The Rise of Monolingualism

By Roxanna Curry

No language has an official area in which it belongs, a boundary it can not cross. However, as Johns Hopkins University Post writers David Gramling and Bethany Wiggin state, the idea that “the conception of language as a prepossession of the nation” is a pervasive one. A person’s primary language, especially if it is a widely spoken one with famous texts and writers associated with it, can instill a sense of primacy in a speaker.

This idea can be seen clearly in citizens of English speaking countries, a language which continues to dominate the world today, being the most studied language with over a billion learners.

In the United States alone, the Modern Language Association found, in 2016, that for every one hundred students enrolled at a college located in the United States, only 7.5 of them were studying a foreign language. This decline is not limited to institutions of higher education. In US schools, the National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey discovered that, on average, just twenty percent of the school-age population participated in a foreign language course.

These data points display a stark decline in foreign language study, as according to a bar chart produced by the MLA, in the year 1965, enrollment peaked at 16.5 percent and has steadily declined since. The only variant to this trend took place between the years 2002 and 2006, when language enrollments in US colleges increased from 8.4 to 9.1 percent of the student body. However since then the percentage of enrollments has dropped an average of half a percentage point every four years.

In a world where the economy has become increasingly diverse and being at a minimum bilingual is more important than ever, it may seem strange that there is not more interest among American students in mastering a foreign language. It may seem even stranger that the economy itself is the very reason for this decline in study.

Difficult economic situations such as the Great Recession have influenced changes in the preferred major of college students. A report from Inside Higher Ed found that “every one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to a 3.2 percentage point shift in major choices for men and a 4.1 percent percentage point shift for women.” This means that American students were less likely to dedicate their studies to sociology, education, languages, and literature, and instead dedicated their focus to majors in which they had more economic confidence.

Compared to European students, who, according to the MLA, have a foreign language enrollment level of ninety-two percent, American students are placed at a professional disadvantage as they are unable to display the same skills as their counterparts from other nations.

Speaking a second language gives job-hunters an advantage in the professional world, as prospective places of employment often prefer an, at a minimum, bilingual employee over a monolingual one. Bilingualism can also lead to better pay, as employers view it as a specialization. The ability to communicate in a foreign language helps an employee close sales and conduct business deals at a much more successful rate.

Beyond the economic world, the ability to communicate outside of one’s mother tongue still has benefits. Being able to speak a foreign language allows a person to experience cultures in a deeper way. These new cultural experiences can also help people interact with people from different backgrounds in a more positive manner. By not engaging with different languages and cultures, a person becomes isolated and unenriched.

Speaking a foreign language also helps a person enjoy travelling more. Despite the extremely low rates of second language enrollment in the United States, as of 2018, 41.77 million Americans travelled overseas. Being able to communicate effectively with citizens of the country one visits can help them exercise independence and not feel isolated.

Overall, the ability to speak a foreign language allows for better international communication, business dealings, and cultural experiences. If this trend of increasing monolingualism continues, American citizens could become cut off from the rest of our changing world.