Linguistics and National Defense
Foreign language study had been lying fallow in the United States since at least the First World War when the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite, Sputnik I, on October 4, 1957. This made Americans anxious, to say the least, and it led to the passage of the National Defense Education Act in September of the following year. The NDEA was meant to improve public education across the country, which had previously been invested in giving students fundamental “life skills” rather than academic training. The legislation also targeted institutions of higher education: it made scholarships and loans available to prospective students; greatly expanded teacher training programs; invested in mathematics, science, engineering, and modern foreign languages; and gave crucial support to graduate students en route to the professoriate.
While the NDEA has often been remembered as a milestone in the history of American scientific and technological development, less attention has been paid to its impact on language study. Perhaps this is because Americans are still so overwhelmingly monolingual. But the Act did emphasize language programs quite prominently alongside provisions for secondary and post-secondary education in science and mathematics. “In addition to grants to the States,” the legislation authorized
…the establishment of institutes for teachers to improve the quality of instruction of modern foreign languages in the elementary schools, the secondary schools, and the colleges and universities. Language institutes and area study centers would also be established to provide training in the so-called “rare” languages, many of which are not now taught in the United States, but which are spoken by many millions of people and are essential to the conduct of our economic, cultural, and political relations with other peoples. Grants for basic research in improved instruction and newer methods and materials in the teaching of modern foreign languages are also provided.
As Deborah Cohn has detailed in her work, the language study provisions of the NDEA built upon the prior efforts of William Riley Parker, who served as Executive Secretary of the Modern Language Association (MLA) from 1947 to 1956. In that role, Parker stewarded the Foreign Language Program (FLP) into existence, which “mobilized scholars and teachers to identify and implement the needs and priorities for language education,” working with the U.S. Office of Education to “develop policies for language instruction and pedagogical training” (Cohn, p. 11). Justifying the need for the FLP to philanthropists and official audiences, Parker likened the decline in American linguistic prowess to the descent of a “language curtain,” which he felt had “inhibited our knowing the minds and hearts of either our enemies or our friends” (Parker, quoted in Cohn, p. 11). With Parker’s considerable help, foreign language study was pushed, for a time, to the center of national interest.
The groundswell of support for foreign language study just described had wide-ranging consequences for the development of mid-century American linguistics. Note the last sentence of the NDEA prose quoted above: “Grants for basic research in improved instruction and newer methods and materials in the teaching of modern foreign languages are also provided.” Joseph Greenberg, Charles Ferguson, and other key actors in this project on language universals received NDEA contracts through the 1960s to share expertise on second language acquisition, to review and evaluate proposals, and to survey existing programs domestically and abroad. This perception of a national crisis, in other words, led to direct material support for “basic” linguistic research in the postwar era. In the contract pictured below, for instance, Greenberg was asked to apply his expertise to the furtherance of “research on more effective methods…development of specialized materials…studies and surveys in Modern Foreign Languages.”
Stanford University. SC 615. Joseph H. Greenberg Papers. Box 3. Folder 18.
Sources like this one are richly suggestive of the Cold War context in which the universals projects were launched. Greenberg, who elsewhere highlighted the psychological payoff of studying word order universals, was being asked here to reflect on what might make for “more effective methods” of providing adult instruction in modern foreign languages—likewise, a question of psycholinguistic significance. In my research, I am currently looking for more direct conceptual connections between some of the NDEA funding initiatives and the language universals projects at the heart of this project.
Works cited:
Cohn, Deborah. 2019. “Cold War Humanities: Modern Language Study, American Studies and the National Interest.” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1990 [1963]. “Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements.” In On Language: Selected Writings of Joseph H. Greenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 40-70.
P.L. 85-864, National Defense Education Act of 1958. Washington: House and Senate Reports, 1958.
