Inside the New Polling That Shows American Families Are Embracing Bilingualism Faster Than Politicians Realize

The American political discourse on language has long seemed to be taking place on a stage constructed in the 1990s. Politicians are constantly debating whether English should be fenced off, protected, defended, or made official.

Additionally, the families they purport to represent seem to have completely moved on while they argue. The most recent statistics give the impression that policymakers are still practicing a script that the public has already stopped applauding.

The Century Foundation’s latest survey, released in November 2025, comes at a difficult time for anyone placing a wager on monolingual nostalgia. The results of six focus groups conducted in Spanish and English and a survey of one thousand Californian families don’t reflect the nation we are constantly told we live in. It is very or extremely important for children to grow up speaking multiple languages, according to 94% of households that speak a language other than English at home. On its own, that is not shocking. Surprisingly, the same statement was made by 55% of monolingual English-speaking families. Over half. Whether the parents speak Spanish or not, the future seems bilingual when sitting at a kitchen table in Sacramento or Bakersfield.

It’s difficult to ignore Washington’s discomfort with this. The current administration has put a lot of effort into discontinuing multilingual programs, removing Spanish-language resources from federal websites, and pressuring educational institutions to use English exclusively. It is presented as a return to something. But specifically, return to what? For many years, German-language newspapers were published in Texas. In the Southwest, Navajo-language radio is still very popular. At the Super Bowl next month, Bad Bunny will be performing in Spanish, which begs the question of who exactly should be uncomfortable.

The political debate seems almost theoretical when you walk into a dual-language school in Salt Lake City or Houston. Teachers who used to correct bilingual children now design lessons around their tendency to switch between languages in the middle of sentences. One seasoned educator in El Paso revealed to researchers what sounds almost like an admission: they stopped penalizing students for being bilingual, and the students began to flourish. That’s the kind of minor, practical observation that ought to be included in policy memos but isn’t.

More than 40,000 students are currently enrolled in Utah’s program, a state that no one would characterize as a coastal elite outlier embracing something exotic. That particular detail is important. Where bilingual education has simply become the norm in schools, the narrative that it is a specialized progressive endeavor continues to clash.

The “language gap,” the 1995 Hart and Risley finding that working-class children hear thirty million fewer words than professional-class children by the age of three, lies at the heart of all of this. For many years, policy reports and teacher training programs used that figure as scripture. The obvious was then brought to light by academics like Teresa McCarty and Sheilah Nicholas: the original study only examined a small portion of English-speaking families and used their continuous, child-directed conversation as the standard. None of it mattered because none of it was measured, including storytelling, prayer, group discussions, and the complex rhythms of multilingual households.

The political outcome of all this is still up in the air. Polling takes place. Administrations take a different approach. However, it’s not a passing mood when families in focus groups give bilingual programs an average score of 7.9 out of 10, with over three-quarters scoring seven or higher. It’s a constituency. Eventually, the politicians might take notice. Families have already done so.