Does Barack Obama Speak 50 Languages?

GUEST COLUMN

BY ANTON KAISER

Why should we worry about immigrants learning to speak English, Barack Obama tells us. Instead, “You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual.”

What is it about learning to contort and twist the tongue, in harmony with guttural and melodic sounds, that supposedly would make American children better? By fact, shouldn’t we all learn to speak our own native language first, before attempting to acquire any elementary skills in one or more other languages?

“We should have every child speaking more than one language. It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beacoup, right?” says Obama.

Ignoring the terrible construct of Obama’s own extemporaneous English (a man so praised for his eloquence when reading from a teleprompter), we are now told that every American child should learn to speak Spanish. (Personally, I would prefer if they learned to speak proficient English first.) Like most liberals, Obama believes that to be multilingual is to be worldly, educated, sophisticated, inclusive, progressive, futuristic, admired, and respected in the world. Really?

Why learn Spanish? Why not the most common language in the world, Mandarin Chinese. Why not Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), the third most common language after English? Better yet, why learn another language at all?

During two tours in Germany, I was frequently asked if I spoke German because of my last name. When I said “no,” the always somewhat haughty and abrupt Aryan reply was, “Too bad.” I invariably responded with, “Maybe. But I was born during the Nuremberg trials.” This response, which is perfectly true, invariably produced a richly ironic pregnant pause, which I enjoyed to no end. But to ease the social discomfort, I would usually follow up by mentioning that I actually spoke more than fifty languages, at least by European standards. Here is what I mean.


From the center of Germany, within a radius of just a few hundred miles, one can easily encounter French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, and multiple dialects in various languages (such as high versus low German - Prussian versus Bavarian - etc.). Therefore to speak different languages is natural to the geographical culture of the continent. For instance, Switzerland borders France, Germany, and Italy, so the Swiss naturally speak all three languages. That fact doesn’t make them more worldly, just less amalgamated and more tribal.

On the other hand, this kind of compressed cultural density is abnormal to our own continent. Trust me, Europeans simply can’t imagine the geographical vastness of the land mass of Canada and the US all speaking the same language (recognizing that Quebec prefers French). A European has absolutely no chance of traveling three to 5,000 miles without encountering multiple languages like we can in America and Canada.

Imagine if each of our fifty states spoke a different language. Would we, by natural association, learn to speak Wyoming, North Dakotan, Minnesotan, Montanan and Nebraskan? As South Dakotans, of course we would. Do more Americans on our southern border know how to speak Spanish than those who live in our more northern states? Of course they do. Using these analogies, I suggested to my German friends that I spoke more than fifty languages, by European standards.

So Europeans aren’t smarter, or more useful, or more educated because they speak multiple languages, they are simply more culturally challenged within their own limited geography.

The three most common languages in North and South America are English, Spanish, and Portuguese. So why aren't we told to also learn Portuguese? Could it be because the Portuguese language doesn’t border any of our states? Of course it is.

Finally, why do most Europeans still learn the English language in school, even though there is no border association requiring it? The answer is because they either lost to us in WW II or because they relied on us economically during the Marshall plan after the war. Through military and economic necessity, European schools made learning the English language mandatory and that reality persists to this day. I suppose we would also readily learn Spanish given those same conditions.

Europeans shouldn’t be praised for their European language skills anymore than Americans and Canadians should be chastised for the commonality of their continental language. Such statements by Obama only serve to frame the true nature of his relative inexperience and his lack of exposure to the rest of the world.


Anton Kaiser was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and retired in Rapid City after serving twenty-seven years as a U.S. Army infantry officer. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, and holds Masters Degrees in Business and in Public Administration from Webster College, St. Louis, MO. He is also a veteran of Vietnam, Berlin, Operation Just Cause (Panama) and an honor graduate of the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS.