America's Languages

The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) celebrates its one-hundredth year in 2017. This momentous occasion, and the well-deserved celebrations surrounding it, offers a propitious moment to consider what the next one hundred years will bring in language in the United States. At first glance, this seems a bit contrived, but as we will see, language and language policy are inextricably bound to the demographic, cultural, and economic forces which have shaped American society since before our founding, and which loom ever larger in the present day. In 1917, the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese was founded in a time of uncertainty, global conflict, mass migrations, and economic upheaval. Ironically, the nativism sparked by the Great War led to significant reductions in the teaching of languages in the United States, as well as an explicit link between "foreign" languages and anti-American sentiment. Combined with the relentless extirpation of the more than 500 pre-Columbian Native American languages and cultures in the preceding century (Macías 2014), and the appeal and construction of the mythos of a unified ethnolinguistic nation-state (Alba 1990; Sonntag and Cardinal 2015), the twentieth century in the United States became "the graveyard of languages" (Rumbaut 2009: 11). This is all too familiar to language educators, language and civil rights advocates, and policy researchers, and perhaps now so familiar that we draw a certain degree of grim reassurance from the parlous state of languages and language learning in the United States. We often say to ourselves "it has ever been thus," and surely our advocacy for languages, and more importantly, our supremely and foundationally human acts of teaching, learning, and using other languages, set us apart. With apologies to Richard Brecht; much of this essay, and in particular the title, draws on years of conversations and debate, represented in his work for the Commission on Language Learning of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Brecht 2016).

However, this picture, while it may reflect the collective sense of the language teaching and scholarly professions in the United States, does not fully account for the reality of 2017. In comparison to 1917, we are reminded perhaps of Ecclesiastes (1:9), in that there is nothing new under the sun. The centennial year of AATSP also sees a world rent by conflict, economic displacement, and mass migrations. Yet one must bear in mind that, with respect to linguistic diversity, our own culture continues to change remarkably, albeit fitfully, and perhaps permanently. Starting in 2000, John Robinson and his colleagues began surveying American attitudes towards language policy issues (see Robinson, Rivers, and Brecht 2006a), correlating public perceptions of the position of English, the supposed threat of other languages and immigrant communities, and the desirability of language education, with a wide range of demographic factors. They extended this work to examining the characteristics of speakers of languages other than English in the United States, whether first or heritage or second language speakers (Robinson, Rivers, and Brecht 2006b). In 2008 and again in 2012, these surveys were extended to pre-election polls, and included modules on attitudes towards a wide range of issues of diversity and tolerance (Rivers, Robinson, Brecht, and Harwood 2013; Robinson, Rivers, and Harwood 2011). Finally, the in-depth examination of the characteristics of those who claimed ability in another language was repeated (Robinson and Rivers 2012), and combined with an empirical assessment of the hiring practices of American companies, as they intersect with languages (Damari et al. 2016). As space and reader attention is limited here, these studies may be summarized as follows:

• • Americans value languages. Roughly 70% indicate that languages are as important as math and science, that children should be fluent in another language before they leave school, that America's languages do not threaten English (see the analyses presented in Robinson et al. 2006a; Robinson et al. 2011; Rivers et al. 2013).

• • An increasingly high percentage of Americans equate tolerance of linguistic and ethnic diversity with tolerance of many other indicia of diversity, such as gay and interracial marriage, the legalization of marijuana, welcoming immigrants, and so...