Dear American CEOs,
Bilingual (noun): a person fluent in two languages; not applicable to 78% of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau). The world is in a process of rapid globalization in which every country, economy and culture is dependent on one another. No country is as impacted by this as much as the United States, where 98.7% of the U.S. population are descended from immigrants, including me (U.S. Census Bureau). Yet, corporations, drivers of much of the change in the States, do little to address this devastating statistic. So, for the benefit of your employees, your nation and your profits, you must support language learning for your workers.
“Why should language learning matter?” you might be asking. After all, if programs such as Google Translate and ChatGPT can easily translate most things, what is the need for people to learn a language outside of curiosity? It’s a question often, and fairly, asked by many (McWhorther). Well, translation apps are fallible, providing translations that are either faulty or lose the intended connotation, spelling disaster for any business dealing. On top of that, language learning provides employees and corporations benefits as a whole.
One of the biggest issues faced by corporations are employee turnover rates. As employees age, the employee’s mental fitness declines and profitability gets worse and worse. Thus, the company is forced to choose between allowing lower productivity to continue or sacking them and investing resources in searching for new hires, which can destabilize workflow and heavily delay plans. These kinds of symptoms especially appear during times of increased stress such as the Covid-19 pandemic. According to a study by the American Psychological Institute, in 2021, 79% of Americans felt stress in the month before the study and 36% reported cognitive weariness (Roach & Roison).
This is where language learning can step in. Beyond just allowing companies to tap into a much larger market who don’t speak English, language learning helps improve long-term brain health and development and improves attention span, skills that are vitally important in corporate environments (Padbhanaman). Benefits being provided to workers are nothing new. Some benefits, such as social security, are federally required and many corporations add more benefits on top of those to boost employee retention (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). All companies would have to do would be to add to the benefits package and reap the rewards.
Language learning is a field that few corporations have tapped into, yet one that can prove to be massively profitable. Remember, a company can only remain profitable if it keeps with the times and adapts to new circumstances. So please, adapt and encourage a world language program for all employees.
Sincerely,
Vyom Mukerjee, Your Future Employee
Works Cited
McWhorter, John. “Will Translation Apps Make Learning Foreign Languages Obsolete?” New York Times, 25 July 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/opinion/translation-apps-foreign-languages.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.
Padmanabhan, Jaya. “Bilingualism May Stave Off Dementia, Study Suggests.” New York Times, 28 Apr. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/health/bilingualism-memory-dementia.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.
Roizen, Michael F., and Keith W. Roach. “Wellbeing in the Workplace.” BMJ: British Medical Journal, vol. 340, no. 7757, 2010, pp. 1150–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40702126.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Language Spoken at Home by Ability to Speak English for the Population 5 Years and Over.” American Community Survey, ACS 1-Year Estimates Detailed Tables, Table B16001, 2022, data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2022.B16001?q=B16001: LANGUAGE SPOKEN AT HOME BY ABILITY TO SPEAK ENGLISH FOR THE POPULATION 5 YEARS AND OVER&g=010XX00US. Accessed on December 8, 2023.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics.” Decennial Census, DEC Demographic Profile, Table DP1, 2020, data.census.gov/table/DECENNIALDP2020.DP1?g=010XX00US&d=DEC Demographic Profile. Accessed on December 8, 2023.U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Economic safety net: Social Security and other legally required benefits.” Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, www.bls.gov/ecec/factsheets/ecec-legally-required-benefits-factsheet.htm. Accessed on January 11, 2024.
