50 Million Americans Speak Languages Other Than English at Home
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The Numbers:
Americans speaking foreign languages at home:
English only: 216 million
Spanish: 32 million
Other languages: 18 million
What They Mean:
Is the United States a monoglot society unable to talk to its neighbors in their 6,912 languages, tongues, and dialects? Or a fractured nation speaking a Babel of 162 languages (by the Summer Institute of Linguistics' count; or even, according to the American Federation of Teachers, 460 languages)? Conservative immigration alarmists talk up the second threat; the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages worries about the first:
"While other nations around the world are producing a citizenry that can communicate with others in their languages, the United States remains largely monolingual in its approach to education, as well as to business, national security and international relations."
In fact, there may be a guarded case for language-optimism. On one hand, the vast majority of Americans speak English well, and relatively few second-generation immigrants have major language troubles. On the other, more American students are studying other languages. As of 2004, 85 percent of America's 17 million high school students were graduating with two or more years of foreign language instruction and a third had three or more years. Both figures are records. To keep up with the demand, between 1994 and 2004, the number of high-school foreign-language teachers rose from 124,000 to 162,000. And American colleges, meanwhile, graduated 19,410 language majors in 2006, nearly 50 percent above the 13,775 language BA's awarded in 1997.
American homes are more polyglot than the schools. While 80 percent of Americans speak only English at home; the other 20 percent, meaning about 52 million people, speak other languages either alone or alongside English. Most of these families -- 32 million of the 50 million people -- are Spanish-speakers. But 152,000 Americans speak Lao at home, 174,000 Hmong; 312,000 speak Greek, 203,000 speak Armenian, 173,000 speak Navajo, 276,000 speak Gujurati, 812,000 speak Russian, 802,000 speak Italian, 2.3 million speak Chinese, 1.4 million speak French, and so on. In these homes, most second-generation children seem comfortable in two or more languages; but AFT worries about the 5 million children, principally new immigrants, who arrive at school with too little English competency.
Further Reading:
In the schools:
PPI's Ed Gresser reflects on experience as a volunteer tutor for immigrant teenagers, for D.C.-based research group Education Sector. Read the essay, stay for the education ideas: http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/
analysis_show.htm?doc_id=587468
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages has a survey of students and teachers on language-instruction, preferred languages, length of study and more, at top left:
http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1
AFT on English language learners:
http://www.aft.org/topics/ells/index.htm
What languages do we learn? The Education Department's dazzling list of contemporary high-school options includes: Amharic, Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin), Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, both classical and modern Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Norse (modern, not Edda), Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. But in fact two-thirds of American high-school students taking languages study Spanish and 20 percent French. The other 15 percent (including double-language students) mainly choose German, Russian, Latin, and Japanese. Chinese has probably joined the group by now. In universities too, the two Romance languages are overwhelming favorites, with Spanish accounting for 8,690 of the language bachelor's degrees and French another 2,410. German, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese combined for 2,113. Only 26 of the graduates majored in Arabic, 28 in Hebrew, 37 in Portuguese, none in Farsi (though one college did report a Master's Degree in Persian lit.), three in "South Asian languages" plus five more in Sanskrit, four in Polish, and two in all African languages combined. M.A.'s doctorates break down on similar linguistic lines. The Education Department's data on language study: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/analysis/sa02c2.asp#info
In the home, and around the country:
The Hmong Academy, a bilingual charter school in St. Paul (Minn.), offers intensive Hmong language training and traditional academic curriculum:
http://www.hmongacademy.org/
Also in St. Paul, Askale Yiteglu assists Ethiopian-American children with English:
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/node/7486#
Help wanted -- The FBI requests job applications from "translators of Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese (All Dialects), French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Malay, Malayalam, Pashto, Serbo-Croatian, Somali, Swahili, Tajik, Thai, Tamil, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Uigur [sic], Urdu, Uzbek, and Vietnamese": http://www.fbijobs.gov/1241.asp
Census Bureau tables on ancestry (oddly missing Asian nationalities) and languages spoken at home:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/
ancestry_language_spoken_at_home.html
And a report on English use among second-generation immigrants:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/
display.cfm?id=282
Around the world:
Japan's Education Ministry on language requirements:
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/news/2002/07/020901.htm
The Asia Society's awed look at K-12 in China, including English requirements:
http://www.internationaled.org/publications/
ChinaDelegationReport120105b.pdf
The Society of Pakistan English-Teachers:
http://www.spelt.org.pk/
And last:
Now -- A list of the world's 6,912 languages, by country and language-family, from the Summer Institute of Linguistics:
http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp
And then -- Genesis 11:1-9 (King James Version) on Babel, the tower, and the origin of languages:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/
?search=GEN%2011:1-9&version=9