Why do so many schools teach French?

In 2017, French ranked as the 10th most spoken language in the world with 229 million people total. Out of those 229, 76 million have French as their first language. That ranks as the 17th most spoken first language.

Ahead of total French speakers includes: Arabic, Malay, Russian, Bengali and Portuguese. Ahead of native French speakers includes: Hausa (spoken in African nations including Nigeria, Ghana and the Ivory Coast), Telegu (spoken in parts of India) and Javanese (yes, not Japanese, it’s spoken in an area called Java).

I found this cool report made up in June that talks about all foreign language enrollment in the US. In K-12 last year, there were ~1.3 million students enrolled in French. That’s about 13.5% of students, marking the second highest language by a wide margin. Spanish is being taught to 76% of students. The next highest after French is German at 3.4%.

My question is, if French is the 10th most spoken language, and 17th highest spoken first-language in the world, why is it the second most taught language in the US?

I was looking up some arguments for why French is spoken so much and some of the best ones I came across were the following:

• “French is seen as Language of aristocrats and is associated with kings, princes, poets, art, architecture, fashion and everything that is refined”
• “French was once the official language of diplomacy. While this changed after the First World War, speaking French is still a sign of prestige among diplomatic circles. French is one of the only six official languages at the UN and Olympic Games.”
• Something about French being historical language and a beautiful language
• There’s a relationship between French and academia because good schools are in French-speaking regions

I’m not necessarily opposed to these reasons. I still find it highly problematic, though. Globalization is occurring extremely rapidly. A great way for young Americans to be prepared to play a part is by understanding other cultures. America has already had significant economic development. There are many regions throughout the world that are beginning to go through that.

That means expansive opportunities for business and economic growth. You could make the argument that Mandarin or Hindi are only spoken in a specific region. While that is true, those regions are massive and there are so many people that speak those languages.

More students should be studying abroad in India and China because that’s where we are going to see some of the most massive development over the next many years.

It just bothers me that even Javanese is a more common native language than French is, and French is the second most spoken language here. It goes to show, there is this historical significance to French that is cool, but does not make it incredbily valuable today.

Our system is outdated in the language department. Even Spanish — although more spoken than French, is being taught to 76% of K-12 students studying foreign language. That number is disproportionally high as well.

I wonder if this will change in the coming years. I know Mandarin is coming up, but it’s slow and learning that language is rather tough.

If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them!

I know very little about foreign languages, admittedly, and I’m someone who fell in the Spanish boat and is going to go get close to fluent this upcoming semester in South America. I still sort of wish someone made me learn Mandarin or Hindi instead. Maybe I’ll pick em up one day.