Native Tongues
According to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people in the United States who spoke a language other than English at home nearly tripled from from 1980 to 2019, reaching a total of nearly 68 million. Conversely, the number of people in the United States who spoke only English also increased during that same period by almost twenty-five percent.
We find these apparently diverging trends intriguing. While the English language remains the dominant means of communication in our country and, increasingly, around the world, people who speak other languages are all around us. One consequence is that the growing number of Americans who speak only English nevertheless come into contact with foreign words and phrases so regularly that those become known and understood – and often incorporated into English itself.
In this week’s puzzle, based on a quote from a book about multilingualism by Northwestern University professor Viorica Marian, we attempted to use as many words and phrases as possible of non-English origin as answers or in the clues, and from as many different languages as possible. If you are willing to stretch a point – and why not, for the sake of fun – you might even agree that every clue/answer pair either does this or at least points to a non-English language or to notions of multilingualism. (Yes, Mohawk is a language, also known as Kanienʼkéha, currently spoken by about 3,500 people of the Mohawk nation.)
How many different languages did you see represented in this acrostic?
If you have six minutes and want to see some incredibly cute kids speaking foreign languages, check out the video below. It’s heartening to witness children so curious about the languages that others speak.