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.