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American Speech 75.3 (2000) 290-292



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In Addition to English

Why Bilingualism Matters

Carol Myers-Scotton, University of South Carolina

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I want to address a forward-looking topic in this essay, bilingualism. I refer to people speaking more than one language in their everyday lives. It's about time that Americans, but especially linguists, wake up to the fact that the majority of the world is bilingual and America, long the bastion of English-only, is joining the human race, whether it knows it or not. This [End Page 290] does not mean that all Americans must become fluent in another language, but it does mean that they--including linguists--should become aware of what speaking more than one language means to the speakers themselves AND to the structure of languages and their study.

For linguists, it's time to stop relegating studies of language contact to the periphery of the discipline. Contact linguistics is the study of what happens to the grammatical structure of languages when they come into contact because their speakers are bilingual. Mainstream linguists persist in analyses that treat one language at a time. They maintain the fiction that whether the speakers of their object of analysis are monolingual or bilingual has no bearing on the form of the language under analysis. They also do not consider that HOW two languages come together (i.e., what options are possible when one language influences another or when two languages are used together in a code-switching pattern) can lead to important insights into the very object of their investigations, the structure of a single language or the abstract structure of language (with a big "L").

For example, research that my associates and I have conducted on Arabic/English code-switching indicates to us precise ways in which Arabic and English verbs differ. We argue that verb forms in Arabic must indicate a setting for tense/aspect features at a very early level in language production (in the "mental lexicon"). In contrast, these features are not salient for English until later in the production process, when a constituent larger than the verb itself is assembled. Also, based on research on Spanish/English code-switching, we can produce empirical evidence that Spanish determiners (because they encode the features of person, number, and gender that they receive from their head nouns) play a critical role in Spanish syntax, making them very different from English determiners.

For the general American public, globalization (faster communication possibilities, economic interdependence among nations) brings all of us into touch with persons who speak languages other than English as their first language. True, more and more people elsewhere are learning English as a second language and can communicate with us in English. But occasions arise when it is necessary for at least some Americans to be equipped to speak to others in their own languages, too. For this reason, more time in the school curriculum--and at the earliest age possible--should be devoted to second-language learning.

There are two even better reasons for all Americans to study at least one second language. First, studying another language gives us a better understanding of English structure; that is, seeing how another language is structured differently throws into perspective the English language. Second, when we study a language, we inevitably also study the culture of [End Page 291] speakers of that language. Studying other languages makes us recognize that other cultures may run on very different priorities than our own. As a linguist, I find the idea of studying a foreign language to see how languages "work" more appealing. But as a world citizen, I think learning about other cultures--and thereby developing tolerances for cultural differences--is the more important objective.

For these reasons, I make the following recommendations: (1) All American elementary-school students should study a foreign language long enough to be able to speak it conversationally. This language should be one that is very relevant to America's changing makeup; Spanish is an obvious candidate. (2) In middle school and high school, all students should study for...

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