Monolingual Americans

If you’ve traveled around this world of ours – in continental Europe, in South America, in many parts of Asia – you have noticed that many of the world’s citizens speak two languages, and some speak three or more. In fact, there are more multilingual people in the world than monolingual.

Monolingual Americans – and if you are American you are likely monolingual – invariably feel a twinge of shame about this. In Germany or Singapore, Moscow or Rio, folks switch from their language to ours because it’s understood us backward Americans can’t switch from ours to theirs. We live in the land of the single tongue, and surely this must be because we are less cultured, less intellectually curious, more barbaric even. How much more sophisticated would we be if we could only parlez-vous francais?

Nonsense. Any first-year economics student can tell you that people do things when they have an incentive to do so. Americans (and Canadians) have very little incentive, economic or otherwise, to invest the time and energy required to learn a foreign language, and very little opportunity to maintain it if they did. Europeans, on the other hand, have an enormous incentive to learn the languages of their neighbors. And, along with affluent, educated, or ambitious South Americans and Asians, they share an enormous incentive to learn the language of the world – English.

Do You Speak Jersey?
I live in New York. The New Jersey border is four miles South, and Connecticut is about a half hour to the East. Let’s imagine that each of these three states spoke a different language.

Welcome to Switzerland. Switzerland is not a very big country – if it was an American state it would rank 42nd in square mileage, between West Virginia and Maryland. But it is bordered by five other countries speaking 3.5 different languages: France (French), Italy (Italian), Germany and Austria (German), and Lichetenstein (a dialect of German called Alemannic).

It doesn’t stop there, though. Switzerland is in the European Union, and the EU alone recognizes 23 official languages.

Many Swiss can speak French, German, and English. This is not because they are a particularly cultured people – in fact (and I apologize to my large Swiss readership), Switzerland hasn’t contributed very much to world culture. The list of Swiss writers and composers, painters and pop stars, is alas, rather small. No Shakespeare or Twain, no Mozart or McCartney, no Picasso or da Vinci. They speak multiple languages for the simple reason that they have to – they are economically and geographically impelled to do so.

English is the Frankish Language

The term lingua franca literally means “Frankish language”, but the actual definition of lingua franca is the unofficial language of the world, the language that is used in business, science, aviation, and diplomacy.

Many languages have played the role of lingua franca. Greek, Latin, then the aforementioned Frankish language (which wasn’t a real language, but a pidgin mix of Italian and other romance languages). French was the language of global diplomacy from the 17th century until very recently.

But now it is English. English ranks only 4th in terms of number of speakers. But it is the global language of scientific papers, of business conferences, of air control towers, of treaty negotiations.

So in addition to their neighbors' languages the citizens of Switzerland need to know English, especially if they want to go work at the bank. The same is true of educated people around the world. English is, at this particular point in world history, the most important language in the world.

For an educated New Yorker, there is no real incentive to learn another language. He can travel to New Jersey and Connecticut, and they speak the same language. He can travel 2000 miles to the South, 3000 miles to the West, across most of Canada, its giant neighbor to the North, and all points in between - and the people, with little exception, speak English. (And things aren't looking good for the exceptions this week...)

He could then hop on a plane East to the United Kingdom, and except for a few odd words, they speak the same language too. Even more, in business meetings from Berlin to Beijing, Reykjavik to Rio, Honolulu to Hong Kong, the lingua franca will be English.

For the Swiss, as for the German and Singaporean, learning another language is often a necessity. For nearly all Americans, it is a luxury.

What about the English?

The English themselves, incidentally, are a fairly monolingual people. Sure, the particularly affluent might know French, which is a train ride away. But like Americans, with their Mother Tongue in ascendancy, they have little reason to dedicate the time required for a second language, and little opportunity to maintain it if they did.

Unable to tout their language skills, the English instead revel in their passport superiority. Very few Americans, they point out, even have a passport. True, but remember too the range of travel an American can enjoy without owning a passport. He can travel from the volcano islands of the South Pacific to the glaciers of Alaska; from the Big Sky country of Montana to the theme parks of Florida. From the metropolis of New York City to the badlands of the Dakotas to juke joints in the Mississippi Delta to the coffee shops of Seattles. He can surf the waves of Southern California and ski the slopes of Utah, he can hit the Vegas Strip, the French Quarter in Nawlins, and catch autumn in New England - he can go to all of these places without once passing through customs. Or for that matter, breaking out a foreign language phrasebook.

The English have, as you can imagine, significantly more incentive to get themselves a passport.

Confucius Say

So the next time you are abroad, and find yourself humbled by the effortless fluency of your hosts, or even for the paucity of passports we have, remember that there is a perfectly good reason for this.

But don't get too cocky. Lingua francas only last so long, so you might want to send your kid to this site.