The University of Colorado recently announced that from now on it will teach almost all graduate-level courses and most undergraduate courses solely in Spanish, not in English.
No, it didn’t. Don’t be ridiculous. I made that up. You can imagine what would happen if such an announcement was made in real life. First, there would be public outrage and probably death threats. Second, even Spanish speakers wouldn’t want it, and enrollments would probably plummet. Third, in Colorado it would actually contravene state law: An astonishing number of U.S. states have passed laws making English the official language (not just Colorado, but Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming as well).
The people who think English needs legal protection are, in my opinion, out of their tiny minds. Preserving and defending English doesn’t seem to have been their main purpose anyway: Removing Spanish-language signs from buses in Miami or forbidding bilingual instruction in East Los Angeles strikes me as being aimed more at inconveniencing and insulting the Hispanic population than at doing anything to promote English. (For heaven’s sake, English is already the world’s most privileged, most widely spoken, and least threatened language.)
Perhaps some people are not aware of what typically happens in immigrant families in America. Adults arriving from foreign countries learn some English but tend not to become perfectly fluent; their U.S.-born children become quasi-native speakers of English and often lack a fully functional command of their parents’ language; and their children, the grandchildren of the original immigrants, are native English speakers and often can hardly speak or understand their grandparents’ heritage language.
English is not under threat. It is eating up the world. And in the Netherlands, where I happen to be writing these words, they fully appreciate this. Dutch universities are switching to using English as their medium of instruction, in all kinds of subjects — see the huge list of all such courses published by the organization Study in Holland.
A friend at the University of Amsterdam told me that the switch to English-medium education in her department has rapidly led not to a slump in enrollment but to something more like a tripling of student numbers. Students from English-speaking countries such as Britain (as well as countries in the Middle East and Asia where there is a strong tradition of English-language education) are now coming to the Netherlands to take degree courses unimpeded by the necessity of learning Dutch.
And of course the international marketability of the Dutch students is enhanced enormously by their being fully experienced in the professional use of English and thoroughly skilled in social interaction with native English speakers.
There are those who worry about Dutch being downgraded, of course. In 2016, one classics professor grumbled to DutchNews.nl about losing humor, claiming that converting Dutch lectures to English tends also to “remove the academic subtlety, the passion, and the inspiration.” It is hard to take such a view seriously. Humor, subtlety, passion, and inspiration can be conjured up in any language.
Of course, it is a tough assignment to tell a faculty member to do the necessary conjuring in an alien language; but that is what the universities of the Netherlands have decided to do. In general, the Dutch do not seem worried by their government’s firm recommendation (it is not a legal requirement) that all universities should offer as much of their curriculum as they can in English.
Dissertations in all subjects are routinely submitted and published in English now. There are tales of departments holding all discussions at faculty meetings in English, and continuing to do so even when all the faculty in attendance happen to be Dutch. It is an astonishing development.
But it does not signal the beginning of the end for Dutch, which will continue to be the medium for social interaction, retail trade, parliamentary business, local and national newspapers, and much of the entertainment industry. Step into any Boekhandel and look around if you think Dutch is in danger. It isn’t. (In Iceland, I am told, things are different: Some in the population of a mere 350,000 genuinely fear that English might take over completely, so Icelandic is actively promoted at all educational levels, even in subjects like the medical sciences where textbooks are only available in English.)
The Dutch experiment is a dramatic illustration of the progress of English toward being the global language for planet earth. And it provides another reason for regarding the paranoia of the English First and English Only proponents in America as ludicrous.