Innocents at Home

By Denis P. Doyle

A study I conducted this year reaches the dismal conclusion that most Americans know little and care less about foreign languages or cultures. Superpower and world cultural arbiter, America remains relentlessly provincial. Because English has become the lingua franca of the modern world--the language of commerce, banking, technology, science, art, and aviation--we have convinced ourselves that our ignorance of other peoples and cultures is not a serious disadvantage. Because English is so widely dispersed, we can "get along" most anywhere.

But we are living in a fool's paradise. At issue is more than bad manners and sloth. Our long-term economic well-being depends on how well we know our customers. As Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) says in his book The Tongue Tied American , you can buy in any language but you sell in the language of your customer.

Compared with the competition, American ignorance is striking. Years ago, long before Japanese dominance in household and commercial electronics, the head of the Sony Corporation spent a year in New York City learning English. As history shows us, there was method to his madness. (It works both ways: Owen B. Butler, the c.e.o. of Procter & Gamble when it became one of the few truly successful American players in the Japanese market, attributes much of Procter & Gamble's success to his knowledge of Japanese. Other...