I was sorting through some old papers and came across a photocopy of this clipping from what I am pretty sure was The New York Times. I have not, however, been able to confirm that. If anyone can tell me the source, I’d appreciate it. Nonetheless, I think it’s a fitting follow up to my last post about translation:
David Tuckerman, who lives near the United Nations, is accustomed to hearing many languages. Recently, he heard a man speaking to his daughter, who appeared to be about 5 years old, in a language he couldn’t identify. He asked what it was and was told that it was Serbian and that naturally the little girl, living in New York, also spoke English.
Mr. Tuckerman complimented the girl on being bilingual and she corrected him. “I’m trilingual,” she said. “My mother is Greek, so I speak Greek to her.” He complimented her again, for knowing the definitions of bi- and trilingual, and then asked what people who spoke only one language were called.
“Americans,” she replied without hesitation.
The country is 3000 miles long and 1000 miles deep. We only border two countries, and English is widely spoken in one of those. Enormous amounts of publications and broadcasts from other countries are translated into English. The miracle is that anyone in the U.S. bothers to learn any other language at all.
This is an old one, and frankly, I don’t find it that clever. The little girl in that story is the daughter of a diplomat, which is to say, a member of the educated elite. Plus, she learned Greek from her mother, because it’s her mother’s native language. I think it is unfair to compare a child like that against the general population in this country. Americans who have a foreign-born parent tend to be bilingual as well, trilingual if they have two foreign-born parents from different countries. Children who are members of the educated elite also tend to have good vocabularies and background in foreign languages. If we are going to point out how ignorant your average lower-middle-class American from Bumfuck, Middle-of-Nowhere is, it would be more fair to compare that person against your average lower-middle-class Serbian from rural Serbia. A comparison with people whose parents speak different native languages, serve at the UN and live in New York city is a bit misleading.
I’ve got to agree with Ron and Amp. I learned Spanish in school, but I had little opportunity to use day to day so I’m pretty bad at it today. I learned some Chinese at work, but once the project ended there was little reason / opportunity to keep learning it. I could try to maintain my ability as a sort of hobby, but that doesn’t really sound like fun. I’m many many hundred miles away from any large non-English speaking population. I have no need/reason to use anything but English in my day to day life. Now, if I grew up in Germany near the French border I’d probably speak 2 or 3 languages, because I’d need to and have lots of opportunity to do so.
But ha hah American’s are so stupid and arrogant. Funny story bro
Yeah, it made me laugh. And as someone who is not an American, I have to say I found it quite correct at first glance too. This is really how many of you appears to outsiders. Not bothering to learn other languages, and never learning them well enough if you do try. There’s always the ‘you’ in sounds that should be just a flat u (like in true), for example.
Then I read your comments, and of course you’re right, there isn’t really that much of a need if you’re always going to be in your own country.
But, as far as anecdata can go. I’m Norwegian, and I spent six years of my childhood in Cameroon, a country with near to 250 native languages, from all of the four major language families in Africa, meaning that they will not be related in any meaningful way at all. The official languages are French and English, but they are used in different regions, not in the same. Anyway. It’s not uncommon that a child speaks five or six languages. One from mother, one from father, French from school, Fula/Fulfulde/Pulaar as the lingua franca and the language of whatever tribe is the most dominant in that area. My parents’ housekeeper spoke nine, most of them fluently. She had no education past what she got as a child, so maybe five or six years.
I’m Norwegian, we have two different written languages and learn both of them in school. We also learn English from age six, in school. I speak French too, and most people my age will have learned a third language, French, German or Spanish. We also understand our close neighbours very well, Danish and Swedish, both written and oral language.
Uh, where was I going with this? Maybe I just wanted to show you a glimpse into a different world. But also, and I think this is important: Learning another language, even if you’ll never go to the country where that language is used, does something for you. It gives you an innate understanding of the otherness in people, and may enable you to get their point of view a little better. Also, access to literature that may not get translated (well). And lastly, it gives a flexibility of mind and brain. Oh yeah, rambling. Thanks for reading :)
IME often people who learn more than one language don’t have the grasp of the subtleties of communication in any of those languages that you get by intensely learning one language. Of course, there’s many monolinguists that don’t have that grasp, either, so YMMV.
