The Language Merchants

If a U.S. citizen happens to have been born of immigrant parents, chances are he can season his speech with the salt-and-pepper words of a foreign language--although his children probably cannot. Otherwise, the odds are that he regards linguistic skill as one of the arcane arts. If he attended college, it is likely that his conviction was merely deepened; he may have won passing marks in French or German, but he probably cannot boast of it in either language.

For 80 years a firm of language merchants has sold monolingual Americans what most U.S. high schools and colleges do not give--the conversational skill to haggle with a foreign hackie, wrangle with a waiter, or, as has been necessary more than once, the ability to ask directions to the U.S. embassy in the country to which the customer has just been appointed ambassador. Last week in Manhattan, President Robert Strumpen-Darrie (some twelve languages) and Vice President Charles Berlitz (23 languages) of the Berlitz Schools of Languages, spoke happily of statistics: last year the firm grossed an estimated $10 million from teach-yourself texts and records and from students in 32 language centers in the U.S. and its possessions (the 150-odd foreign Berlitz Schools are administered from Paris). In the last five years, largely because U.S. industries are sending foreign-bound employees to language schools in wholesale lots, registration at Berlitz has doubled.

Sanskrit & Papimento. Founder and household god of the language firm was Charles Berlitz' grandfather Maximilian (46 languages), who started his first school in 1878 in Providence, invented a teaching technique now referred to reverently as The Method. It consists chiefly of one precept: under no circumstances is anything but the language under study spoken in class. A corollary: for the first few lessons, all instruction is verbal--otherwise, Charles Berlitz explains, students tend to transpose pronunciation values in languages sharing the same alphabet.

Using Maximilian's system, Berlitz teachers can, and have, taught illiterate savages (Philippine Igorots, brought to the U.S. for the St. Louis Exposition of 1904) to speak English, and literate Americans to speak most of the world's tongues. Berlitz Schools in New York are prepared to teach 60 languages, last year taught 37. French is the most popular; Papimento--a Caribbean lingua franca of languages such as Dutch, Spanish, Hindustani--has not yet been requested; Sanskrit has been asked for, but not taught.

Intimate & Intemperate. Cost of moderate fluency: $300 to $500 for 60 to 100 hours of private instruction. The vocabulary taught is selected for the frequency with which words are used in conversation rather than in literature, which is the basis for most college word lists. Part of the course: a lesson in intimate and intemperate uses of language. Berlitz reasons that even a gentlemanly student ought to know that to call a Chinese a tortoise, for instance, is grounds for water torture.

Courses set up especially for industry get word lists tailored to the trade; Berlitz-drilled operatives for a large soup company prowled Italy, snooped out a formula for minestrone in fluent culinary Italian. Berlitz spends much of his time abroad, keeping an ear out for language changes, next week will be in Scandinavia plotting a new teach-yourself primer combining Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

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