Why Your Children Should Learn a Less-Commonly-Taught Language

More than 300 distinct languages other than English are now spoken in the United States.  According to the U. S. Census Bureau's 2009 Statistical Abstract, those with the most native speakers in this country are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, French, Vietnamese, German, and Korean (all with numbers of speakers in the millions), followed by Russian, Arabic, and Italian.

Other languages with large numbers of speakers (in no particular order) include Portuguese, French Creole, Yiddish, Greek, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Navajo, Laotian, Thai, Hmong, Hindi, Urdu, and Serbo-Croatian.

The most- commonly-taught languages are Spanish, French, and German, which do happen to be among the top-ten most-commonly spoken languages in the U.S but also all happen to be Indo-European languages closely related to English.  All of the world's other languages are classified as "less-commonly-taught." 

Of course there are many reasons to learn languages other than the number of people who speak them (whether in the U.S. or abroad).  Here are some reasons why your children should learn a less-commonly-taught language.

•  To get to know their family history.  Many North Americans, even if they no longer speak a language other than English, Spanish, French, or German at home, have ancestors who did.  Did you perhaps have a Native American great-grandfather or a Ukrainian immigrant grandmother, or are you descended from African slaves who spoke Mende, Fula, or another West African language?  Or perhaps your child's connection to a less-commonly-taught language is even closer, as for my niece Sophia, who is learning Georgian in order to communicate with her grandmother and cousins in the Republic of Georgia and in the United States.

• To read or do research in another language.  Do your high-school-aged children want to read the Bible, the Torah, or the Buddhist scriptures in their original languages?  Do they love modern Egyptian novels, Japanese comic books, or Chinese Taoist poetry?  Do they want to attend school abroad for a short time?  Do they plan to study history, art history, international studies, computers, languages, comparative literature, translation, or linguistics in college?  If so, they might want to start studying a less-commonly-taught language now.

•  To make new friends in their community.  If you live in a community where less-commonly-taught languages are spoken, learning one of those languages may help your children make new friends and connections within the community.  This may be true even if you don't live in a big city.  In Lewiston, Maine, where I live, for example, there is a large Somali community and knowing the Somali language would be very helpful to anyone attending the public schools as well as to anyone wanting to get involved with community organizations, from the library to the farmer's market to the hospitals.  (See Newsweek's very interesting article, “The Refugees Who Saved Lewiston,” on the Web at http://www.newsweek.com/id/180035).

• To travel and make new friends abroad.  If your family is going on vacation to Ireland, perhaps your children would benefit from learning some Irish Gaelic.  If your child plans to go on an exchange program to India, she might want to learn some Hindi, Gujarati, or one of India's several hundred other mother tongues.  If you or your spouse will be stationed in Kuwait or South Korea in the near future, your children could benefit greatly from learning to speak Arabic or Korean.

• To help save a dying language from extinction.  More than half of the world's approximately 6000 languages are now considered "endangered," which means that there will be no native speakers left a hundred years from now.  Many have only one, ten, or a few hundred speakers as I write; others have become extinct in the recent past.  Some communities are now making efforts to save their endangered languages from extinction by teaching them to both children and adults.  Linguists are attempting to preserve others on paper or in audio and video formats so that they will still be able to study them when they are no longer spoken and learn more about human language in general or about specific language families.  Your child can participate in this important work by learning and sharing an endangered language.  For more information, please visit the Endangered Language Alliance website at http://endangeredlanguagealliance.org/.

As you and your children start on this vital and empowering mission, I’ll leave you with a couple of additional resources:

•  The University of Minnesota maintains a website through its Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA).  This website provides listings of K-12 and college/university course offerings in less-commonly taught languages, lists of relevant organizations, and even audio and video files that can be used by educators free of charge.  Check it out at the following URL: http://www.carla.umn.edu/lctl/.

• The Ethnologue project aims to provide a comprehensive catalog of the world’s living languages.  The online version is available at http://www.ethnologue.com/.

I wish you and your children the best of luck as you embark on your language-learning adventures.  Please check back for future posts on specific less-commonly-taught languages here at LinguistKids!