Mirror of language: the debate on bilingualism.

Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism.

Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism. Kenji Hakuta. Basic Books, $18.95. Bilingual education has been denounced by so many people for so many years that it's come to be seen as little more than Hispanic America's slice of the special-interest pie. The arguments against it sound so good that they've been generally accepted at face value. Why should our hard-earned tax dollars support enclaves of instruction in Hmong and Cape Verdeian and Kreol? Why, with the example of Quebec before us, should we deliberately "maintain' people in Spanish rather than move them full-speed into English? What's so special about today's immigrants that they can't learn through the total-immersion process, like everybody else's grandparents did?

As it turns out, most of these complaints fall into the welfare-Cadillac category of policy analysis. That is, they have more to do with basic prejudices than with history or fact or observation of the way the programs actually work. Far from rushing into English, most of America's previous immigrants clung to Polish or Italian or German, leaving the linguistic shift to their children. Today's Spanish-speaking immigrants also are clinging to their language, but by all indications, their children are taking up English at least as rapidly as in the past. Even in Miami, where America's assimilative powers have been put to the sternest test, Cubans who came over in the 1950s and 1960s now complain that their children are not interested in liberating the motherland and instead are concentrating on getting their MBAs.

Bilingual schools, mainly German, were commonplace in the U.S. until their popularity plummeted during World War I. From the enormous mound of professional studies of bilingual classrooms, the worst conclusion that can be drawn is that, in some cases, bilingual programs may not move the children into English any faster than other, more conventional approaches. (The two main alternatives are "mainstreaming,' familiarly known as sink or swim, and giving students an hour or two of intensive English each day while sending them to mainstream classes in math, history, and so forth.) Is this grounds for a Quebec-like wave of concern?

Kenji Hakuta's Mirror of Language is a powerful and enlightening political document precisely because it has no obvious axe to grind. Hakuta is a young psychologist at Yale who specializes in the linguistic aspects of bilingualism. In political speeches and barroom conversations, "biingual' has come to imply somebody from Cuba or Mexico who doesn't know English; Hakuta focuses on the real, literal meaning of the word, asking what happens when people learn to speak, use, and think in a second language.

The first two-thirds of the book is a review of the experimental and historical evidence about the bilingual mind. The discussion is aimed at the layman, but it is demanding and not to be read with a beer in hand. For years, Hakuta says, children raised in dual-language environments were thought to be confused and even retarded. There is a stage at which children cannot distinguish between the two languages they hear and use. But that passes quickly, and it now seems that the rigors of learning two styles of thought leave the children with more adaptable and creative casts of mind. The latest studies, Hakuta says, "suggest the following conclusion: take any group of bilinguals who [can speak both languages with about the same skill] and match them with a monolingual group for age, socioeconomic level, and whatever other variables you think might confound your results. Now, choose a measure of cognitive flexibility and administer it to both groups. The bilinguals will do better.'

Although most research in bilingualism involves children, Hakuta also describes the way adults learn language. His results are heartening to those of us over age 12. The general assumption that children always learn languages better is too crude, Hakuta says. Someone who starts learning another language as a child and sticks with it has a chance to attain a higher ultimate level of mastery, especially in accent. (Think of Kissinger and Brzezinski, adult learners both.) But the biological clock does not run out on language-learning by the teenage years. Indeed, because adults are more familiar with the abstract principles of language, they initially will learn languages more rapidly than children.

With warnings about linguistic separatism ever in the air, Hakuta's most surprising evidence concerns the fragility of bilingualism. The powerful, natural tendency of societies is toward a common language, he says. Bilingualism persists only in conditions of diglossia--that is, when different languages are used in distinctly different situations. (For example, Spanish used in the household, English in public and in school.) The seeming bilingualism of modern America--the signs and advertisements and notices in Spanish --reflects mainly the surge of new immigrants from Latin America, not the persistence of Spanish over the generations. The most remarkable trend in American linguistic history, Hakuta says, is the rapid disappearance and disuse of non-English languages.

Hakuta concludes this book with what is, to me, the first plausible case for a "maintenance' approach to bilingual education-- continuing to keep children fluent in Spanish or another language, while ensuring that they are competent in English. Their progress into English is all but inevitable, he says; the benefits of real bilingual competence should not be cast off casually. It helps the students with their cognitive skills; it helps the nation deal with the world. Everyone recognizes this when it means a junior year in Paris or Milan. Why not more bilingual training for everyone, not just Bennington students?