It's Pleasant to Parler

John McWhorter of The New Republic gives short shrift to the value of learning French (or German or Italian or most other European languages, for that matter).  From a purely Benthamite perspective, of course, he is right: greater practical value can be had by learning Chinese, or Spanish, or Arabic, or arguably even Portuguese.

Then again....  I take a look at my list of languages on Facebook - French, German, and Dutch.  Hardly a practical assembly, I grant you.  But because I speak French, at least, I have had the inestimable joy of reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Balzac in the original.  I actually got to use my slender ability in German when I worked for a law firm in Philadelphia, and I enjoy being able to know what, exactly, Wagner's characters are bellowing at each other.

As for Dutch - well, when I go to Amsterdam, I always get smiles of surprise and genuine gratitude when I demonstrate that, hey, at least I bothered to learn some of your language.  And Dutch, while not pretty, is fascinating for an English-speaker; much as was once said about Latin, I studied Dutch and learned more about my own language.

Furthermore, learning other European languages can better connect us to our shared Western cultural heritage - in literature, yes, but also in many other intellectual and cultural endeavors.  China, of course, has a resplendent cultural heritage - but it's not ours, and the heritage of Italian is really much closer to us than the heritage of China, notwithstanding the former's present geopolitical irrelevance.  Reading Machiavelli in the original is going to provide more direct benefits to us, as Westerners, than reading Sun Tzu in the original.

Studying European languages teaches us about Europe, about the West, about the languages of the West - about ourselves.  This isn't chauvinism, or at least, it doesn't have to be - rather, it is merely venturing into new fields that, nevertheless, share our cultural substratum.  We can put down roots more quickly there.

Most fundamentally, studying foreign languages develops a person's intellectual capacities.  The choice of language - and the cultural doors opened by that choice - has consequences for the way and extent to which those capacities can be developed.  Cross-cultural communication is an important goal of language study, but it isn't the only one.  There are reasons other than strict, direct utility for learning a language.

Did I mention I also speak a few words of Irish?