A crowd of Midtown Manhattan crowded around me at lunchtime at the Japanese restaurant. Behind the counter were the cooks who had prepared the aromatic bowl of noodles that I was now enjoying.
The boss, an elderly Japanese man, read the waiters’ orders and shouted orders in Japanese to his employees. Two burly young Hispanics with tattooed arms and backwards baseball caps moved from plate to plate in the steamy space, ladles this, mixed that, all so smoothly I didn’t notice when they finished a meal. order and start another. In quieter moments, they filled bowls with chopped herbs and wiped down the counter with a rag while speaking Spanish to each other and addressing a third cook, another Japanese, in the pidgin English of the restaurant’s kitchen. Three languages, two of them foreign to those who spoke them, and the immaculate rhythm of their noodle ballet never faltered or slowed down.
It is incredible that the world is doing so well, considering that people use languages that they did not grow up with, that they did not study in schools and in which they were never evaluated or received any certificate. Still, the world works. The noodle scene may have been repeated that same day hundreds of millions of times around the world, in markets, restaurants, taxis, airports, businesses, ports, classrooms and streets where men, women and children of all ages all skin colors and nationalities met, ate, bought and sold, flirted, traveled, worked side by side, waited on each other, introduced each other, greeted each other, insulted each other and asked directions from people who did not speak the same language . They managed to do all of this successfully, even though they may have spoken with an accent, used simple words, made mistakes, paraphrased, and done other things that marked them as foreign speakers. Such encounters between non-native speakers have always permeated the human experience.
In our era, these encounters are at their highest level of expression, since the ties between languages and geography have been weakened by migration, global business, cheap travel, cell phones, satellite television and the Internet.
Perhaps the reader is familiar with the histories of languages such as English, French or Latin, which are (or were) valuable cultural capital.
This book tells another story; it is another type of cognitive capital, the material that one takes with one to learn a new language.
We once lived in bubbles, disconnected from the bustle of the world. But more and more these bubbles, in which one or only a few languages were spoken, are connecting with each other every day, and more and more of us are passing through them. It is clear that multilingual niches are proliferating and that monolingual people (like me) find it necessary to live and act multilingually. (…)
Something else is also happening: we have begun to want to move naturally between these bubbles, with complete freedom. (…). Ideas, information, goods and people are flowing more easily in space and this generates a sensitivity about language learning that is more rooted in the trajectories of an individual than in their citizenship or nationality. It became inherent in the demands of the economy, not the standards of schools and governments. That means our brains also have to flow to stay plastic and open to receiving new information and developing new skills. One of those skills has to do with learning to communicate in new ways.
If people’s level of anxiety about language learning could be lowered, it could solve what has become the fundamental linguistic challenge of the 21st century: how can I learn a language fast? How well do I have to speak or write it for it to work for me? Whose standards will I have to follow? Will they ever take me for a native? Will it change my economic status, my identity and my brain?
The way in which adults learn languages is associated with the emergence of English as a global lingua franca. In fact, the spread of English is a clear example of the reconsideration of “native-level” skills in a language.
In the next few decades, some two billion people will learn English as a second language. A large fraction of them will be adults attracted by the prestige and utility that have made it the most popular language to study for the past five decades. In China, the English language market has been valued at $3.5 billion, with as many as thirty thousand companies offering English classes. It is estimated that up to 70% of all interactions in English worldwide occur between non-native speakers on a daily basis. This means that native English speakers have less control in determining the “correct” English pronunciation and grammar. Some experts in China and Europe now advocate teaching standardized foreign types of English that would not be accepted in English-speaking countries.
English must be the only global language with more non-native speakers than native speakers. However, it is not the only additional language that people learn in the global language learning market, valued at 83 billion dollars: a figure that does not include spending on schools, teachers and textbooks in education systems. In the United States, seventy percent of college students in their foreign language classes study Spanish, French, and German; although Arabic, Chinese and Korean are becoming more and more popular.
*Goodbye Babel, Editorial authorship. (Fragment).
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