Babel No More Read Free

and that monolinguals (such as myself) need to live and act multilingually. But that’s not what I’m writing about.
    Something else is happening as well: we’ve begun to want to naturally move among these bubbles unimpeded.Maybe you’re a Dagestani woman living in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, who speaks Russian to your husband while he speaks Arabic to you. Maybe you’re an American project manager leading phone meetings, in English, with engineers from China, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Maybe you’re a Japanese speaker working next to two Hondurans in a noodle shop. Maybe you’re a Beijinger finally realizingyour dream to see the Grand Canyon. Ideas, information, goods, and people are flowing more easily through space, and this is creating a sensibility about language learning that’s rooted more in the trajectories of an individual’s life than in one’s citizenship or nationality. It’s embedded in economic demands, not the standards of schools and governments. That means that our brains also haveto flow, to remain plastic and open to new skills and information. One of these skills is learning new ways to communicate.
    If you could alleviate people’s anxieties about language learning, you’d solve what has shaped up to be the core linguistic challenge of the twenty-first century: How can I learn a language quickly? How well do I have to speak or write it for it to be useful? Whose standardswill I have to meet? Will I ever be taken as native? And are my economic status, my identity, and my brain going to be changed?
    How adults learn languages is central to the emergence of English as a global lingua franca. In fact, the spread of English is the signal example of the reconsideration of “native-like” abilities in a language. In the coming decades, as many as two billion people willlearn English as a second language. Some large fraction of them will be adults who are attracted by the prestige and utility that has made it the most popular language to learn over the past five decades. In China, the size of the English market has been valued at $3.5 billion, with as many as thirty thousand companies offering English classes. It’s said that on a daily basis, as many as 70 percentof all interactions in English around the world occur between non-native speakers. This means that native English speakers have less control over determining the “proper” pronunciation and grammar of English. Some experts in China and Europe now advocate teaching standardized foreign Englishes that wouldn’t fly in the language’s home countries.
    English may be the only global language with morenon-native speakers than native ones. However, it isn’t the only additional language that people are learning in the $83 billion worldwide language-learning market—a figure that doesn’t include spending on schools, teachers, and textbooks in educational systems. In the United States, 70 percent of college students in foreign-language classes study Spanish, French, and German, though Arabic, Chinese,and Korean are increasing in popularity. If you live in Brazil, you’ll learn Spanish, now compulsory in schools. If you live in East Asia, it’s Mandarin Chinese. In Europe, thanks to the European Union, it’s French and German. Hindi in India. Swahili in East Africa. Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. But speaking like a native, at a moment when people need extra languages to make a living, is a standardto which adult speakers literally cannot afford to be held.
    Also, pumping new life into endangered or extinct languages depends on teaching them to people who have lost the moldable brains of youth.And when ancestral tongues die out, their communities don’t become mute—children and adults learn to speak something else, often a language connected to the demise of their ancestral one. I say thisnot to glibly dismiss the issue but to point out the full scope of the problem. Also, exciting new technologies for translating