The Newbury Port News – Jonathan Wells
“Over the last few years I have met and talked to many people with French or Italian or occasionally Hispanic surnames. When it feels OK to inquire, my interest in language has often led me to ask whether their parents or grandparents had emigrated to this country, and if so whether they had brought their native language with them and taught it to their own children in this country. The answer is more often than not that the new arrivals spoke their old language between themselves, but did not teach it to their children, evidently because they wanted the children to be acculturated and assimilated into American society as quickly as possible. The question posed by this situation is, have these children lost something by not getting that second language early in their lives? I was curious to know how much knowledge of a foreign language affects the learning, understanding of their own culture, and use of their own language by native English speakers. (Classical Latin and Greek are, of course, very important, but outside the scope of this inquiry as they are no longer spoken.).”(more)