this year, Republicans and Tea Party members in Johnson County, Texas vehemently opposed Arabic-language classes that were planned for a few public schools. Angela Cox, president of the Johnson County Tea Party, said that teaching Arabic in Johnson County schools would be an “atrocity”; Johnson County Republican Party Chairman Henry Teich saw the proposed Arabic studies as part of “a decided effort to suppress the history of our own country” and part of a conspiracy to force Americans “to become Arabic citizens.”

In 2010, plans to offer Mandarin Chinese classes at Cedarlane Middle School in Hacienda Heights, California (a suburb of Los Angeles) were met with opposition from local conservatives. John Kramer, a former school district superintendent, saw Mandarin-language education as “a propaganda machine from the People's Republic of China that has no place anywhere in the United States.”

But this type of xenophobia is nothing new. The English-only movement has been around for many years in the U.S.; during the 19^th Century and early 20th Century, English-only activists were fearful of German making inroads and undermining English as the country’s dominant language. Before 1923, more than 20 states in the U.S. had laws prohibiting or restricting the teaching of foreign languages in public and/or private schools. But in 1923, English-only proponents were dealt a major blow when the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Meyer v. Nebraska struck down a Nebraska law that forbade the teaching of foreign languages to students before the 9^th Grade (even in private schools). English-only activists of 1923 feared that the High Court’s ruling would marginalize the English language in the U.S., but English remains the country’s de facto language 88 years later. And the English-only movement continues, although its primary target in recent decades hasn’t been German, but Spanish.

The U.S.’ most visible English-only organization is U.S. English, which was founded by the late Republican Sen. S.I. Hayakawa and English-only activist John H. Tanton in 1983 and has been lobbying to make English the country’s official language. Since the mid-1980s, many states have passed laws declaring English to be the official language. But at the federal level, the U.S. does not have an official language—although U.S. English, Americans for Legal Immigration and ProEnglish (which Tanton founded in 1994) would like English to be declared the country’s official language.

The far right’s fear of foreign languages can become downright irrational at times. In 2007, talk radio host Laura Ingraham was furious because Sen. Chris Dodd (a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary) briefly spoke some Spanish to a young Latino man during a CNN debate. During the presidential race of 2004, Republican pundits argued that Democratic candidate John Kerry was untrustworthy because he spoke French as a second language. And some English-only proponents are against any type of advertising in languages other than English. When Republican Steve Lonegan was mayor of Bogota, NJ in 2006, he called for a boycott of McDonald’s because of a Spanish-language McDonald’s billboard in that city. Lonegan (who ran against Chris Christie in a GOP gubernatorial primary in 2008/2009 and is so far to the right that he accused Christie of being too liberal) remains a favorite with New Jersey Tea Party members because of his unsuccessful crusade against that McDonald’s billboard. The Tea Party, in fact, has been full of English-only activism. Ron & Kay Rivoli’s “Press One for English,” a country song that berates immigrants for not speaking English exclusively, has become an anthem at Tea Party gatherings.

 Tim Schultz, director of government relations for U.S. English, believes that use of the Spanish language threatens the survival of English in the U.S. and that the “elevation of Spanish to this sort of co-official status” means that Spanish speakers “less and less need to learn English to survive in the United States.” But is the English language really in danger of disappearing in Miami, San Diego and other heavily Hispanic cities as Joey Vento, Americans for Legal Immigration, U.S. English, ProEnglish and members of the Tea Party would have us believe? Hardly. In 2006, a study of Southern California-based Latinos conducted by the University of California, Irvine and Princeton University found that only 17% of the third-generation Latinos surveyed could speak Spanish fluently; that number fell to a mere 5% among the fourth-generation Latinos surveyed. In other words, the Tea Party fantasy of third-generation or fourth-generation Latinos who cannot speak any English is exactly that: a fantasy. If 95% of fourth-generation Latinos in Southern California don’t speak Spanish fluently, it’s safe to say that the English-only crowd is paranoid when it claims that English is in danger of ceasing to be the U.S.’ dominant language.