MarthaJoy: Although I agree that learning foreign languages is one of the best exercises for the mind, and although I am more than a little troubled about the current wave of anti-intellectualism in my country — I have to say I get a little sensitive about claims that Americans are the only nation of monolingual ignoramuses, and that a non-English speaker’s knowledge of English represents a high degree of culture.
I grew up in Russia, a society where the belief that it is THE most refined, cultured and intellectual group of people on the planet is far more prevalent than the infamous American belief that we are the center of the universe. I cannot even begin to adequately describe the sense of cultural superiority that most Russians embrace. And yet, very, very few Russians speak foreign languages. Very few people are even interested in learning. The ability to make borsch, bang out a couple of sonatinas and having watched “La Chevre” and a couple of other Pierre Richard comedies is the height of cultural sophistication for the overwhelming majority of the so-called “intelligentsia”; although I will concede that we (and by “we”, I mean Russians) have perfected the fine art of creating a veneer of cultural sophistication. Oh, sure, Russian diplomats speak foreign languages and their children do too. But diplomats aren’t most people.
Now, Americans aren’t any more monolingual than people in other anglophone countries. It’s interesting to note that when non-anlophone people learn foreign languages, English is de rigeur, with other widely spoken languages, such as Spanish or French less important, but certainly more popular than, say, Albanian. And that is a clear indication that the primary reason for learning foreign languages is utility, not cultural sophistication. If intellectual curiosity were the driving force behind these people learning foreign languages, then there would be just as much demand for learning, say, Farsi, as there is for learning English. But that’s not what’s happening.
Amused:
Heh, I have a Norwegian friend who is learning Farsi, if that’s the same as we call Persian :) Her fifth language, I think.
I don’t think I said that “Americans are the only nation of monolingual ignoramuses, and that a non-English speaker’s knowledge of English represents a high degree of culture.” I’m not even able to see it in other comments. Sorry about that. It might be, ironically, my grasp of English isn’t good enough. But I’ll try to clarify. I chose Americans as my example because my thoughts sprang from the story in the OP. I could have said what I said about about anglophones, I think.
What you say about non-English speakers learning first and foremost English, is of course through. It is the language of the world now. What annoys me about that is the horribly illogical spelling/pronounciation rules. Seriously. Plaid should be said like braid. Even said should be pronounced like braid. Say-ed, not sædd, FFS. What bothers me about it is the tendency for English to assimilate into other languages, and I worry that we might lose even more of the smaller languages than we already are.
Also. Americans? I meant to say Statesers. The people in Brasil and Chile are not anglophones, as far as I know.
MarthaJoy: I know this issue is like the third rail of public discourse sometimes, but we do have a convention, in English, of calling the residents and natives of the United States “Americans”. (Kind of like residents and natives of the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia refer to themselves as “Macedonians”, not fyrmians, or formerrepublicans; even though as far as I’ve heard, it really upsets a lot of Greeks.) I know some people depart from the convention, but it’s still a convention, and referring to US citizens/residents/whatever as “Americans” does not reflect the speaker’s knowledge or beliefs about the geography and culture of, as well as languages spoken in, the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
“MarthaJoy: I know this issue is like the third rail of public discourse sometimes, but we do have a convention, in English, of calling the residents and natives of the United States “Americans”. (Kind of like residents and natives of the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia refer to themselves as “Macedonians”, not fyrmians, or formerrepublicans; even though as far as I’ve heard, it really upsets a lot of Greeks.)”
The problem is that Canada, and over a dozen countries in Central America, and at least a handful (according to Risk, there’s 4!) in South America, are also…in America.
How many other countries are in the region of Macedonia? The continent of Macedonia? Near the ocean of Macedonia?
I call myself a Québécoise (it doesn’t translate very well in English, but Canadian-English people say Quebecers – and yes they call us, and have called us since forever, Canadian-French people), which means a female resident of the province of Quebec.
I’m pretty sure that by doing so, I’m not robbing someone of the right to say they also are from Quebec, because Quebec is a city and a province…and that’s pretty much it. It’s not the name of a continent. And we are pretty much aware of being an island of French in a sea of English, to boot, with tiny TV and movie markets (France has different taste than we do, and we each have our accents).
We don’t assume that “of course, everyone is looking up to being like us!”, unless we mean “resisting cultural assimilation for 248 years (since 1763 by the English empire proper, then in Canada’s English dominion against our will since 1867) and ongoing”.
