July 2017

No Mourning, Por Favor—It’s Día de los Muertos

2019-12-17T13:52:58-05:00By |Articles|

While American children are busy unloading their haul from a night of trick-or-treating, Mexican children—and their parents—are spending the day making sweet offerings and celebrations in honor of their dead. Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is an important holiday in Mexico, and one that other Latino countries and communities (including some in the U.S.) also celebrate. UNESCO has added the commemoration to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. A mezcla of indigenous and Christian beliefs The Día’s history is a mezcla, or mix, of Aztec ritual and Catholic observance, the latter courtesy [...]

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January 2017

Six Tips for Conversation Corps Partners

2021-05-26T10:05:38-04:00By |Articles|

From the book America's Bilingual Century: Six Tips for Conversation Corps Partners Tip No. 1: Be a learner, too First, it helps greatly if you are learning their native language. This levels the table, away from teacher-student, and facilitates true conversations among equals. You are learning together, both being vulnerable and child-like, both being helpful and adult-like. It makes conversations more open and candid, and fosters true learning. Even if you’re not learning their particular language, if you are an emerging bilingual in another language, you still will be more likely to [...]

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November 2016

The Surprising Truth About American Bilingualism: What the Data Tells Us

2025-03-24T13:48:00-04:00By |Articles|

We Americans think we suck at languages. We particularly think we suck when compared with European countries, “where everybody speaks three or four languages.” Yet this view of our country is outdated. The surprising truth is that the United States is a world leader in bilingualism. This truth matters because the skills that American bilinguals possess not only help those individuals advance in their careers, but taken together, American bilinguals are key to building American soft power. By bilingual, I mean someone who actually uses two or more languages on a daily basis. It’s not the [...]

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March 2015

Pragmatism, Not Orders, Drives the Languages Americans Speak

2025-03-25T17:03:49-04:00By |Articles|

The executive order to make English the official language of the US continues a long history of suspicion toward languages other than English that dates back to some of our founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin worried that the German-speaking immigrants of his era would never learn English and therefore not become true Americans. Yet at this point in our history, an executive order proclaiming that English shall be our official language is like proclaiming that all fish shall be officially wet. English has long ago saturated all aspects of life in America. And besides, Americans have never [...]

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June 2014

Cratering Language Enrollments Reveal America’s Linguistic Divide

2025-03-25T11:45:12-04:00By |Articles|

The Modern Language Association calls its recent survey of college language enrollments “staggering.” Enrollments in Spanish, French and especially German have cratered. In the dozen years between 2009 and 2021, language class enrollments dropped 29.3%, or by almost half a million students nationwide. It is the largest decline since the MLA began documenting language class enrollments back in the 1950s. Yet, in contrast, the number of American bilinguals has grown 260% in the last 50 years, from about 20 million in 1970 to more than 76 million today. How can both trends be true? The answer [...]

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