[lg policy] What a Coca Cola Ad Taught Us About Language Policy in the US

Fri Feb 7 18:34:29 UTC 2014

 Super Bowl <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/superbowl-ads/>  Language
Learning <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/language-learning/>
Super Bowl<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/superbowl-commercials/>
Foreign
Languages <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/foreign-languages/>
Speakamerican <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/speakamerican/>  Media
News <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/Media/>

Last Sunday night, millions of American crowded televisions sets to watch
the Super Bowl, an annual sporting event so synonymous with American
culture that *Le Monde*, a French newspaper, dubbed it "the other 4th of
July<http://sportsus.blog.lemonde.fr/2014/02/02/super-bowl-day-lautre-4-juillet/>."
During the game, Coca Cola ran this minute-long
spot<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=443Vy3I0gJs&list=PLCIVZWq1FAwcWJmgdF5o3-QTZZ-OnBUgA]>featuring
a variety of people singing "America the Beautiful" in a variety
of languages.

Within minutes, a veritable firestorm erupted on Twitter. The hashtags
#SpeakAmerican and #FuckCoke began trending, with users saying things like,
"This is America. We speak English." Conservative political icon
former-Congressman Allen West had a post
up<http://allenbwest.com/2014/02/coca-cola-ad-super-bowl-americans-brand-hm/>on
his website before the game was even over quoting American president
Teddy Roosevelt, saying, "We have room for but one language here, and that
is the English language for we intend to see that the crucible turns our
people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a
polyglot boarding house..."

The controversy highlights some uncomfortable truths about America's
complicated relationship with bilingualism and foreign language learning.
For a country that considers itself the world's superpower, its citizens
are shockingly deficient when it comes to having a knowledge of foreign
languages. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has
noted<http://www.forbes.com/sites/collegeprose/2012/08/27/americas-foreign-language-deficit/>,
"Only 18 percent of Americans report speaking a language other than
English, while 53 percent of Europeans (and increasing numbers in other
parts of the world) can converse in a second language." Put in a global
perspective, the U.S.'s overwhelming monolingualism is an aberration:
according to the Center for Applied
Linguistics<http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/digestglobal.html>,
"Available data indicate that there are many more bilingual or multilingual
individuals in the world than there are monolingual."

It didn't always used to be this way. Many of the United States' founding
fathers spoke French, Italian, or Spanish, or could read a classical
language like Latin or ancient Greek. Martin Van Buren, the 8th president
of the United States, learned English as his second language -- his first
being Dutch. Legend has it that James Garfield, the 20th president, could
write simultaneously and ambidextrously in Latin and Greek.

Fast-forward to today, when bilingualism has, at times, been a political
landmine. In 2008, Barack Obama, who is monolingual, was roundly
criticized<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-i-dont-speak-a-foreign-language-its-embarrassing/>by
conservative groups for supporting early-age foreign language
education
in American schools. What did Obama say
exactly?<http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/the-monolingual-presidency/>"Instead
of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English -- they'll
learn English -- you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You
should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should
have every child speaking more than one language."

Other aspirants to the presidency who *have* been able to speak foreign
languages have been mocked for their linguistic prowess, including Mitt
Romney and John Kerry, who both speak French, and Jon Huntsman, the 2012
Republican presidential candidate who speaks Mandarin Chinese. But men like
these are the exception in the U.S. and will remain so, especially as
schools have cut funding for foreign language programs. As an article
published in Forbes entitled "America's Foreign Language
Deficit"<http://www.forbes.com/sites/collegeprose/2012/08/27/americas-foreign-language-deficit/>points
out, the state of foreign language instruction in the U.S. is, well,
not great:

*- The percentage of public and private elementary schools offering foreign
language instruction decreased from 31 to 25 percent from 1997 to 2008.
 Instruction in public elementary schools dropped from 24 percent to 15
percent, with rural districts hit the hardest.*

*- The percentage of all middle schools offering foreign language
instruction decreased from 75 to 58 percent.*

*- The percentage of high schools offering some foreign language courses
remained about the same, at 91 percent.*

*- About 25 percent of elementary schools and 30 percent of middle schools
report a shortage of qualified foreign language teachers.*

*- In 2009-2010, only 50.7 percent of higher education institutions
required foreign language study for a baccalaureate, down from 67.5 percent
in 1994-1995.  And many colleges and universities, including Cornell, have
reduced or eliminated instructional offerings in "less popular" languages.*

This leads us to the greatest irony of the entire controversy: Coca Cola is
a global brand that hails from a country that's becoming less and less
adept at producing global leaders. Only a quarter of the world's population
speaks English. (I say "only a quarter" because citizens of Anglophone
countries often act as if this percentage is much higher.) That means that
Barack Obama, who was hailed as a transformational leader who would repair
America's global image, can only communicate with a quarter of the world's
population -- except though translators.

But speaking a second language is about much, much more than simply knowing
vocabulary and grammatical structures; it can actually change the way you
view the world. For that, translators simply won't do the trick. For
instance, recent research <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US7wLCbZ84M> has
shown that speakers of "non-futured" languages, like Finnish or German, are
more likely to save more money for retirement and are less likely to smoke
or be obese than speakers of "futured" languages like French or English.
See this video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US7wLCbZ84M> for more on
those findings -- it is *fascinating*.

It appears, perversely, that the ineptitude of the world's richest country
and largest economy when it comes to learning foreign languages could
hamper its ability to remain globally competitive. According to the council
on foreign relations<http://blogs.cfr.org/renewing-america/2012/06/26/foreign-languages-and-u-s-economic-competitiveness/>,
"Nearly 30 percent of the U.S. economy is now wrapped up in international
trade, and half of U.S. growth since the official end of the recession in
2009 has come from exports." Domestically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
estimates that market for interpreters and translators will grow by 42
percent between 2010 and
2020<http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/30/news/economy/job-skills-foreign-language/>.
For a country that's been mired in an employment crisis for the better part
of five years, encouraging more people to pick up a phrasebook doesn't seem
like such a foolish idea.
All of the talk about employment statistics aside, it appears that that
America's bilinguals, like the ones featured in the Coca Cola ad last
night, will have the last laugh in this debate. From a greater resistance
to the deleterious effects of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, to enhanced
cognitive flexibility -- that's a fancy name for what a layman would call
creativity -- and decision-making abilities, the advantages of being
bilingual<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-roitman/why-it-makes-more-sense-t_b_3435076.html>are
numerous and well-documented. It seems, then, that those who now plan
to boycott Coca Cola have a lot more to learn from those featured in the
commercial than the other way around.

Whether you do it to better your mind or whatever, try learning a language
this year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zach-simon/what-a-coca-cola-ad-taugh_b_4734009.html
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