The Army Language Corps: We speak Farsi so you don ’t have to

[Dennis Baron]

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The Army Language Corps: We speak Farsi so you don’t have to

While the U.S. contemplates making English either its official or its  
national language, continues to discourage immigrants from speaking  
their own native languages, and actively encourages Americans to  
remain resolutely monolingual, the army has been quietly teaching  
strategic foreign languages to key personnel on a strictly need-to- 
know basis.

Since 1776 the American military has defended the nation against all  
enemies foreign and domestic, and since 1941, when it began secretly  
teaching Japanese to U.S. soldiers, most of them of Japanese  
ancestry, it has been defending us against all languages foreign and  
domestic as well.

The army’s elite Defense Language Institute, in Monterey, California,  
the self-proclaimed “language capital of the world,” now teaches 24  
key languages to military and other government personnel, condensing  
four years of study into freeze-dried packets of “languages-ready-to- 
speak” that take just six to 18 months. So willing is the army to do  
the talking for us that the motto of its Farsi program is, “We speak  
Farsi so you don’t have to.”






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(and sorry for the hat trick of posts this week -- )

Dennis



Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

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