“Spanish is clearly now the world’s coolest language. So why do we push children to learn French?”, asks Gary Nunn in the Guardian.
His argument for pushing children to learn Spanish rather than French is something about Bad Bunny, whoever that is, singing at the Superbowl, whatever that is, plus a slightly less childish argument about how more people worldwide speak Spanish than French. So they do, but that does not rescue the entire article from having the air of being written by una rata en un saco. Mr Nunn may well get his wish that Spanish should dislodge French as the main language taught in British schools, but the triumph will be spoilt by whispers that there is increasingly little practical point in teaching any foreign language to children who already speak English, the language the whole world wants to learn. Mr Nunn says that his Spanish has allowed him to “remote-work my way across Latin America and learn to salsa with guapo men in nightclubs” which is nice for him, but the number of current pupils likely to dance in his footsteps is low.
Fate played a cruel trick on British teachers of modern languages. When I was a girl, they had just fought a successful campaign to dethrone Latin and Greek. In vain did the teachers of dead languages bleat about widening cultural perspectives and indefinable cognitive benefits. Teachers of French and German and Spanish talked better, stronger, more manly talk about how many tens of millions of living humans spoke their favoured languages; about exports and global relevance and earning potential. They quoted Willy Brandt, “You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine”, and they won.
But now the German for “job” is “der job” and the Spanish for “marketing” is “el marketing” and it turns out that Germans and Spaniards will not just buy in English but conduct their international business in it. And the teachers and enthusiasts for modern languages are reduced to fighting over which of them will grab the largest share of the shrinking number of English-speaking pupils willing to put the effort in to learn any of them, while dredging up from memory all that benthic detritus about “seeing the world in with different eyes” that they mocked so mercilessly when it came out of the mouths of the classicists half a century ago.
[Added later in response to comments: I do not mock it. To me, the ability to see the world with different eyes; to see how thought itself can be differently arranged, is a huge benefit. Just not the sort of benefit that gets you a better job, not if you are a native English speaker. As translation software improves, even the payoff from all those years of study of being able to find your way around a foreign city disappears. The emotional benefit of being able to make a friendly connection with people you meet abroad by speaking their language will never die, unless brain augmentation makes us into a new sort of human, but that is almost the only advantage left that a living language has over a dead one. In terms of widening your understanding of how varied human cultures can be, dead languages win.]
As I have been saying for more than a decade, my feelings about the triumph of English are not particularly triumphant. Not only do I mourn the beigificiation of the world, I fear that when we are down to just Mandarin, English and Spanish the state will find it even easier to control us than it does now. There have been many times in history when minority languages served as a literal speakeasy for minority opinions and where dead languages helped keep free thought alive.
Man’s an idiot.
Bad Bunny was singing at the Superbowl in a country bordering a nation which itself is bordering Central America then almost an entire continent mostly speaking Spanish.
The Guardian is published in the UK. A country which… isn’t any of those things.
I think learning a language as an English speaker, serves two purposes: firstly it helps you learn about language itself, which is to say you understand your native language better, plus it has utility to enable you to travel and enjoy it more, or speak to other native speakers for the pleasure and to some extent the respect of doing it.
One could argue that kids don’t need to study English in schools. After all they can already speak and write it. But we do so for deeper enrichment and I think foreign language serves the same purpose.
So I think foreign language education is a good thing. And if you are going to teach one Spanish has the benefit over French in that it is spoken in many interesting countries (sure, French is spoken in the Ivory Coast, but who wants to go there?) Plus it is considered one of the easiest languages to learn, which means you get more bang for less bucks.
Finally, if you speak Spanish you can mostly struggle by in Portuguese and Italian. And seriously, who doesn’t want to experience Carnival in Rio at least once in their lives.
Foreign language learning is good, I am trying to improve my French, Spanish and German at present, admittedly slowly.
Superbowl is godawful and the Guardian are a bad offender for trying to trying to make American culture war slop relevant to Britain.
What “foreign” language? I cannot function in many of the Southern states of the USA without knowing Spanish. An entire branch of my extended Minnesota family speaks mostly Spanish. One-quarter of my television channels are Spanish-language.
In the perfect future world, we’ll all speak a common pidgin, we’ll all be a uniform shade of brown, and it truly will be a globalized world.
But for now, it’s still wise to be comfortable with the main languages spoken in your area. “We are an English-speaking country” resonates as much as “we all love our buggy whips.”
“One could argue that kids don’t need to study English in schools. After all they can already speak and write it.”
Many don’t speak and write it to any kind of standard though. So many don’t know how to use words like your and you’re appropriately and the Internet is awash with semi literate utterances. Some don’t even know the difference between two to and too. There is also a trend towards writing unfamiliar words as a combination of words that people already have in their somewhat limited vocabulary, lack toast intolerant for example.
Garry Nunn of the Guardian (a newspaper that covered up the murder of millions of human beings – and would happily do so again) is ignorant.
“Bad Bunny” did not speak real Spanish – he just used a series of obscenities that would disgust anyone who admired the Spanish language.
