Children growing up after this crisis will use far more oral language after it ends

The data are in.

I take the risk of predicting that—along with pedants angry that people aren’t calling it a “COVID generation”

Bruh.

On a more serious note though:

One effect that this crisis may well have on American language is to bolster the longevity of its diversity. In this country, currently about one in four children live in homes with a language other than English as the main language. Yet, the sad truth is that these languages tend not to make it far past that home unless there are massive communities of people living in that language, which is true of just a few such as Spanish and Mandarin, or in more isolated communities, Yiddish and German.

Often, children in bilingual homes learn their parents’ and grandparents’ language to a functional but abbreviated degree. They can converse fluently on a basic level, but never master the level of language required to discuss complex topics and miss many of the pickier aspects of the language’s grammar. Linguists call this “heritage language.” People who speak a language only at this level seldom pass it on to their children, even if they happen to marry someone who also speaks the language on the same level.

Children whose Bengali or Danish was slipping have now been spending infinitely more time with parents (and especially in immigrant communities, grandparents) and have been able to use the home language all day every day for the first time since toddlerhood. I have heard from many parents who say that they are pleased to see their children’s skills in the home language explode or at least improve. A summer immersed in a language can do wonders, as veterans of Middlebury College’s famous language-learning program can attest. The lockdown is clearly going to amount to the equivalent of about two summers, and there are mini-Middleburys happening in millions of houses worldwide.

Many will be less sanguine about another possible legacy of the virus. If this kind of lockdown becomes necessary in waves until there is a vaccine, and especially if other pandemics arrive in the near-future and mean again separating children from formal schooling for months at a time, the ever-increasing oralization of American language use will be entrenched even more deeply than before.

At home one learns to talk; at school is where one learns to speak, especially those from less educated homes. At home one writes stuff down here and there; at school one learns to compose the kind of text that presents you to the world as a serious person. Humans are genetically programmed to talk, and ordinary talk is complex and nuanced indeed. Yet modern civilization exerts a requirement that citizens master a secondary layer of communication, the formal one.

I take the risk of predicting that—along with pedants angry that people aren’t calling it a “COVID generation”—we will see the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores go down. It will first become evident with the round of fourth-graders tested next year.

Already we have seen a transition from an era of long emails as common coin in the 1990s to brief texts as the norm starting in about 2005, such that even many people who were comfortable with long emails then today prefer the brevity of texts, while people under about 25 often find not just email but Facebook too wordy. The terseness of texting and Instagram rule now: As always, formal language is a stunt, not a natural condition.