The larger similarity that I see, though, is that only recently have (most) people begun to deal seriously with literature published in a language they have acquired for research. Historically, a lot of our crowd have regarded language acquisition as a primarily oral exercise — as in, “What would I bother to read in Language X, when everything worthwhile is in English?” Ethnocentric at best, and sometimes distressingly racist, too.

Acquiring my main research language slowed down my grad school progress by a year and had moments of pure agony, so I certainly see the trouble for those not inclined that way to put forth the effort. (I’m a language geek, so I was excited for the opportunity.) But the ones who treated the language classes as some irritating burden to be borne until they could escape paid for it: it’s pretty obvious to everyone when a dissertation based on ethnographic research was written by someone who didn’t understand what people were saying.

There’s another problem for grad students related to both underfunded language departments and that fucking five-years-and-alley-oop model of grad programs: funding for the extra time that language acquisition requires. Some languages are hot and sexy with funding sources, and students can apply for FLAS grants and so forth to underwrite their studies. Other languages, like Spanish (as GayProf and Historiann have discussed at length), get short-shrifted at every level, and a lot of researchers who desperately need a year or two to sit down and get schooled in the new language are left to their own devices. It’s staggering to read the old classics of the discipline and see how our venerable predecessors could while away two or three years doing nothing but language acquisition on their universities’ accounts, before actually getting down to work. But since that possibility seemed to go hand in hand with the old white boys’ club of academia, perhaps I shouldn’t be too nostalgic.

Interesting – I had never heard about the language itself being regarded as inferior.

On a tangent, I wonder how much of the negative stereotyping of Spanish-speaking peoples in Mexico and elsewhere by Anglo-Americans was borrowed from older English negative stereotypes about the European Spanish, which were already part of the cultural baggage of the earliest English settlers in North America.

Historiann – Regarding whether it’s defensible for American historians remain monolingual, I’m not a historian myself, but I would think that a lot depends on what a particular scholar specializes in. There must be some places/times/topics where almost all of the sources really are in English, so a scholar there wouldn’t be missing much.

1) Historiann — hey, some of us have actualy made careers using those stats courses!! Not that they should necessarily be a ‘language’, but I’m a fan, generally, of encouraging historians to look outside their discipline (as well as learning languages).

2) At a certain Ivy grad school in the 1990s that shall remain nameless, a US history colleague had to fight to have Spanish allowed as a ‘scholarly’ language. Up to that point, it was French or German, unless you showed an exceptional need for such marginal tongues as, uh, Spanish. This is no longer the case, so maybe that is progress?

3) I teach the colonial survey as cultural encounters: equal time on each topic for Europeans (Fr, Sp, Eng, some Dutch and German), Africans, and Native Americans. But things fall apart when I get to social life — just not as much to draw from for all those groups, unfortunately. Every year I try to do a little more — I finally have a kickass week on witchcraft that ranges from Europe to Mexico to Iroquoia to… what’s that place again?… oh yeah, Salem.

Contrast this with the sad truth that our fully bilingual university requires no second language work or certification from students. So we will routinely graduate students who are monolingual (almost always in the Anglophone stream, mind you, not our Francophones who are mostly functionally bilingual just from the regional culture).