Statesers? Good luck getting that to catch on. Languages certainly reflect politics and underlying social attitudes, but last time I checked, the full name of Mexico also includes the (Spanish) words for United States (google it!) and I’d HATE to be accused of appropriating THAT too. OTOH, no other country name has “America” in its official name, so unless you’re proposing we all become Unitedstatesofamericaers/Unitedstatesofamericans/USAers/USAians (pronounced as well as written), I think we may be stuck with what we’ve got. On the upside, that should give you an easy way to shake your finger at the vast majority of us, who use the term “Americans” simply because it is what is widely understood to make our meaning clear.
To the OP: I know lots of Americans (there I said it!) who very much wanted and want to learn a foreign language. Often we start in high school or even college, though, which is not the way to go, as any linguist or language pedagogue can tell you (and with often pretty abysmal coursework too). I remember growing up in a rural area and trying my very best (pre-Internet) to figure out a way to learn another language with very limited resources. It simply isn’t fair to compare apples and oranges or praise someone for naturally acquiring a second/third/etc. language as a child while shaking your head at an adult who has never had that chance.
You know, Amused’s class analysis of the story didn’t even occur to me, and I think it’s dead on. I have to say, though, that for me–and this is what made me smile–the story is very sharply double-edged, exposing the arrogance that the little girl inherited, precisely because her answer could not have been a truly considered one or based on anything more than a very, very limited experience, as much as it pokes fun at “monolingual Americans.” (I will admit that this might be a very idiosyncratic reading, though, since I also understand that, on its face, “monolingual Americans” are supposed to be the butt of the joke.)
Regarding the fact that there are plenty of people all over the world who are as stubbornly monolingual as the Americans this story refers to ostensibly are, I know that this is true, but there is nonetheless an attitude about English–and I associate this attitude with a stubborn and arrogant monolingualism–that is in my experience identifiably American. By way of illustration: When I was living in Korea, my friends and I, from various English-speaking countries around the world, were having lunch in a Pizza Hut that was at the time located in the Samsung building in Seoul. We would go there occasionally when we got homesick for western food. On this particular afternoon, three American men who were attending a medical conference being held in the Samsung building were also having lunch, and they were trying to explain to the waitress taking their order that they wanted the toppings on their pizza to would deviate slightly from what was on the menu. She was having a very hard time understanding them; it took probably 10 minutes for them to make clear what they wanted, and they were only successful after she had brought to their table two or three other people whose English she’d thought was better than hers. I won’t go into the blow-by-blow here, but when all was said and done, one of those American men said, loudly and without a trace of irony or humor of any sort in his voice, “Why can’t these people learn to speak the damned language!” I don’t know if he had forgotten he was not in the United States and I am not going to speculate on where inside him that statement came from, but the assumption that English is “the damned language” is the kind of monolingualism that I associate with the story I told in the OP. It is, for me, the same kind of arrogance that results in the fact that only 3% of the books published in the US are translations from other languages, and a ridiculously small portion of the 3% is literary translation, which is the kind of translation that most often brings readers into some kind of contact with other cultures. (And yes, I recognize that talking about “readers” already means that I have narrowed the scope of my critique in terms of socioeconomic class and education.)
Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
Tell us more. We yearn to hear the sneers from Davos Man!
I’m not sure exactly what you’re implying, Megalodon, but I’m pretty sure it goes against our goals here. Please review the comments policy. Thanks.
FYI, there’s a version of this joke in one of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, where “What do you call someone who only speaks one language?” is answered with “Human.”
Given the cultural penetration of the joke, my guess is that it’s much more likely to have been a joking piece than an actual piece of reportage. Or, rather, any time it appears reported, it is someone telling the joke. It’s just a bit too sophisticated to be genuinely “out of the mouths of babes,” IMO.
And then there are those of us who didn’t learn a second language at home because our parents and grandparents, who were native speakers of a language other than English, fled from a country where they were being persecuted and were trying to fit in here. You know, like all those oh-so-sophisticated European countries. As long as one doesn’t speak the wrong languages, that is.
So frankly, my opinion of comments like Martha Joy’s @4 is one that does not fit the blog policy here. I’ll limit myself to amusement that people who claim to be worldly and sophisticated are showing the exact same cultural chauvinism and stereotyping they believe are innate to Americans.
Richard, I find your parenthetical about an ‘idiosyncratic reading’ rather hard to believe. This is an apocryphical story that one hears over and over in various media outlets and I am rather surprised that someone as intelligent as you would have failed to immediately grasp that the monolingual Americans are the butt of the joke.
