Jude Magnotti ‘26
EE Co-Managing Editor
Language is the single most difficult, taxing, yet important thing you will learn in your life. It involves a set of complex rules, a near perfect memory, and astute and correct pronunciation of a menagerie of words and phrases. Yet, somehow, it is adults and teenagers that struggle to speak it more than anybody else. When you are young, around 0-9 years old, your brain is actively equipped to absorb and pick up new bits of language. This is why more than 70% of bilingual/multilingual speakers learned their second language or languages before the age of 10.
Unfortunately, once your brain gets past that point, it is close to impossible to ever speak a language with the same adequacy or effectiveness as a native speaker. Kids who are not exposed to language during this critical time period have actually shown to not be able to ever fully pick up a language again at all.
Every year in school, we are reminded time and time again of the importance of our world language classes. We are encouraged to take them by our guidance counselors, funding for these classes is a top priority for many schools, and events and weeks to celebrate culture and these classes are frequently hosted. Yet, sadly, funding for world language classes is one of the first things being cut in many schools that can simply not afford to spend the time or money to teach these languages. Afterall, why spend time teaching students a second language when they can barely afford instruction in English as it is?
Still, what about the skill of learning a second language in particular makes it worth putting money and effort into, and how can cutting these classes be a massive detriment to a student’s learning experience?
Well, as it turns out, while learning a second language may seem obsolete and taxing, it is one of the most important skills a student or person can utilize in their life. In just a few years since 2019, the percentages of households in the U.S. speaking a second language rose from just 11%, to almost 25% in 2024. Since 1980, the amount of foreign language speakers in the U.S. has TRIPLED from 23.1 million to 67.8 million with most of these individuals speaking tongues such as Spanish, French, and German.
Still, value lies not just in the growing population of people speaking these languages in the U.S., but the growing movement to protect endangered languages in the United States. Arikara, Cherokee, and Hawaiian sign languages are all examples of prevalent languages that have now been reduced to an incredibly small portion of speakers. Despite efforts to preserve these artifacts of culture and diversity, many languages have already been lost to the wind and forgotten entirely.
While even the most well-funded of schools can not afford to teach languages such as these, understanding the importance of preserving these sacred methods of communication is critical in maintaining the ever more diverse and changing landscape of America.
When it comes to speaking a second language in particular, the benefits reveal themselves to be seemingly evidence. In addition to the ultimate act of bragging that is being the only one to speak another language fluently out of your friends, speaking a second language has been proven to enhance the neurological and cognitive capabilities of people who speak it.
For example, most bi/multilingual individuals are able to think in both their first, second, third, and even fourth languages at the same time. Not only does unique skill allow for faster thought input and organization, it has proven to expedite the process of thought generation potentially paving the way to more creative ideas.
Similarly, this process can also lend itself to supporting a more reliable memory which becomes especially valuable as you get older or even decide to learn another language. Multilingual speakers are often shown to have a greater capacity for learning even more languages than those who have only spoken native tongues.
Still, we are leaving out the most important (as well as the most pain-strikingly obvious) benefits of knowing a second language: communication with other people. As evidenced by the growing number of foreign language speakers in the United States, the chances of you actually being able to use your second language to communicate with and understand speakers of a different language have become increasingly more likely. You never know when you meet someone in a jam who may not speak the same main language as you, and having the ability to potentially help them and make them feel at home is one of the best things you can do for them and yourself.
Still, many will make the argument that students being taught a second language does not provide enough results to justify its cost. Only 2% of students who take a language course in school actually learn the language fluently and only 10% study a language course again in college.
Still, the problem lies not in the system, but that these world language classes are in fact not being taught early enough. As previously mentioned, your brain has an incredibly difficult time learning language after age 9 so when students begin classes in middle and high school they are already well past their full language learning potential. Instead, these classes need to be started and encouraged as late as pre school and as early as the child first starts learning a language.
In countries where multiple languages are taught in instruction, there is close to a 99% percent comprehension rate with almost every single student growing up to speak their second language fluently. While the task of teaching a bunch of 3-year-olds another language may seem daunting, it is not as hard as you think it would be.
As I stated, children’s brains are uniquely wired to pick up and learn language and chances are if you threw a rigorous world language class at a class of pre-schoolers vs. a class of teens, the pre-schoolers would remember it better. Culture is changing. Countries are changing. The entire world is CHANGING. This is why it is ever more important to arm our students with the skills they need to succeed as early in life as we can possibly get them to. In the case of something as important as the very fabric of how we communicate and conduct ourselves in world language, this sentiment rings especially true…
Image courtesy: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay