It's Time to Learn a Second Language - The Gentleman at Large

It’s time to learn a second language. We’ve had a good run with this one, but it really is far past due that we broaden our horizons and pick some Tagalog, or Farsi, or at least a little Spanish.

Now, don’t get me wrong: English is great. Hold on to it. Don’t forget it. It’s beautiful and fun and you’re still going to need it. But it really is past time to take the plunge and fire up that DuoLingo, or some classes at the lifelong learning center, or something. Because English has had a good run but, our infatuation with it really speaks volumes to where we stand today as a country.

Like many institutional shortcomings that plague this country, we need not look much past the current President for an example. He has said, for instance, that he is not anti-immigration, but simply expects that immigrants speak English (and are wealthy). And why shouldn’t they? This is America, after all. Where English is the official language. It’s only reasonable that to be welcome here our new guests should learn that much.

Only English is not the official language of the United States – we do not have one. It’s as though we only recently decided than a nation of immigrants can settle on xenophobia as a tenet of national policy. And really, any insistence that new Americans speak English is another glaring example of our tradition of double standards. Like meddling in foreign elections, and corporate espionage, we really do expect so much more of others than we do of ourselves. Consider the president:

That this president has chosen to hang his hat on immigration and language is an irony that should not be lost on any of us. He has demonstrated time and again that he has, at best, a basic understanding of the English language. He coins demeaning terms like “chain migration” and “anchor babies,” and then flaunts those very same practices with his own family.

Our infatuation with English grows not from the fact that it is a wonderful language, but from the fact that we happen to speak it. Our clinging to it has nothing to do with its beauty, but that it simply reaffirms a self-centered status quo, based only in hubris and narcissism. Remember that we’re the people who just one day said, “Nope, we’re Americans. All you other people living on the American continents gotta pick something different.”

And no differently from burying our heads on climate change, our clinging to English ignores the obviously changing conditions around us.

Is English going anywhere? Of course not (so really, don’t forget it), but the Cervantes Institute estimates that by 2050 (within our lifetimes unless we’re wiped out by an anomalous natural disaster or disease curable by vaccines) Spanish will be the most spoken language in the US. Even today there are large swaths of this country where it is the primary language, and is spoken at home by more than 41 million people.

English is not obsolete, but monoligualism is. Sure, speaking Spanish, or Russian, or Salish will help you practically. But more than its practical benefits, embracing a second (or third, or fourth) language recognizes at a base level that the world does not revolve around us. That there are many, many other cultures and perspectives, and that it really is possible that we don’t have all the answers. Is ‘merica the best goddamn country on earth? Maybe. Probably not. But it’s a bold claim from someone unwilling to even look around.