Mythago:
I have no memory of when I first read the story, since the clipping is not dated; and I have to say I was surprised to read here in the comments that it is so familiar to people. This clipping is the only encounter with the story that I remember.
The double-edged reading of the story was, in fact, my first response when I found the clipping in my papers, though I have no doubt that this was not my first response the first time I read it–since, as I said, I understand that, on its face, monolingual Americans are supposed to be the butt of the joke. So much depends on context. I spend a great deal of my time reading, thinking, writing about and teaching about the politics of language and so the double-edged reading seemed obvious to me, which was why I thought the story made an interesting follow up to the post on being a translator of Persian. Clearly, though, this deserved a more thoughtful treatment than I gave it in the OP.
Another issue is one of detection: how do you even know whether a given American speaks 1, 2, 3, or more languages without them explicitly saying as much? That they visit a given country and don’t know the language means nothing – that I didn’t know Czech when I visited doesn’t invalidate all of those high school & college courses in Latin & Japanese, yet any random person witnessing my fumbling with the dictionary would assume I’m monolingual.
Part of the problem is that, for someone who speaks a language other than English, English is the obvious first choice given it’s current status in the world. But if you already speak English, any other language will only slightly increase your ability to communicate with others, and in a highly region-specific way.
Oh well, in another few centuries we’ll all just communicate in binary, anyway. Assuming we aren’t a hive-mind by that point. Or extinct.
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@Schala: Really? You don’t say. I am sure you mean well, but the above comment encapsulates precisely what I don’t like about the argument against USA citizens, residents or natives (unwieldy, isn’t it?) calling themselves “Americans”. It’s a disingenuous argument. After all, Canadians are commonly known as Canadians, Chileans as Chileans, and Brazilians as Brazilians. So this argument can’t be made out of any genuine concern that when someone says “Americans”, listeners will be confused as to what specific people in the Western Hemisphere is being referred to. That’s exactly what I am talking about when I say it’s a convention: everyone knows what it means. And thus, the prevailing real reason this argument is made is that it gives one a pretext for schooling the stupid, uneducated American (who surely believes that the Earth is flat and that cheese is harvested from ravioli) that “America” is also the name of two continents. In real life, when people say things like this to me, on the assumption that, being an American, I am completely illiterate, or when they assume that, just because I don’t speak their language, I must be monolingual — I find it rude, condescending, culturally chauvinistic and annoying as hell.
Besides, if you want to nitpick, isn’t “Statean” also misleading? There are states in Brazil, as well as in Mexico. Perhaps using the term “Statean” is unfair to those countries, as it implies that they don’t also have states? Moreover, since Columbia is a feminine personification of the United States, shouldn’t then Colombia change its name? And furthermore, is it even fair to call any America, America? After all, these lands … existed long before Amerigo Vespucci! It’s silly. It really is.
The argument against Macedonians calling themselves Macedonian is that they are misleading the public into believing that they are descendants of ancient Macedonians. The region that was Macedonia in antiquity is in the general vicinity of “Macedonia”. Funny thing is, in antiquity, Macedonia’s neighbors neighbors to the south did not even consider Macedonians as fellow Greeks. They were categorized as “barbarians” and were not eligible to compete in the Olympic games for that reason, at least up until the time when King Philip took everything over. Now, however, the achievements of the Macedonian empire are considered to be a part of Greek heritage, and a significant proportion of the Greek public believe that today’s “Macedonians”, who are living in what was really Thrace (I think) are encroaching and poaching their culture. So — because I don’t believe for a second that the objection to the word “Americans” is truly founded on a desire to avoid practical confusion — the Macedonian issue is pretty much the same kind of silliness as claiming that Americans aren’t calling themselves by the right name.
Upon reading this, I immediately thought, “No foreign language? But don’t they speak Russian?”
My high school French teacher would regularly berate my classmates and me about our shoddy study habits. “You’re just lucky you’re not in the lycee. Those European schools would never accept slipshod work like this! Graduates from those schools are head and shoulders above you lazy louts,” yadda yadda.
So I finally visit France. And the first people I encounter are some workmen repairing the airport and speaking among themselves – in fluent French! And if that weren’t enough, a bunch of school kids ran by, chattering with each other – in fluent French! Crap, I think, my teacher wasn’t just blowing smoke — these schools must be awesome if even 8-yr-olds are already fluent in a foreign language!
