The nation changed from being arguably the most linguistically homogeneous it had ever been—just 4.7% of its population was foreign-born, with immigrant tongues becoming extinct—to something that resembles its original state much more. You can learn more from the soundscape of a grocery store in Houston or a suburban Virginia school hallway than from a policy paper. Of course, English is used everywhere. However, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Arabic, and Vietnamese are also. Long regarded as the national standard, the monolingual American may be nearing an expiration date.
For decades, the numbers have been steadily increasing, but they are often overshadowed by more heated political debates. Approximately 89% of Americans over five spoke only English at home in 1980. Nearly 60 million people reported having a non-English language in their home by 2010, when that percentage had fallen to about 80%. According to more recent estimates, there are more than 76 million bilingual people in the US, making it one of the most bilingual countries in the world by volume. That is three times the number of bilinguals in Germany. France’s five times over. The popular perception of Americans stumbling through a Parisian café with nothing more than “merci” and a helpless smile doesn’t align with this fact.
All of this has an almost paradoxical quality. In the past, the US has been incredibly multilingual and brutally effective at eradicating immigrant languages in a matter of generations. Early in the 20th century, millions of people spoke German; Yiddish flourished in tenements in New York; and Polish and Italian reverberated through Midwest industrial areas. Nearly all of it had vanished by the third generation; this was due to assimilation, upward mobility, and the gravitational pull of English rather than a government decree. Decades ago, Calvin Veltman’s research came to the conclusion that all non-English languages in the nation would eventually disappear if immigration stopped. That procedure is still the same. Immigration is what has changed.
Everything was rewired by the post-1970 wave. Due to widespread immigration from Latin America, Spanish alone makes up about two-thirds of the non-English speaking population, and it shows no signs of declining. It’s not just Spanish, though. Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, and Arabic are not specialized languages. Scattered throughout American metropolitan areas, each has hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions, of daily speakers. If there is a tipping point, it has nothing to do with any one language surpassing English. It concerns the transformation of classrooms, workplaces, and even the silent calculation of who gets hired and who doesn’t, with a critical mass of bilingualism becoming commonplace rather than exceptional.
However, it’s important to exercise caution when pronouncing the monolingual American dead. For tens of millions of people, living exclusively in English is still the norm outside of coastal cities and border areas. The vast, suburban, and culturally isolated interior of the nation doesn’t feel especially multilingual. Additionally, the third generation continues to follow the old pattern of language loss. Heritage speakers frequently talk about a painful transitional state in which they can understand their grandparents’ Cantonese or Urdu but are unable to speak it fluently, watching the language disappear like water through open fingers.
Perhaps the institutions are beginning to catch up, which is why things are different now. The Seal of Biliteracy for high school graduates has been accepted by thirty states. Elementary schools in Utah, Delaware, New York, and Los Angeles are increasingly implementing dual-language immersion programs; these initiatives are frequently motivated by parent demand rather than legal requirements. Although it sounds like a joke, Duolingo asserts that more American kids learn languages through its app than through the educational system.
Whether any of this will result in a larger, more visible bilingual minority or a truly bilingual mainstream is still up in the air. English dominance is still highly motivated. However, something has quietly changed beneath the surface, and no press conference has been held to discuss it. The near-complete English monolingualism of the postwar era was not typical in America. In the past, it was the exception. The nation appears to be returning to something older and more linguistically complex, according to the census data that keeps piling up year after year. It’s a different matter entirely whether Americans are prepared to view themselves that way.
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