The wrong-headed thinking of English-only activists was exemplified by Vento, who generated some controversy in Philadelphia a few years ago when he posted a sign in the window of his fast-food business (which specializes in Philly cheesesteaks) that said: “This is America. When ordering, please speak English.” The inference was that Mexican immigrants in South Philly had no desire to assimilate or learn English when in fact, the vast majority of Mexican business owners in South Philly have no problem addressing non-Latino customers in English; they might converse en español with other Latinos, but they assume that conversations with non-Latinos should be in English.

Vento, who was offended by the Spanish-language signs he saw popping up in parts of South Philly, said that many of today’s Hispanic immigrants aren’t as quick to learn English as the Italian immigrants of the past (Vento was Italian-American). But that is revisionist history. If one visited South Philly 100 years ago, there were plenty of first-generation immigrants from Southern Italy who spoke Italian among themselves and had Italian-language signs in the windows of their businesses. But their children and grandchildren ended up speaking English as their primary language, and the same thing happens with Hispanic immigrants in the 21^st Century. Mexicans in South Philly don’t need Vento to remind them that the U.S. is primarily an English-speaking country; they know that already.

Although some first-generation Latino immigrants speak Spanish among themselves, second-generation Latinos typically grow up speaking English as their primary language—and many third-generation Latinos don’t speak Spanish at all. Linguist Robert Lane Green, author of “You Are What You Speak,” has said that it is a myth that today’s Hispanic immigrants are less inclined to learn English than immigrants of the past, and a 2006 survey by Pew Hispanic Research bears that out; 96% of the Latino immigrants Pew surveyed felt it was “important” for their children to learn English.

 Los Angeles-based Mexican-American Marco Gonzales, who serves as a senior communications director for an international company that sells nutritional products and is a former publicist for the Univision Music Group, asserted that English-only proponents needn’t worry about second- or third-generation Latinos failing to speak English; Latinos who are born and raised in the U.S., Gonzales said, typically speak it fluently.

“In the 1950s and 1960s,” Gonzales explained, “Spanish was considered the language of the working poor and the language of the field workers. And all of these Latino kids were told by their parents, ‘You are not going to speak Spanish in this house. You’re going to speak English.’ They did not teach their kids Spanish because they didn’t want them to be discriminated against. That’s what happened with the Chicano culture, and there are so many third-generation, fourth-generation Latinos in this country who are very Latino-looking but do not speak a lick of Spanish.”

The big linguistic challenge for the U.S., according to Gonzales, is not making sure that U.S.-born Latinos learn English—which they inevitably will—it is getting Americans in general, Latino or otherwise, to recognize the importance of being able to speak more than one language. Technology and the Internet, Gonzales said, have made the world a smaller place—and in the future, American workers will be at a major disadvantage if they are monolingual.

“When you look at job opportunities with international companies,” Gonzales noted, “they require bilingual skills. So if it’s an asset, why are some Americans resisting it so much? It just makes no sense to me. Speaking two or more languages is a sign of intelligence. It’s not a weakness. It’s an empowering skill. I don’t condone Latinos coming to the United States and not learning to speak English, but being bilingual is an asset—and being multilingual is a triple asset.”

Gonzales speaks from first-hand experience. Born and raised in L.A., he speaks both English and Spanish fluently (his mother moved to Southern California from Mexico) and also speaks some conversational Italian and Portuguese. And those linguistic skills, Gonzales said, have given him a huge competitive advantage in the job market.

“In my professional life, being bilingual has helped me a lot,” Gonzales stressed. “I always asked for more money when I applied for jobs because I knew that being bilingual was a valuable skill. I knew it was a skill that companies needed. When I got into corporate communications, being able to speak more than one language put me at the front of the line. My language skills have always been my VIP ticket.”

