by Kevin Burton
There was a time when I had multiple dozens of penpals from around the world. More than once I heard this joke:
What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks only one language? American.
I told this joke in Mexico while I was teaching there. The few Spanish speakers who hadn’t already heard the joke, belly laughed. Why?
Americans had (have?) the earned reputation of being insular, xenophobic, practically allergic to other cultures.
All the native Spanish speakers I have talked with, call my Spanish good or excellent, even though it is actually middling at best. That’s because they are surprised and delighted that an American has tried to learn their language.
So I was surprised to read on the Good News Network that 23 percent of Americans are bilingual. I was even more surprised to read in the Washington Post that that many high school students receive a special designation on their diploma if they are bilingual.
Have Americans suddenly warmed to other people and languages?
“Proprietary survey and research data from a DC think tank have demonstrated that a greater percentage of Americans are bilingual than the French, Italians, or British, despite these Europeans having a more immediate need for bilingualism,” wrote Andy Corbley of the Good News Network.
“Visits to Milano, Paris, or Amsterdam may have given generations of Americans the wrong idea about the talent inherent in the tongues of Europeans: namely that all can easily produce two or three languages.”
“The ‘America the Bilingual Project’ has found that the EU average for number of bilingual citizens is 25 percent of a country’s population, while the US is 23 percent—a few percentage points higher than France and Britain, just 5 percent less than Germany, and double that of the Italians.”
“There are approximately 76 million bilingual Americans, which is three times as many as Germany, the next highest country in Europe in terms of absolute numbers of bilingual citizens, but also represents more speakers of the world’s most-spoken languages than any other country.”
Still resistance to other languages is quite common.
“In New York, a restaurant customer threatened to turn the staff over to immigration authorities if they didn’t stop speaking Spanish to one another. In Montana, a Border Patrol agent demanded the identification of two American citizens chatting in Spanish at a gas station. In Georgia, one Walmart customer scolded another for speaking Spanish to her 3-year-old daughter,” wrote columnist Jay Mathews in the Washington Pos. under the headline “Half of the World is bilingual. What’s Our Problem.”
“It happens often. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that 22 percent of Hispanics said someone had criticized them for speaking America’s most popular foreign language. Twenty percent said they had been told to go back to their home country.
“Yet in the nation’s high schools, the language issue is going in a surprisingly different direction,” Mathews wrote. At Gabrielino High School in San Gabriel, Calif., for instance, Dylan Rojas is about to graduate with a special designation on his diploma celebrating his fluency in Spanish and English.”
“It is called the Seal of Biliteracy, created in 2008 by the advocacy group Californians Together. Thirty-five states and the District are putting it on diplomas, but it is so under the radar that many students never hear of it until they receive it.”
“The US has more English-Spanish bilinguals than all of Latin America combined, so it’s no surprise that the Project found that 66 percent of American bilinguals are Spanish speakers,” Corbley wrote, “but the US also contains more than one million speakers of seven other languages. These include Tagalog (Filipino), Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese (Cantonese), Korean, but also French and German.” Corbley wrote.
“The US has between 100,000 and 1 million speakers of 35 other languages, the higher end represented by Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, and Italian, and the lower end represented by Persian (Farsi), Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Thai, Ukrainian, and Dutch.”
“Obviously immigration is a large part of this success story, but it wasn’t always so. The trend up into the 1960s was actually the rapid abandonment of native languages over the first and second generations following immigration—a rate faster and more prevalent than what is found in any country on Earth,” Corbley wrote.
“However, after 1960, the trend reversed, with greater and greater rates of bilingualism developing. An estimated 10 percent, approximately seven million American bilinguals, grew up in English-speaking homes but managed to gain professional competence in a second language, showing that America’s bilingualism boom wasn’t just down to immigration.”
From that “professional competence” line, I gather I don’t qualify as one of the 76 million bilingual Americans. But if I am on Jeopardy and the category “80s Mexican pop music” comes up, I’m totally sweeping those questions.
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