One who speaks three languages is called “trilingual.” One who speaks two languages is called “bilingual.” One who speaks only one language is American.
According to a Forbes Magazine article, less than 20 percent of natural-born U.S. citizens can speak a foreign language. To put this statistic in perspective, more than 50 percent of Europeans know a second language.
It seems fairly clear why Americans are less likely to learn a second language. The United States — being a largely isolated nation due to its domination of its continent and the geographic separation of other major powers — simply has far less exposure to other languages than Europeans have. It is common for Americans to encounter Spanish speakers, or even the odd French speaker in certain regions of the country, but the overwhelming majority of Americans are fluent in English. Additionally, nearly all official discourse is done in English. Europeans, on the other hand, have far less isolation.
For example, Germany shares a border with the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland and Denmark. This proximity means that Germans frequently are exposed to Dutch, French, Czech, Polish and Danish. Unlike in the U.S., where the English language has the preponderance of legitimacy, each of these languages has a powerful nation-state backing it. And some countries, like Switzerland, have more than one official language. If Germans refused to do business in another language, their sphere of influence would be severely limited.
English may have become the lingua franca of political and economic discourse throughout the world, but other languages are still widely used in international exchanges. In an increasingly interconnected world, it will not be long before Americans will frequently have to converse with the world outside the Anglosphere.
However, the benefits of foreign language acquisition go beyond mere communication. Learning a second language in youth provides innumerable benefits to individuals. Two of the largest benefits are an improved understanding of one’s native language and an increased capacity for further language acquisition.
Grammar rules are surprisingly universal. And there are a few reasons for this similarity: universal linguistic traits, common origins and contact. Every language has the same goal: to express ideas verbally. So it is understandable that different languages will run into similar problems and develop similar solutions.
For languages that are related, grammar rules are passed along, like genes, through the process of evolution. Almost all of the European languages are derived from Proto-Indo-European, so it should come as no surprise that the grammars of the various Indo-European languages are very similar. Within this language group further lines of ancestry can be seen as well. English is a Teutonic language — albeit a highly irregular one. Therefore, English grammar is more akin to German, Dutch and Swedish than it is to French, Spanish and Italian (all of which are derivative of Latin).
Yet, English is a curious example. English is Teutonic, but it is highly irregular due to the amount of outside contact. English traces itself back to Anglo-Saxon, a language with origins in northern Germany and Denmark. In 1066, England was invaded by the Normans, who spoke a dialect of French. Because of this bastard birth, English is somewhat of a hybrid between the Romance languages and the Teutonic languages. Nowhere is this clearer than in vocabulary. Almost every word that ends in “-ble” comes from French, and no other language has different names for animals and their meat (e.g. deer is Teutonic and venison is French). Grammatical influences are also seen, such as the two ways of showing possession: e.g. “the king’s son” (Teutonic) and “the son of the king” (French).
Knowing a second language, particularly one in the same language family, helps one understand from where the grammar rules of one’s first language come. And this understanding is not merely academic. If a native English speaker knows French and German, it will be easier for him to remember English grammar. Instead of merely knowing English grammar, he will understand it.
Learning another language in youth will also help one learn other languages in the future. This is especially true of English. English grammar is a lot simpler than the grammar of many other languages. To list only a few examples, English has no grammatical gender, very few inflections, few strict syntax rules and almost no subjunctive mood. This simplicity is advantageous in learning English, but it serves as a hindrance for native English speakers trying to learn another language.
A native English speaker has no experience in gender agreement, ubiquitous inflections or a developed subjunctive mood, features common in other European languages. A Francophone can learn Italian fairly easily because of the similarities. An Anglophone must learn an entirely different paradigm when he tries to learn another language.
There is an easy solution. Teach children Latin in elementary school. Latin, far from being a dead language for stodgy Classics scholars, is an excellent framework for future linguistic study. Linguistic theory posits that the human brain is primed for language, i.e. children are born ready to learn a language. But there is a formative age in the elementary school years. During this time, children become fluent in their language and lose the natural predisposition for expeditious language acquisition.
This is a widely accepted theory, but is it expressed in the American educational system? Not at all. Students in the U.S. are typically required to learn a second language in high school, long after the formative age. The uniqueness of English ensures that studying a foreign language in adolescence or adulthood will be tedious.
But, if children were taught Latin in elementary school, they would have a linguistic frame of reference other than English. Latin grammar is not unique in the way that English grammar is. Knowing Latin would make learning Italian, French, Spanish, German, Greek, Hindustani or any other Indo-European language far easier. And this is not a novel idea. Children in the 19th century were taught Latin and Greek at an early age. Perhaps a dead language is just what we need to bring new life to foreign language education.
