Demise of German Language Instruction in the US

Yet another casualty of the economic crisis in the US: foreign language instruction is being phased out in schools due to budge constraints:

After years of expanding language offerings, suburban districts across the New York region are now cutting back on staff and instructional time, phasing out less popular languages, and rethinking whether they can really afford to introduce foreign tongues to their youngest students while under constant pressure to downsize budgets and raise achievement in English and other core subjects.

The cuts are affecting all languages, but German classes are especially vulnerable to budget cuts:

The 10,400-student Arlington district decided to phase out German — leaving Spanish, French and Italian — because it was the least popular choice among students; last year, 44 seventh graders enrolled in introductory German compared to more than 300 in Spanish. The district also phased out Russian more than a decade ago.“It was a low-fill, high-cost area of instruction, and if that wasn’t taken, something else would have been,” said Frank V. Pepe Jr., the superintendent.“I’m not pleased we eliminated German,” Mr. Pepe said. “I’m not pleased at all.”

I was fortunate enough to grow up in the hey day of American middle-brow culture, where every school offered German, French and Latin.  I started learning German in elementary school, and by age eleven was reading Tonio Kröger in class. This was also during the height of the Cold War, and my high school offered three levels of Russian language instruction.  These programs have now been eliminated. 

The other force working against German language instruction in the US (and elsewhere) is the dominance of English in scholarly publications. For much of the last century, college students who studied the hard sciences had to fulfill a German language requirement, since much of the research was available only in German.  As a graduate student, I was able to support myself in part by translating scientific articles into English.  Now, nearly all of the research is published in English:

Earlier this year, the German Culture Council (Deutscher Kulturrat) drew national attention to the issue when they announced that German as a language of scholarship in the scientific field is “on its deathbed.” According to the council, only 1 percent of the world’s published scientific works are currently written in German. University classes are increasingly being taught in English and there are ever more German-based research centers and conferences where colleagues communicate primarily in English. The result, says the council, is that foreigners who are guests at German institutions do not feel compelled to learn the language. 

But German instructors everywhere can take solace in the fact that situation for Russian is much more dire:

Russian seems to be faring more poorly than other colonial languages because the countries that had to absorb it have a more cohesive sense of national identity and are now rallying around their native languages to assert their sovereignty.Russian is one of the few major languages to be losing speakers, and by rough estimates, that total will fall to 150 million by 2025, from 300 million in 1990, a year before the Soviet collapse. It will probably remain one ofthe 10 most popular languages, but barely. Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi head the list.