It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?
The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.
This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.
Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”.
(via lingrix)
[someone linked this to me]
Suppose we took this seriously - that we decided monolingual white children weren’t gaining a sufficient intuitive understanding of language as a generalized concept, because their households were too monolingual.
What, then, could be done about it?
Children across America are made to learn foreign languages throughout their schooling, but it rarely sticks. Why?
Insufficient density.
Quite simply, there just aren’t enough speakers of the language per population in a given area to support conversing with it regularly. It becomes useless, and the brain does what it always does with information that doesn’t get used - purge it.
Any response focused on a great diversity of languages, then, would be ineffective. There are simply too many different languages. If we limit instruction to only those languages with at least one million speakers, and keep children in school eight hours per day, each language will have just over one minute of instruction devoted to it.
To truly grasp the idea of language on a deeper conceptual level, fluency and depth of understanding would be required.
To create the number of speakers required to sustain fluency, then, we must pick one second language per geographic area, then make it mandatory in school.
I propose this be done at the regional level.
Mandarin Chinese or Japanese for the West Coast. German for the Midwest. French for the East Coast and New England. Spanish for the South and Southwest.
Not only will this bring about regional cultural differentiation which will increase the cultural diversity of America and support for later Regional Federalism (instrumental for unification with Canada and Mexico to form the North American Union and ensure continued dominance into the late 21st century), but it will add truly exciting new slang to the language.
Yes, the resulting drift will make old documents harder to understand, but the insistent descriptivists have already thrown that out the window as unimportant, so why stop there?