When I tell people that my major is German studies, I often get the follow-up question, “Are you German?” No, I am not German. I took Spanish and German in high school, and I liked German enough that I decided to continue with it in college. Underlying that question is an assumption: that I am studying German because it is a part of my cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is one of the myriad reasons why people study a language, and over the next few weeks, the Opinions Section will feature a series of articles from students and faculty about their experience with language learning and the role it plays in the broader liberal arts framework.
The idea that learning a language is a central part of a college education is a very old one, and historically there have been a number of good reasons for that. I was once told by a Swarthmore math professor that when she began as a mathematician, she had to learn German since most of the scholarship was written in German. In a world where English is the “Lingua Franca” of academia (especially STEM) and translation software makes reading a work in a language you do not speak relatively easy, it can be easy to forget that English was not always the only language needed to succeed in academia. One quick note, the term Lingua Franca refers to a vehicular language that makes communication between two groups of people possible. The original Lingua Franca of the Western world was Koine Greek, a common language that allowed the different Hellenistic city-states to communicate with each other. With the rise of the Roman Empire, Latin became established as the dominant Lingua Franca of Europe, a position that it would hold well into the 18th century.
Returning to Swarthmore, the college catalogue from 1871 shows that four languages are offered: Latin, Greek, German, and French. Greek was, of course, Ancient Greek. Why the preponderance of dead languages? We may imagine that the Swarthmore of 1865 was a stuffy, archaic old place, but at its founding, Swarthmore was a revolutionary institution. Its commitment to co-education, its integration of the natural sciences into the liberal arts education, and its work to end “the aristocratic idea of an educated class,” as laid out by first president Edward Parrish, were all radical concepts in the world of higher education. The reason “dead” languages made up 50% of the language course offerings was that even in the 19th century, the foundational texts in many fields of knowledge were written in Latin.
The language requirement at Swarthmore was originally incredibly rigorous. Swarthmore students took three year-long courses per year, for a total of twelve courses after four years. Of those twelve, two had to be language courses. One-sixth of a student’s academic career at Swarthmore in the 1870s would have been their language coursework. Language learning at Swarthmore opened doors to texts not otherwise readily available in translations, and it opened the doors for international travel. Although, I imagine very few students were traveling to ancient Greece or the Roman Empire.
Returning to the present day, a quick survey of any language classroom reveals that those studying any one individual language are a small minority, and the entire population of students in language classes as a whole is also very small. Although majors are not the best barometer to gauge the health of an academic program, Spanish is the only language that has hit double digits of majors in the past twenty years with ten majors in 2018, and all the other languages manage a strong one to two graduates per year. Swarthmore’s foreign language requirement mandates that unless A.) English is a student’s second language and they are demonstrably fluent in their first or B.) a student successfully studied three years of the same foreign language in high school, then they must take one year of an introductory language course at Swarthmore. It is no secret that many Swarthmore students come from better-resourced high schools than the general population. The result: many Swarthmore students have already completed their language requirement in high school.
Under Swarthmore’s current system, I would argue the value is placed on knowing or having at least studied a second language at some point. I argue that Swarthmore should expand its requirements for learning a language and eliminate exceptions because I believe the value of studying a second language comes not entirely from knowing that language, but rather from the process of studying. Studying German has improved my ability to think critically about the English language. Prior to German, I never gave much thought to sentence structure, parts of speech, subjects, direct objects, and indirect objects. Since studying German, I think about most sentences in terms of Cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Accusative), and I believe it has made me a better writer. Longtime readers of my articles who disagree are welcome to voice their complaints about my writing at The Phoenix’s complaint collection, held in the Amphitheater on the 5th Wednesday of February. I argue that the value of learning a language comes not exclusively from knowing a second (or third or fourth, etc.) language, but rather from how it makes you think critically about your own language. As such, I encourage you to take a language class here at Swarthmore to complement your other courses and round out your liberal arts education, and as we say in German: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.
