A Reflection on Linguistics
I have never thought of myself as a linguistics expert. In fact, I’m basically monolingual. But it’s nonetheless a fascinating topic that I think deserves a blog post today.
You see, I live in the United States, a country whose tourists are infamous for being “ugly Americans” who expect everyone to speak English to them wherever they go. Now, not every American tourist is like this, but stereotypes exist for a reason. And a reflection on this topic has led me to realize that we’re at a disadvantage relative to many other countries.
A map showing leaders of select countries according to how many languages they spoke as of late 2022, per r/MapPorn. Joe Biden (USA) was the only one to speak only English.
Most of the people I know were required to take a foreign language in high school. Many of these people, including my brother and I, selected Spanish, but it never came naturally to me. At least, not as naturally as it came to my brother. My brother, one of my best friends, did an exchange program in Spain at age 16, and later an internship in that country. I have done neither of those things.
This stands in stark contrast to Europe. On the occasions when I’ve been fortunate enough to visit European countries where English does not have official status, virtually everyone I’ve spoken to has had good enough English to where I could hold a conversation with them. Until recently, I can’t say I questioned it very much. I guess I just assumed “that’s the way it is”, without really thinking about why.
Indeed, the data bears this out. According to a 2022 survey, almost 80 percent of Americans living in the US are monolingual. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that 65% of Europeans speak multiple languages according to the same survey. The linked article, published a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, details the implications this has for both America’s economy and geopolitical status. And TLDR: It’s not good.
It wasn’t until Trump’s first term that I learned the United States doesn’t actually have an official language at the federal level. Of course, in practice, English is as good as the official language, since day-to-day life here really runs on English; indeed, more than half the states have designated it as such. That being said, the real reason Trump proposed making English the official language at the federal level was as a monument to his xenophobia, not because it would actually affect U.S. policy, let alone daily life in this country.
I could go on and on about how the United States and United Kingdom exerted efforts to promote the notion that English should be the “default” language. This has been well-documented in many academic texts and doesn’t need to be discussed any further here.
However, it’s not just Anglophone nations that have contributed to “language consolidation.” The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), uses English as its official working language. This is despite the fact that only two of its member states, Singapore and the Philippines, have actually designated English as having official status for civilian life.
Representatives from Southeast Asian countries at their 2024 summit in Australia, taken from Kiripost. Despite (or because of?) the diversity of languages used by civilians in their countries, all of these leaders have agreed to speak English at the meeting.
Meanwhile, here’s some food for thought: There are more than seven thousand languages currently spoken by the world’s roughly 8.2 billion people. Many of these tongues, however, only have a couple thousand speakers at most, meaning that if they are not taught to younger generations, we risk losing these languages for good.
Just think about that for a moment. This post is published in English. If your primary language is English, or another widely-used language like Spanish, Mandarin, or Russian, it probably seems unthinkable (if you’ve considered it at all) that one day your language, the tongue you use for everything in your day-to-day life, could vanish. And yet, there are people, including a large percentage of the world’s indigenous population, who live with this reality every day.
Moreover, languages are not just systems of communication. Anyone who’s taken a second language in any capacity has probably figured out that every language provides a different way of seeing the world. Whenever the last speaker of a language passes away, the world loses a unique perspective. I think that’s regrettable, just like the loss of biodiversity all over the world as a result of environmental issues like deforestation and climate change.
In my mind (and again, I say this as someone who is functionally monolingual), this is an issue that deserves more attention than it’s getting. As indigenous issues have become increasingly politically salient in countries like Canada and Australia, both governments and civilians in those places have reflected on their ancestors’ role in what would become this crisis.
The Aboriginal and national flags of Australia, side by side. Image taken from the Catholic Leader website.
Canada, for instance, has their Truth and Reconciliation Commission, something I wish the United States would do. Indeed, there are many things Canada does that I wish we would. But I’m getting off track here.
The point is, if English is your first language, you should think critically about how it came to be this way. If you travel abroad, don’t be that “ugly American” who assumes that everyone around you needs to speak your language. And consider what it must be like if your own language was marginalized in favor of what others say should be the “default tongue.”
Maybe the opportunity to gain this knowledge is the only thing I can be thankful for this year.
