The Degree and Origin of Foreign Language Competence
If you’re curious about the underlying numbers for my last post, here they are. The table shows every logically possible combination of (a) how well people speak a foreign language and (b) where they learned the foreign language. Percentages should and do sum to 100%.
Table: The Degree and Origin of Foreign Language Competence
Where You Learned It
Home
School
Other
Didn’t
How Well You Speak It
Very well
8.6%
0.7%
0.5%
0%
Well
2.3%
1.7%
1.0%
0%
Not Well
1.2%
4.0%
1.7%
0%
Poorly/
Hardly At
All
0.4%
1.7%
0.6%
0%
Don’t
0%
0%
0%
75.6%
Source: GSS, 2000 and 2006
[Note: “Didn’t” doesn’t mean that the respondent never studied a foreign language in school. “Didn’t” is what I assign to all respondents who say they don’t speak a foreign language.]
Fun fact: While the most common status by far is “don’t speak a foreign language/ didn’t learn it anywhere,” the second most common status by far is “speak a foreign language very well/ learned it in the childhood home.”
While I was reviewing these numbers, I recalled last year’s debate with Tyler about the effect of upbringing on language. I suspect he’ll treat my table as vindication. I disagree. The data is more consistent with my original position that “You can make your kid semi-fluent in another language with a lot of effort.”
Few Americans are fluent in all of the languages their great-grandparents spoke. The reason is clear: The fraction of people who learn a foreign language in the home is considerably smaller than the fraction of people raised by one or more parents who knew a foreign language. Why do parents allow their ancestral tongues to fade from memory? Because linguistic atrophy is the path of least resistance. To get your kids in the “speak a foreign language very well/ learned it in the childhood home” box, you typically need to speak to them in that foreign language almost exclusively. Unless you strongly prefer to speak that foreign language, that’s a heavy burden.
The post appeared first on Econlib.