Obama and Learning a Second Language

Twice in recent weeks Barak Obama has mentioned a bizarre tenet of his campaign: his desire that all Americans should speak a second language.

Bizarre because Obama himself speaks nothing other than English, though he spent part of his childhood overseas.

Bizarre because most Americans will never leave the borders of the United States. They will live their entire lives speaking English exclusively without suffering any negative consequences.

Bizarre because having one common language unifies people and simplifies government.

Bizarre because historically the first thing immigrants have thrown into the melting pot upon arrival in the United States is their language. The challenge to learn English is implicit in an immigrant’s decision to move, legally or illegally, to the United States.

I am not criticizing Obama because I am an ignorant American who refuses to learn a second language. I speak, read, and write English, French, and Danish. In high school and college I studied three other languages as well just for fun: German, Latin, and Polish. Why have I invested so much time and a fair amount of money in the acquisition of various languages? Lots of reasons, none of which involve impressing hordes of unknown Europeans.

Learning a language for me was an intellectual exercise. (I grew up in Kansas, after all, hundreds of miles from the nearest border.) I planned to travel some day, of course, but an occasional two-week trip would not have been sufficient motivation for the hours I devoted to French. I loved the language – how it looked on paper and how it flowed from the tongue. I loved the recognition of borrow words and common roots, the idioms, the French fairy tales and Christmas carols, the patisserie and the mousse au chocolat. All of it.

And it wasn’t long after I started studying French that I noticed I was learning a lot more about English in the process – an added benefit of language acquisition.

In Denmark I attended a college preparatory high school with classmates who were on the ‘language line’ as opposed to the ‘math and sciences line.’ We studied five languages that year, but mastering all five languages wasn’t really the point. We were developing mental discipline in a classical sense. (Please note: the vast majority of their peers were not studying languages at all – they were attending trade schools, having opted out of higher education at 16.)

Obama seems to forget (quite frequently and on a variety of issues) that Americans are FREE. In this case, they are free to study anything they like. The government has a vested interest in making sure that students master the fundamentals: English, math, and the hard sciences. If those subjects are the leafy green vegetables of an academic diet, foreign languages are the desserts.

What Obama seems to be hinting at, though he may be unable to articulate it, is that Americans need to have more world-awareness. If we accept this premise, let’s begin, then, not with superfluous language acquisition, but with geography. Knowing how to say ‘river’ in Spanish is less important in a global economy than knowing where the major rivers of the world are and what cities and civilizations lie along them.

And while we’re in the process of studying geography, maybe we will learn a little more about history.

Because I enjoy French and Danish so much, I would encourage everyone to learn a second language – but only if they are interested in doing so. I would not shame them into it, and I certainly would not mandate it.

Finally, I would not take an overseas trip while running for president and ridicule my fellow citizens for not speaking foreign languages. Obama could have apologized for his own lack of scholarship in language acquisition, but he couldn’t resist blaming American culture instead.

As Obama himself demonstrates, an American can do very well in this world knowing only English. There’s nothing wrong with that and nothing to be ashamed of. Historically, conquering nations have dominated linguistically as well. Whether we like it or not, the United States has conquered most of the world ideologically and technologically – to the victor go the spoils.