Are We Really Monolingual?
15th January 2012
The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true?
Probably not. I speak only one language regularly, but then that’s all I really need … living in Texas notwithstanding, I can get along perfectly well not doing Spanish. On the other hand, I can make my way in Latin, French, German, Russian, and Greek (thanks to going to non-government schools) and know enough of Irish, Arabic, Swahili, and Japanese to appreciate their unique qualities. (And how many nerds know enough Elvish or Klingon to astound their high school teachers?) If I lived in Europe or Africa, where one has the equivalent of, say, living in Indiana and having Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio speaking different languages (let’s not have any snide remarks about Kentucky, please), then I’m sure I’d be sufficiently multilingual to suite the most rabid Crustian. But that’s not the case.
Indeed, I’d say that most black people in the U.S. are effectively bilingual, since there’s a distinctive black dialect (remember the ‘ebonics’ flap?) that, depending on how deep into the inner city you get, is often not intelligible to people from the suburbs. (In nine times out of ten, you can tell whether someone is black simply by the way they speak — indeed, one black writer, detailing his experiences growing up and attempting to fit into mainstream American culture, titled his book He Talk Like a White Boy after a remark by one of his classmates.)
Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English?” The bureau reports that as of 2009, about 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. This figure is often taken to indicate the number of bilingual speakers in the United States.
But a moment’s reflection reveals that the bureau’s question about what you speak at home is not equivalent to asking whether you speak more than one language. I have some proficiency in Spanish and was fluent in Mandarin 20 years ago. But when the American Community Survey (an ongoing survey from the Census Bureau) arrived in my mailbox last month, posing that question, I had to answer no, because we speak only English in my home.
So basically the bean-counters are looking for unassimilated immigrants, which is not the same thing at all.
Nonetheless, to better map American language abilities, the census should ask the same question that the European Commission asked in its survey in 2006: Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue? (The answer, incidentally, dented Europe’s reputation as highly multilingual: only 56 percent of the respondents, who tended to be younger and more educated, said they could.)