Ha! The humans I see depicted in outer space often seem to have the attributes of, well, middle-class Americans (United Statians, if you prefer). So perhaps it makes sense that people from other planets would identify attributes we (allegedly) associate with Americans and generalize them to all humans. Alternatively, perhaps it makes sense that authors who regard Americans as the model for all humans in space would then attribute the (alleged) foibles of Americans to all humans in space.
If they are good or benign humans in outer space, they have American attributes. If they are villainous or suspicious humans, they tend to have British attributes.
If they are good or benign humans in outer space, they have American attributes. If they are villainous or suspicious humans, they tend to have British attributes.
Only if by “attributes” you mean accents. Their culture tends to be more High Fascist, Roman Imperial, or even Space Fantasy Nietzschean or Orcish.
That said, the projection in the SW universe is actually rather British; humans are native speakers of the language of government, imposed by Empire throughout the Galaxy, smugly certain that they are superior to other species, whose labor and resources are to be used.
Anyway, derailasaurs rex is OFF THE TRACKS.
Martha Joy:
There’s a reason for that. Due to various historical factors (especially first being conquered by Scandinavians and then the French and then doing it’s own fair share of conquering later on) English has picked up and incorporated a lot of French, Spanish, et. al. words. It’s also had a large number of pronounciation changes without concomitant spelling changes during the shift from Old English (much closer to English’s roots as a Germanic dialect) to Middle English to Modern English; e.g., “knight” used to be pronounced “ki-ni-ght” rather than “nite”. English is not a pure language – it’s got a lot of other language’s words stuffed and mangled into it.
So it’s a bit of a mess, but it’s not going to change. It’s ironic that the creator of the first really popular dictionary in America, Noah Webster, did so in part to regularize spellings of words in America and wanted to make the kinds of changes you are looking for – like spelling “knight” as “nite” and otherwise making spelling and grammar, etc. consistent and simple. Up until then it was pretty common to see all kinds of spellings for given words, even by educated people in the same document. He succeeded in helping regularizing spelling, but failed at simplifying it. And he made no progress in grammar whatsoever.
“So this argument can’t be made out of any genuine concern that when someone says “Americans”, listeners will be confused as to what specific people in the Western Hemisphere is being referred to. ”
Well, just recently, someone who is from Northern Europe called me an American, knowing full-well I was Canadian, and said “it’s the same, you’re in America”. I was surprised, but that’s probably from not having much contact with non-North Americans (ie people who don’t live in North America – not just people who don’t live in the US).
“To the OP: I know lots of Americans (there I said it!) who very much wanted and want to learn a foreign language. Often we start in high school or even college, though, which is not the way to go, as any linguist or language pedagogue can tell you (and with often pretty abysmal coursework too). I remember growing up in a rural area and trying my very best (pre-Internet) to figure out a way to learn another language with very limited resources.”
I learned English (which yes, is a second language to my native French) through exposure to it. English cartoons, English videogames. Now in this day and age where you can have games in the console’s settings (including at least English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Italian, Deutsch etc), it’s only a matter of finding a game with enough dialogue, bonus if it’s also spoken.
If I learned it in another way (such as school only), I wouldn’t be bilingual. I’d probably still gotten high marks in school, but not enough grasp of the language to use it fluently and/or on a daily basis. Keep in mind that others in my same-age cohorts who are bilingual already had basis for it, or a very strong professional or otherwise interest towards it…or they’re piss-poor at speaking and writing it. And that’s from Quebec province, submerged in the sea of English – people still don’t learn it much (to acceptable levels).
And much of that exposure to English was in my teen years, not childhood. In childhood, I watched French-translated cartoons, read French books, spoke French exclusively, and games pretty much had zero dialogue (or very little on the grammatically correct side, or more evolved than 1st grade, see Zelda II: The Adventure of Link). In my teen years I got interested into English-language series, because they weren’t readily available in French and… it was interesting.
Now they’re readily available in French, and I’ll go fetch fansubs with the original Japanese language, when looking for anime. I’ll watch English cartoons in English. And I’d probably prefer Dr Who in British-original (than France-translated), because the nuances are lost in translation…and the French like to go in regional French while claiming it’s international French.
Amused,
Very interesting views, and insightful. You remind me very, very distinctly of someone I know, of similar background and views. I’m positive she would have phrased it all exactly as you, word for word.