Russ Feingold on the critical need for language learning

Russ Feingold is a Wisconsin icon. If you go around Madison, you can easily find bumper stickers that say "Russ Feingold will always be MY senator". He lost his last election to Ron Johnson (who's making news on his own, despite being generally invisible in the Senate) in the surge that brought Scott Walker to power, and he steadfastly refused to run for governor against Walker.

At any rate, I just finished reading his new book, While America Sleeps: A wake-up call for the post-9/11 era.* In the senate, Feingold worked hard on 'big picture' foreign policy issues, often on issues that the US has largely ignored, like, say, what's going on in Africa. The book reviews post-9/11 politics from his perspective and closes with a lot on what he thinks we need to be doing now. He writes (p. 258-259) about the skills and abilities we need as a nation:

To continue to play a leading role in the world, and to be safe at home, we have to develop these abilities in government, education, and the media.

Perhaps foremost among the abilities we Americans need to cultivate is the knowledge of foreign languages. I know only English and a smattering of French, so I have to admit my own failings in this area. They say that it's very hard to learn a language later in life, but if there's an experiment somewhere to see if someone approaching sixty can still become fluent in some foreign language, sign me up. A failure to learn other languages can be viewed as arrogant, possibly even rude. … But it is more urgent than that. I am convinced that it is actually a threat to our national security … .

Nicely said. He builds a really extended discussion around this and concludes, among other things (p. 261), that:

We simply need more American who are willing to make linguistic diversity an important part of their education and lives.

Yup. And, Senator, we'll be in touch the day we start looking for subjects for that experiment.

*The title plays on Churchill's While England Slept by way of JFK's senior thesis, published as "Why England Slept".

Spanish speakers learning English in the US

We've been through this topic before, but here's more on just how fast Spanish speakers in this country are learning English, based on work from the Pew Hispanic Center. (Note that there's a menu bar across the top, where you can get different sub-stories.) The key info is captured in the graphic:

Even the BBC gets part of a language story right! (If you don't get why that's shocking, click here and search 'BBC'.) But of course I have a quibble:

Very often [Hispanics] switch between languages within a single sentence, or borrow English words and put them into Spanish, making a hybrid known as Spanglish.

Every language borrows from others, and English is vastly more hybrid on that count than most 'Spanglish' I've heard. Codeswitching is another game -- it's real and it's important and striking linguistic behavior. For example, you can only really do it appropriately if you're really solid in both languages. But getting at that behavior is just not something you can usually ask people. Bilinguals are often aware that they codeswitch and may report it, but what the label means varies -- I've heard people who use an occasional English word consider that 'Spanglish', and everybody in this country does that, pretty much. In fact, I'll bet you $20 that there are systematic differences in what people mean by the term across generations.

Anyway, more information in easy-to-present form for how fast immigrants are learning English today.

RezWorld: A new tool for language learning

Mr. V's last post took us back to literally the earliest known Cherokee text written in Sequoyah's syllabary. I passed that link on to some folks, and was rewarded with a link to what's probably the newest tool for Native language learning — RezWorld. It's described "the first fully-immersive 3-D Video Game that teaches Native languages." Check out the video.

The prototype shown in the video is, as it happens, in Cherokee, and the idea is that it can be adapted not only to any language, but also the appropriate community and cultural context. It's got a nice feel to it, low-key and with humor. And yes, there is a shot of the syllabary in there.

Of course this won't magically get kids speaking their community's language instantly, but it's another tool for revitalization, and probably one that will reach some effectively. It looks pretty cool.

And you should read the story of how the project came about, here.