Is this the sort of speech that Mr Nunn wishes children to be taught? The grim answer is IT IS – for if children are taught the sort of “Spanish” that “Bad Bunny” comes out with, then the great works of Spanish literature will be closed to them.
Remember the Guardian really hates Spanish culture, as it hates the culture of all historic Western nations, and hates the Spanish people – if anyone doubts this, read what the Guardian says about the Vox Party in Spain – which is trying to stop the slow-motion (not so slow motion now) genocide of the Spanish people, the Guardian hates-them.
If the Guardian had its way Spanish culture, indeed the Spanish people as a historic nation, would be utterly destroyed – and so would the nations of Latin America.
For example, the collapse of fertility in Chile (due to leftist economic and cultural policies) has, in reaction, led to the election of a conservative President – the Guardian hates him, as it hates anyone who tries to save their nation, their historic culture – including their language and its literature.
Genocide, the extermination of historic nations – peoples and their culture, is not “tolerance”, it is not “diversity” (although it may be “Diversity”, capital “D”, – a very different thing), and it is not liberalism.
It is no more liberalism than the Guardian support for Stalin, Mao, Castro and other thieves and mass murderers.
bobby b writes, referring to the US, “We are an English-speaking country” resonates as much as “we all love our buggy whips.”
I comment with due caution when I live so far away, but so far on this issue the buggy-whip makers have been right. Of course that doesn’t mean they will be right forever, but I know that I have been hearing predictions that the US will cease to be a majority English-speaking country in twenty years or so for a good deal longer than twenty years. The Economist published this article a few days ago: “America may be reaching peak Spanish”. (A link to the same article that does not require registration can be found here.)
Excerpt,
The most interesting part of the article was a bar chart headed “Lo vas a olvidar”, with the subheading “United States, Latino adults who say they can carry on a conversation in Spanish.”
2022, % responding
All Latinos – approx. 76% [All the figures are approximate because they came from my reading of the bar chart and it’s a small chart and quite difficult to see.]
Foreign born – approx. 92%
US born, second generation – approx. 68%
US born, third generation – approx. 35%
The source was given as the Pew Research Centre (Center), who I know do a lot of polling on this sort of issue. I’d call Pew a think tank rather than a pollster. They are usually fairly reliable.
I have no doubt that Spanish will continue to be more widely spoken in the U.S. than any other non-English language, because it is a major world language and there are millions of people who speak it just over the border. But the drop-off in the percentage of US-born Latinos who can carry out a conversation as the generations go by is quite steep.
Spanish, like most romance or germanic languages, takes about 22 weeks to learn for the US diplomatic corps. French, German, and Icelandic take longer.
(Other languages take even longer, 44 weeks or more.)
That is an argument for choosing Spanish over French, but ultimately the choice is up to you. I have read a few very interesting books in French (not cover to cover) and a few more written in French, in translation, but i have yet to read any book written in Spanish. That is a consideration.
I wasn’t meaning to say that we will become a Spanish-predominant country, just that we will never return to the one-language model that so many seem to yearn for. We are now a bilingual country.
It is mostly tradition that we claim to be an English-speaking country at this point. Heck, the sheer number of local schools here in Minnesota – about as far from the Mexican border as you can get – that have adopted Spanish-immersion programs is surprising. (In Spanish immersion, the school day is conducted en Espanol.)
We’re too far north to become Aztlan, though. 😉
Well, I learned Japanese in the ’80s because it gave me access to cute Japanese girls. 🙂
@bobby b
We are now a bilingual country.
FWIW, I don’t agree. There is a difference between “we are a bilingual” and “a lotta people speak Spanish.” There are many people who do not speak any Spanish, and almost everyone who speaks Spanish also speaks pretty decent English. Moreover, the small number of (legal) people who do not speak English are greatly disadvantaged.
For sure, there are a small number of places that not speaking Spanish is a disadvantage, but usually in poor or depressed areas. So mostly the worst consequence of not being able to speak Spanish in those places if you can’t find the best place to get a taco. There are, after all, places where not speaking Navajo is a disadvantage too.
If you live in Bern you probably only speak German (and probably English), if you live in Geneva, you probably only speak French (and probably English.) That’s what a truly bilingual (or in this case quadra-lingual) country looks like.
BTW, piece of trivia — many countries have two languages in their national anthem, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium and Fiji, for example. However, I think South Africa takes the cake with their national anthem in five languages, and when they sing it, they sing all five languages. I think this, the only functional example of multi culturalism in South Africa’s new state, is largely attributable to Mandela, who, for all his faults did try to start the country on a unity basis. And I think its spiraling out of control largely started with his death.
FWIW, AFAIK it is also the only national anthem that has a key change (strangely when they switch from African to European languages.) But I could be wrong about that.
The Spanish national anthem has no words, as on the restoration of the monarchy (on Franco’s death), they couldn’t agree on the words or translations into Catalan, Galician and of course Basque, so they just have the tune, meaning their footballers look dumb when they line up before an International, but they could only hum along even if they knew the tune.