Dr. Catherine Ingold, executive director of the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) at the University of Maryland, agrees with Obama’s assertion that foreign-language study should become a much higher priority for the U.S.—which, she said, will suffer in the business world if the majority of its residents continue to be monolingual. “One of the things that Barack Obama was pushing, I think, was a more global perspective,” Ingold observed. “Certainly, everything that has happened with globalization proves that he’s right. We can’t be insular and succeed in an era in which you can place an order by e-mail thousands of miles away and get it delivered in a few days. We’re going to need people in our companies who can interact in potential markets with potential business partners in their language. If you have strong language skills, there are going to be really good job opportunities out there.”

NFLC believes that for Americans, intensive foreign-language study should begin as early as grammar school. Ingold said that becoming fluent in foreign languages will not harm Americans’ English-speaking skills—if anything, it might improve them.

“There is a belief that if you know Spanish, French or German, you know less English—which is totally wrong,” Ingold asserted. “Learning a language in addition to your mother tongue enhances your overall cognitive ability. It makes you smarter. It enhances your overall language processing abilities and doesn’t in any way detract from your mother tongue.”

Unfortunately, foreign-language education in the U.S. seems to be decreasing at a time when Americans need it the most. Because of the economic downturn of the late 2000s/early 2010s, foreign-language programs are facing major cutbacks all over the U.S. at the middle school, high school and college levels. 

At the University of Nevada at Reno, majors in German and minors in Italian have ceased. At Winona State University in Minnesota, a moratorium has been placed on new majors in French and German. Majors in German are being phased out at Louisiana State University, which is problematic in light of the fact that Germany is Europe’s largest economy. For new students, majors in French, Italian or Russian are no longer offered at New York State University, Albany.

Ideally, American students should begin learning foreign languages from the first grade or even kindergarten. But in 2006, the Center for Applied Linguistics reported that only 24% of public elementary schools in the U.S. offered foreign-language study—and of that 24%, 79% of those grammar school programs were aimed at basic exposure to the language rather than proficiency. So if Americans do achieve proficiency in a foreign language, that seldom happens until middle school. William Gheen’s claim that American elementary school children “are being forced to learn Spanish” and are in danger of receiving insufficient exposure to English has absolutely no basis in fact; the truth is that most elementary schools in the U.S. don’t offer even basic study in a foreign language. And because of budgetary cutbacks, foreign-language study in some places may not even be available until high school. In March 2011, for example, the school district in Burke County, North Carolina announced that all foreign-language programs would be ending in middle schools and that high schools would only offer Spanish and French classes.

There’s nothing unreasonable about expecting immigrants to learn a country’s primary language, which is Obama’s expectation and is what most immigrants do when they come to the United States. But demanding that people be monolingual 24 hours a day is something entirely different, and historically, those who tried to coerce people into being monolingual were dictators with a very nationalistic streak. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce, didn’t believe that Italians should speak Italian as their primary language; he believed it should be their only language. Foreign-language newspapers were banned under the Mussolini regime. Similarly, Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. El Generalissimo, believed that anyone living in Spain should speak castellano exclusively and greatly restricted the use of Catalan in public (which is why the street signs in Barcelona were in Spanish during the Franco years, although they were replaced with Catalan signs in Spain’s post-Franco era).

But these days, becoming multilingual is encouraged in many European countries. Fluency in English is now the norm in Holland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Austria, Germany, Belgium and Denmark even though English is not the primary language of any of those countries. The average high school student in Amsterdam has no problem understanding American movies or BBC newscasts and is likely to understand German as well, but all that foreign-language study hasn’t marginalized the Dutch language in the Netherlands—and just as that country sees the value of being multilingual, there is no reason why American schools shouldn’t encourage fluency in Spanish, German and other languages while helping to maintain English as the country’s primary language. But whether or not the U.S. will eventually move in that direction remains to be seen.

“I hope that in the future,” Gonzales said, “more Americans will study other languages and at least try to be bilingual. I hope that changes. I really do.”

Barack Obama was right: fluency in foreign languages is not something that Americans should fear, but something to be embraced and encouraged.

Alex Henderson's work has appeared in the L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, and other publications. He speaks proficient Spanish as well as some Italian and French.

###