LITTLE ROCK — Now is the season to wish someone Frohe Weihnachten.
Wait, before you lick the stamp on your Letter to the Editor - “We live in America!” - consider that our Christmas season borrows much from the German - namely, the Christmas tree - and our language is “Germanic” by classification. French, Spanish, Italian - these are Romantic languages.
“Oh, but it’s awful tough to say.”
Not for a growing number of young Arkansans, who are piling into German classes throughout the state. That is, to hear German teachers tell it.
Earlier this year, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock made the surprise decision to suspend its German language program. Professor Susanne Wagner said she will be out of a job soon, and the university stopped accepting German language majors and minors this year and will close the program at the finish of the next academic year (spring 2014).
“UALR has technically not canceled its program,” says Deborah Baldwin, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. That would mean filing formal paperwork with the state Department of Higher Education.
Still, this, along with rumors last year that Little Rock’s Dunbar Middle School, a magnet school with an international studies program, lost its German language teacher and never found a replacement - it has since - led some around the capital city to wonder whether German language instruction in the state was kaput.
The job-seeking Wagner, past head of the state chapter of the American Association of German Teachers, is bewildered by such a suggestion. This year, Parkview Arts/ Science Magnet High School hired a University of Arkansas graduate with a master of arts degree in teaching, Will Davis, to restart German language classes there, and Little Rock Central High School not long ago added a part-time German language instructor.
There’s also language instruction at Gibbs Elementary School.
Wagner expanded her own program inside Stabler Hall by 800 percent, she says, in four years. “In Arkansas, German’s doing well,” she says. “All German teachers, at least in Little Rock, could add more classes, but we have a law that says teachers can only teach 150 students. If we could add more teachers, we’d have more classes.”
Baldwin says 800 percent sounds great, but in total numbers, the German student population is virtually nonexistent. She says the college counts seven declared German majors, and six more who have declared German a second major. That’s 13 students for whom intermediate and advanced classes must be offered every semester, and the university’s minimum enrollment standards for a lower level course is 14, 10 in an upper level class; often Wagner’s program doesn’t meet those numbers.
GERMANIA
It wasn’t long ago that German was second among this nation’s second-tier second languages.
The U.S. Census Bureau statistics track the changing popularity of German for non-English speakers living in the country. For three censuses - 1980, 1990 and 2000- of those languages besides English that were spoken in the home, Spanish was always first and, until recently, French second (Mandarin has since claimed the second spot).
In 1980, German was the fifth most common language spoken in the American home behind English, Spanish, French and Italian, respectively. But by 2000, the number of Spanish-speakers had experienced a more than 150 percent increase, and French more than 35 percent, while German had actually declined about 13 percent.
In those three decades, the number of American residents who spoke a language other than English at home rose, from 11 percent to 13.8 percent, and then to 17.9 percent of the total population. (Spanish comprised 48.2 percent, 54.5 percent and 59.9 percent of those non-English speakers.)
That German would essentially hold steady over this period of accelerated growth of non-English cultures and languages translates to a steep decline.
The most recent census data tell us that in the United States, German is still fifth (1.1 million) among second languages spoken in the home, behind Spanish, Mandarin, French and Vietnamese, and ahead of Korean.
SHARED LANGUAGES
“The thing is, this is not a trend,” says Kathleen Condray, head of the German program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Last year the university added a German major for students not graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences - business, engineering, hospitality students. Two years ago, her budget was increased for an additional German language instructor.
“Students study and work abroad in paid internships at places like BMW, a start up in Berlin, and an architecture firm in Leipzig. One of our graduates, Chris Moon, was hired at Google international headquarters this year, and he said they were much more interested in his German skills than his Chinese skills.”
So, despite the relevance of census data within the United States, students choose to study languages not just tocommunicate but to position themselves for living in more than one hub in interconnected markets. And Germany has, right now, one of the few healthy, and by far the largest, economies in Europe.
This year, the Arkansas Economic Development Commission prepared a white paper titled “The Arkansas International Business Report” in which it pointed out thatEuropean businesses account for more than two-thirds of all foreign investment in the state. Six European countries were among the state’s top 20 trading partners in 2011, and of those, German companies were most numerous - 21 - with 33 locations statewide accounting for 1,600 jobs. (French-owned companies number only 12 but employ about 4,000.)
Baldwin, the UALR dean, says comparing the UA and UALR isn’t fair. The first has a battery of language programs, including Japanese and Latin.
“Most of the universities in the state don’t offer more than [we do]. That is, Spanish and French. Not many ... are offering a full complement of languages.
“I wish we could, but if it’s dependent in part on demand, the demand isn’t there.”
Now, demand is a shifty thing.
Many years ago the college suspended the dance program to similar public outcry. Now, it has been resurrected. Why? Baldwin says other programs in the region closed; UALR can offer the only Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program in dance in the state. Meanwhile, a competitor program at the University of Missouri is in trouble.
“We could be a magnet for [dance],” she says.
That’s what it might take for German.
TALE OF TWO COLLEGE CITIES
A year ago, Haas Hall Academy in Fayetteville hired Sabine Schmidt, a native German and a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville graduate, to teach German. Superintendent Martin Schoppmeyer says it has become one of the most popular courses, and he hopes to add German IV in the next two years. He also plans to re-introduce Latin instruction at the school.
“I think anytime you’re exposed to a foreign language it’s a benefit,” he says.
“German is the closest language to English,” Wagner adds.
Not Spanish?
“No, no, I’m sorry. And if you look at the map, how long it takes to conquer a language, and you only look at Japanese and Chinese, it takes years to be fluent in [those], but you can be already better than ‘survival’ after four semesters in German.”
Condray says Fayetteville High School German teacher Tam Stassen has had such great success that seniors there hop over to the university’s campus - it’s literally a stone’s throw away - to take intermediate-level German literature courses.
Sarah Bunton, a middle school German teacher in the Fayetteville district who is a native of Fayetteville and also a graduate of the university, is the first German instructor most of those students have.
“Our numbers have doubled at the junior high level, and we started offering it three years ago,” she says.
Perpetuating German means nurturing the pipeline, and Bunton is the intake. German teachers there and everywhere must keep one eye on their instruction and one out for the threat of termination. “We were so upset [about the University of Arkansas at] Little Rock, which had a self-sustaining, very estimable program,” Bunton says, “and if they shut down, we would hate for it to ... affect our programs.”
UALR sophomore and Donaghey scholar Cayley Griffiths says the matter will probably discourage all language majors and minors at the university, which only offers programs in French, Spanish and German:
“To cut one of the languages and only offer two, I don’t think that’s up to par.”
Style, Pages 49 on 12/23/2012