You know what really irks me? That there are foreigners in our beloved United States who are hardly proficient at English, stumbling over their words with a very limited vocabulary and atrocious pronunciation, and — let me finish — English-speaking Americans judge them for it.
These Americans complain that these “foreigners” should learn to speak English like true patriots, or else go back to Mexico or Vietnam or the Ukraine or wherever else people understand them.
I see two major hypocrisies in such a judgment. One is that most of these Americans descended from German, Italian, Chinese, Russian, and other immigrants who barely knew a word of English when they first came to America. The second hypocrisy is that if any one of these Americans were to visit the Latinos or Asians or Eastern Europeans in their countries of origin, the vast majority of Americans would become the very foreigners whom they judged on their own soil, not even knowing how to ask the location of the nearest airport that can take them back to their native land, their circle of comfort.
As Planet Earth becomes more and more globalized, learning a second language is more useful than it has ever been, not only for travel and international communication, but also to further understand American and foreign cultures in an era when the ties between all cultures tighten every day.
We’ve moved past the age when most people traveled less than 25 miles from their birthplace in their entire lifetime. Fast transportation, global politics and trade, and the Internet can take you away from your comfortable home to a place where people don’t speak English, and where you might regret sleeping through Italian 101. It’s true that English is the most studied second language worldwide, but still less than a quarter of the global population can speak it. You can excuse yourself all you want for sticking to your mother tongue, but you’re the minority: globally, multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers. It’s time to adapt.
The reasons are innumerable, and the facts to support them are everywhere:
• Academics: Students who take a foreign language, regardless of economic background, score higher on the math and reading sections of the ACT and higher on the verbal section of the SAT, even though neither test involves foreign language.
• Economics: One in five U.S. jobs is tied to overseas trade, and 60 percent of companies expect international sales to exceed domestic sales in the next 10 years.
• National security: Eighty different federal agencies depend on speakers of more than 100 different languages, and the Foreign Service reports that one-third of its workers can’t speak the language of their foreign post.
This doesn’t even include what many people consider to be the biggest payoff: learning about and immersing in foreign cultures. Last summer, after studying Spanish for five years, I traveled to Latin America and lived with a Spanish-speaking family for two weeks. Without studying Spanish, I never would have been able to discover a people with different beliefs, values and perceptions, but the same human feelings that all mankind shares. With each new language, you gain the power of learning from speakers of that language worldwide, who can teach you many things that your American next-door neighbors cannot.
By learning a language, you’ve taken the first step in understanding other people; once you know what they’re saying, you can then understand why they say those things, what they believe in, why they are the way they are, and what you can learn from them. Language is the gateway to fully understanding mankind, and until you can bridge the linguistic gap, your world view is unfortunately limited.
Kerry Martin (kerrywmartin@msn.com) of Greenwood Village is a junior at Cherry Creek High School.
