Language teaching in today's American high schools has remained essentially fixed in the fifties – that is kids can study French, Spanish, maybe German, possibly Russian or Latin, but very few languages outside these European languages are offered.
All of these languages come from Europe, none from Africa or Asia. Clearly, in today's world when business is global, it would be an advantage to expand the horizons of youth in the so called first world to include third world languages.
The Five Super Languages
There are five so called super languages, English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic, that the vast majority of people in the world speak. Other languages, like Italian and increasingly German are regional languages of a specific culture and place. Especially German seems to have lost much of its cachet as the language of science.
The third category that is usually not mentioned is second language rankings – clearly nowadays English is the most useful second language, and has become the Latin of the twenty first century – the language of students and scholars. But among second languages, French (especially when talking to people over fifty) is very useful. German, although it is spoken by few people as a first language, even fewer than French, can still be useful as a second language, for instance when speaking to people in Turkey who worked as Gastarbeiter in German or who were children of Gastarbeiter.
The Place of Arabic
Arabic is not a useful second language. It is useful when dealing with people who either do not know English or can communicate so much better in Arabic that it is better to meet them on their own ground. The study of Arabic should not be undertaken lightly. If a young person wants to study Arabic, he or she should understand that just knowing a little Arabic is useless from a professional point of view.
He has to know Arabic well enough to really communicate in it. And he must also understand that there are really two languages to learn – written Arabic that he needs to read the newspaper especially, and spoken Arabic which is quite different from the written form. Arabic also has regional differences that – although not as pronounced as they were before the TV era – still form major dialects that are largely mutually incomprehensible, like the many dialects of Chinese.
Oil and Water
The other thing any young person should understand clearly is that oil is on the decline in the Near East. One school of thought says that all of these countries will run out of oil within the lifetime of someone in his or her twenties. Thus the importance of the Near East will decline, while the importance of China is increasing. If counsels were to be given about the most useful language to learn, first would come Chinese, and secondly Hindi or Turkish.
The counsel would include an injunction to look not at where the oil is, look at water, and there Turkey has a big advantage. And there are a surprising number of people who speak Turkish or closely related languages, not just in Turkey but in China and the ex-Soviet Union.
But after saying all this, one would also advise the student to learn Arabic because he loves it as a language, as a repository of a fascinating culture that is neither Eastern nor Western, but really at the hinge between East and West.
William Halsey - Bill Halsey is an organist, pianist and singer who has been travelling the world in search of interesting organs. He is now in Southern ...