Also, Spanish is a language of in the main of decaying socialist economies, apart from the newly renascent Argentina and hopefully Chile come the new President.
Whereas French gets you France, Belgium (oh, I see) and a chunk of Switzerland and a fair chunk of Africa.
Bernie Ecclestone allegedly said (rather unkindly if it be true) that anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to.
If people are going to speak Spanish – they should speak Spanish, not spit out the stream of obscenities that “Bad Bunny” came out with.
I’m surprised he wasn’t advocating Arabic. The classical form, of course.
William H. Stoddard.
If people understood Classical Arabic they would be able to read the Koran and the Hadiths – as well as the classical commentaries on these texts. The Guardian, indeed the international establishment generally, would not want that – as the myth that they push, that Islam is a religion of peace, would be destroyed.
And by “the establishment” it must be understood that this includes, in various countries, people who call themselves Conservatives or Classical Liberals – but still wish to push comforting myths, claiming that everyone can be friends.
Western Civilization has fallen dramatically from the days when great men such as John Bright were considered mainstream – the mainstream today is made up of lying cowards, who support the persecution of anyone who tells the uncomfortable truth – about a wide range of matters.
Paul, you seem to be supposing that the opinion writers for such places as the Guardian are educated enough to realize how ugly the Muslim scriptures would look to someone who could read them. I’m surprised that you believe this. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s not what I would have expected.
Arabic, like Chinese, takes about 88 weeks to learn for the US diplomatic corps. (4 times as much as Spanish etc.) Japanese and Korean are about as difficult, but of lesser interest from a security perspective.
True. I’m probably biased. I spend my time shuttling between Arizona and Minnesota.
Arizona (outside of Phoenix and Tucson) is more Espanol than Ingles. The Minneapolis metro area and some of its burbs are predominantly English, but not by a huge percentage.
So I’ll correct what I said to, my areas of the USA seem to be quite bilingual.
(And I’m not even counting Little Mogadishu in Minneapolis, where the signs and the conversations are Somalian.)
In any event, if I just distill what I said down to “English is not THE language of the USA anymore”, I think it works.
Snorri Godhi: At the DLI (Defense Language Institute, in Monterey, CA) the 48-week Russian students tend to hang out with the 48-week Farsi students, as they come in on the same rotations, while the longer-term Mandarin and Korean and Arabic people hang out separately. When they say “X weeks”, they mean weeks built of 50 hours of classroom, and probably 20 hours of homework, each week. Not an easy slog.
William H. Stoddard – I think they (the Guardian and so on) really knows what Islam (the religion of Mohammed – his teachings and his personal example) really is, they are just pretending when they say it is peaceful – they really see it as a useful weapon to help destroy the “capitalist” West, the Guardian types are dominated by their hatred of Western Civilisation – they do not really care what happens, as long as the West is destroyed.
Of course, I may be mistaken – they may really think that Islam is “peaceful and tolerant” in which case they are not just ignorant of the texts, they are blind to everything going on around them. That would be beyond being stupid – it would be an intellectual blindness so severe as to be a mental illness “the person stabbing me is doing it as an act of love”.
bobby b – the failure of Americans to rise up and defend themselves, since the Immigration Act of 1965 (when the demographic transformation really got under way) has been astonishing – especially as Senator Kennedy (and your own Vice President Humphrey) kept saying that the purpose of the Act was NOT to change the population demographics of the United States – which, of course, meant that this was the purpose of the Act.
However, as people have been taught, all over the Western world since the 1940s, that any effort to defend themselves and their communities is “racism” (but Westerners being kicked out of other countries, such as Algeria – a country the French created from the 1820s onwards, is somehow NOT “racism”), perhaps it is NOT astonishing.
Westerners have been taught that they are the problem – that it is good for Westerners to, over time, be destroyed.
Of course, Spanish is a Western language – and Catholic Spain (now being destroyed by a leftist government – fertility has collapsed, due to top-down imposed “cultural change” going back many years now, and masses of invaders “immigrants” are being legalized) was a great Western nation. However, the left have transformed much of Latin America – most certainly including Mexico (especially since the terrible Revolution of 1910 – which the Marxist filth of Hollywood celebrate in various lying films), and have even mutilated the Spanish language.
Hence their calling the spitting out of various utterances by “Bad Bunny” – “speaking Spanish” – I suspect that Cervantes would have begged to differ.
With hindsight it is clear what has happened to Spain in recent decades has been the early stages (now NOT the early stages) of slow motion genocide – but then that is true of so many Western nations.
The left still pretend, perhaps even to themselves, that they want to create a wonderful new society – but really they just want to destroy the West.
Their true aim is to leave nothing but ashes and dried blood.
Bobby: iirc the teaching schedule in the US diplomatic corps is 5h/day, 5 days/week.
Based on my experience, if i had to spend much more time than that on a foreign language, i might go insane.
Or more precisely, even more insane.