You Should Take a Language

You should start a language this spring. “Who, me?” Ja! Oui! Da! Sí! 是! はい! Sic!

Why? New languages create lifelong opportunities. They open up new solutions to crisis and uncertainty. And above all, learning new languages sparks joy. Don’t just take my word for it,ask the alumni I meet at conferences or coffee shops, who introduce themselves after seeing my telltale nametag or purple sweater. In one breath, they’ll tell me how much they love the college, the toughest professor in their day, and then, the languages they took. “Was that your major?” I’ll ask. Sometimes the answer is yes, but often not. Biology. Political Science. History. Economics. English. European Studies. Mathematics. The list is long. 

Regardless of the field, studying a language opens doors. Consider the alum who landed in West Berlin after graduation, just before the fall of the Wall. His career in foreign service took him across Europe and the Middle East, later to Leipzig as the U.S. Consul General. Consider the alum who took Chinese in his first year and studied in Beijing the next. Seven months abroad turned into seventeen years in Taiwan, to graduate studies, a career teaching Chinese and history, and two bilingual children. Language study at Amherst, he shared, set his life and career on an entirely new course and has transformed his approach to the world.

Consider the art history major who learned three different languages in college, and three more since — most recently, Arabic. Had he known he’d one day give presentations on architectural projects in French for clients in Africa? At the time, Italian, German, and Greek had been a haven from the heavy reading of required classes, as well as the chance to play with different kinds of problems and passions.

One alum who majored in STEM (and English!) connected me to a STEM friend who’d put her Amherst French classes to work in the Peace Corps in Morocco, adding Tamazight and Arabic. Now a science writer, she translates complex discoveries from around the world and beyond for her readers. 

There’s the alum with a double major in German and mathematics, who earned a master’s in applicable mathematics in London, before pivoting to history. Today, he’s an award-winning historian at an R1 university, whose work on citizenship in postwar Europe has connected scholars of French, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and the numerous languages spoken on the continent. 

These are only a small sampling of the stories I’ve heard since coming to Amherst, from those alumni crossing paths or emailing with me in the past week. But there are many more stories like theirs, and others that are unique in their own regard. They’ve been inspiring and profoundly touching, and I am grateful for their willingness to talk with me. My short account doesn’t do them justice.

Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself, “but times were different then! Less expensive! Less divided! Less uncertain! What good will learning languages do for me? For my community? For the world?” It’s true, the crises you face now and in the future are too numerous, the threats too complex to list. But that is exactly why you should study a language. Complex challenges require complex solutions. Foreign languages are a superpower in that sense. 

Those taking a psychology or philosophy course may have heard about the Trolley Problem — the classic thought experiment that asks whether you’d pull a switch to save five, if doing so meant taking a life. Research tells us that our responses to ethical problems can change fundamentally based on whether we encounter them in a first or second language. In promising studies, participants’ responses were less individualistic and more inclined towards empathy in second languages. This is to say nothing of the centuries of rich and varied knowledge available to us solely through the lens of other cultures and language communities. 

This week, students in my first year seminar, “Once Upon a Time,” read folk tales by a Cameroonian immigrant to Northern Germany in the 1880s. For context, Cameroon had become a German protectorate, followed by decades of French colonial rule and brutal oppression. Our writer tells a story about Tortoise and Dog, who gather nuts from the tree of a greedy tiger. Dog’s yelp gives Tortoise away, who is seized by Tiger and in danger of becoming dinner for him and his friends. Despite his small size, Dog resolves to rescue Tortoise, donning a disguise and scaring the larger animals out of their wits, while Tortoise slips away unnoticed. When crises surround us, when solutions seem all but impossible, we would do well to follow Dog’s lead. 

Approaching challenges in another form, in an unexpected way, may just open up a path out of the present danger and towards a lasting solution. This is the case whether the problem concerns a tiger’s pot, histories of oppression and atrocities under colonial rule, or the many crises that fill our front pages and newsfeeds today, including the crisis in education. Current reporting from the National Center for Education Statistics found that only 25% of students in the United States had studied any language other than Spanish for any amount of time during K-12 — and this report was for 2019, before the devastating and lasting effects of the pandemic and funding cuts caused further decline. Among high school students, 12.3% had taken any credits at all in French, only 2.7% for German and Latin, and less than 2% for Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Italian. 

Predictably, enrollment in languages other than English in colleges and universities has suffered from this “pipeline” problem, as I mentioned in a recent faculty meeting. Between 2016 and 2020 alone, enrollment in foreign languages at all institutions of higher education fell by 15.4% in the United States. Again, this was before the pandemic. As language instruction disappears from middle and high school curricula, as colleges and universities shutter programs, our collective ability to confront the serious problems facing American society and the world suffers immensely. 

I admit, that last paragraph got a bit heavy. Luckily, I have my German class to look forward to, because I get to spend eighty minutes playing games, solving puzzles, reading stories, and having great, complex conversations with my students. There’s a lot to be joyful about, also about language learning on our campus and the Five Colleges. It’s truly a privilege to teach with and to such an engaged and enthusiastic community–and a large body of research shows that learner engagement is one of the key predictors of successful second language acquisition.

Rather than tell you about the ways learning new languages enhance the quality of our social life and promote happiness and wellbeing though — or the ways these benefits are available to diverse brains and diverse learners — I leave you with some homework. Go talk to someone who has taken a language class at Amherst. Talk to students. Talk to alumni. Talk to your professors. Yes, they take our language classes too! And then, talk to your advisor about signing up for a language class this spring!