Linguanomics by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun

Author:Gabrielle Hogan-Brun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

CHAPTER FOUR

Is learning another language worth it?

This chapter comes with a ‘health warning’, namely that the straightforward question in the title can be answered in different ways, all the way from ‘yes, definitely’ to ‘perhaps’ or even ‘no’. It all depends on your values. What may be ‘worth it’ in terms of ‘usefulness’ or ‘importance’ might not have any evident material gain. Learning a new language requires a commitment to invest in scarce resources (time and money), in the expectation of some kind of return. A recent podcast discussed this question, in response to the comment below by Doug Ahmann1:

I’m very curious how it came to be that teaching students a foreign language has reached the status it has in the US. My oldest daughter is a college freshman, and not only have I paid for her to study Spanish for the last four or more years [in school] … but her college is requiring her to study even more! … How did it ever get this far? In a day and age where schools at every level are complaining about limited resources, why on earth do we continue to force these kids to study a foreign language that few will ever use, and virtually all do not retain? Or to put it in economics terms, where is the return on investment?

Doug may not have been surprised to learn that the average earnings differential his daughter could expect was, in the words of the podcaster, Stephen Dubner, only about 2 per cent. However, as subsequently demonstrated in the Economist,2 the real return on investment of a 2 per cent extra wage is not insignificant over time. Considering a lifetime’s earnings, an average 1 per cent salary increase per year and compound interest of a typical university graduate’s starting salary of $45,000 turns this bonus over forty years into an extra $67,000 (at 2014 value) that can be added to a pension fund (or retirement account). As we saw in Chapter 2, because of oversupply in the USA, Spanish is the language with the lowest return on investment there, so this sum may well be greater for someone who can offer a language that is high in demand but short in supply.

A cost–benefit calculation on the worth of learning another language might, however, only assess part of the story. It is widely acknowledged that the actual return on such investment can also comprise indirect social or cultural gains. Arguably, Doug’s daughter would have ample opportunities to ‘retain’ her Spanish language skills through interactions with Latino citizens that make up some one-fifth of the overall US population,3 and with a vast pool of speakers in another nineteen Latin-American countries in South America and more in the Caribbean. Also, she may in time generate more income by drawing inspiration from the richness of Hispanic cultures.

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