It is no secret that most Americans can only speak English. The resistance and stubborn disposition of our population result in a people who on average are considerably behind the world average in the ability to speak many languages. Today, being bilingual can be a valuable asset. Knowing more than one language has numerous upsides, the most important for our generation being marketability, and when most Americans are monolingual, it would appear to pose a real problem for this nation’s future. But is being bilingual really that important? Is it worth all of the hype?
Bilingualism is certainly a valuable skill. Being able to speak Spanish, French or any other language opens countless opportunities for jobs abroad, and because of this, people who only speak one language do not have the skills to be part of the globalized economy and international job market. Because of benefits in industries like customer service and healthcare, companies increasingly favor those who speak multiple languages. The Journal of Experimental Child Psychology has shown that children learning two languages perform better at certain problem-solving tasks than do their monolingual peers and that they gain “specific cognitive abilities, like selective attention and cognitive flexibility, where they have to focus on relevant information and ignore distracting information.” Overall, bilingualism certainly comes with its benefits.
While an important skill, bilingualism should not be mandated in this country. It is overrated, and fluency in a second language is not a necessary skill. Americans may not be getting hired not because of their inability to speak one language, but because of a highly problematic lack of proficiency in the skills necessary to do their job, which is a common trend in America. Most Americans already have a good understanding of English and the ability to speak another language is simply not necessary or useful. Those who think monolingualism is a real problem facing America would be severely mistaken; social and economic issues facing this nation result in far greater outsourcing of labor and unproductivity of companies.
The American K–12 educational system is a bigger contributor to economic problems than is the lack of bilingualism. To add to this, studies also show that when a bilingual and a monolingual American are compared, it can be seen that the maintenance of many languages in the brain involves an additional processing cost, which could be used towards learning valuable trade skills instead of complimentary bilingual abilities. This might lead to verbal skills of a bilingual person to be generally weaker than those noted in monolingual speakers of the language.
Bilingualism may not even be a problem for Americans. According to the American Community Survey, over 21 percent of Americans over the age of 5 now speak a language other than English at home. This proves that bilingualism, as well as being an overrated knowledge set, may not even be a problem in this nation. On top of this, the number of bilingual speakers is projected to increase in the coming years, so the misconceptions about Americans are proven baseless and wrong.
All the Romance languages you may have taken over the years at school may not even count; as long as you can fluently say “Parlez vous anglais” and order coffee with broken French, you likely will not require greater linguistic understanding. Being bilingual can be an advantage, but it is a unnecessary to promote bilingualism so passionately.