America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century is the American Academy’s response to a bipartisan request from four members of the United States Senate and four members of the House of Representatives to examine the following questions:
- How does language learning influence economic growth, cultural diplomacy, the productivity of future generations, and the fulfillment of all Americans?
- What actions should the nation take to ensure excellence in all languages as well as international education and research, including how we may more effectively use current resources to advance language learning?
This request followed, and was inspired by, the important work of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences and its 2013 report, The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation. The Heart of the Matter included a strong endorsement for the development of intercultural skills, including language learning. The bipartisan request asked the Academy to expand upon and elaborate on that recommendation.
The Academy created its Commission on Language Learning in 2015 to gather data, collect testimony, and discuss opportunities for improving the nation’s capacity in non-English languages. In late 2016, the Commission, in collaboration with the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project, published The State of Languages in the U.S.: A Statistical Portrait, which offers a quantitative analysis of our language capacity, focusing on the U.S. education system. America’s Languages draws from this data to offer a series of concrete recommendations for schools, two- and four-year colleges, universities, community organizations, businesses, government agencies, philanthropists, students, and parents—all of whom have a role to play in preparing citizens to thrive in the twenty-first century. As the Commission writes in this report’s introduction: “It is critical that we work together at this moment in history, when there is so much to gain by participating in a multilingual world, and so much to lose if we remain stubbornly monolingual.
