You are probably familiar with this semi-infamous statement of Barack Obama: “Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.” But you may be unfamiliar with what came next out of Obama’s mouth:

“You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language. You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here. They all speak English — they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe. And all we can say is, ‘Merci beaucoup.’”

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At least one Impromptus reader wrote to say that this reminded him of a piece of mine, from long ago: “Love on the Arno.” It told of my time as a student abroad, and how it increased my conservatism, and patriotism. Many of my fellow Americans were terribly embarrassed to be American. And that had an impact on me — it was nauseating, actually.

You could call those embarrassed Americans “self-hating Americans,” as many do. But I have always found this designation a little misleading. Such people, in my experience, are not really self-hating: They are supremely self-loving. It’s just that they hate you — or, in any case, are embarrassed by their country.

I have a piece on Americans and foreign languages in the forthcoming National Review. The issue will be available, in digital form, on Friday. I very much hope you’ll read the issue, and that piece along with it.

I’d like to say a little more here. In the above-quoted statement, Obama said, “It’s embarrassing when Europeans . . .” Some Americans will always be embarrassed, especially in front of Europeans — just as adolescents are embarrassed in front of their parents. But adolescents grow out of this. So do most Americans who are embarrassed by Americanness.

But some never do. And, in a hundred ways, the Obamas, husband and wife, seem like unreformed college students, still slapping the Canadian maple leaf on their backpacks. Do you know what I mean?

The embarrassed American says, “Oh, we’re so fat, we’re so loud, we’re so this, we’re so that! We use ketchup, we have the death penalty! We don’t learn foreign languages. It’s so embarrassing!”

One of the reasons I chose to write this piece for NR is that I’ve been immersed in foreign languages for much of my life — have thought a lot about them. Cherish them. I think I’ve studied five languages formally, and maybe the same number informally. I’m sort of a language junkie. Therefore, I have some confidence in pushing back against the Obama types.

You may remember that S. I. Hayakawa was the head of U.S. English — indeed, he founded it. That was important, because, not only was he “ethnic,” he was a distinguished linguist (a semanticist, in particular). You could not mess with him as a jingo, a racist, a xenophobe, a boob. (Of course, this didn’t stop the Left — nothing can.)

According to the Gallup people, a quarter of Americans speak a language other than English well enough to hold a conversation. That doesn’t seem so bad to me, all things considered. But be that as it may. Chew on a few facts and ideas.

America is a great big continental nation, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On our northern border is Canada, another vast continental nation. It is almost entirely English-speaking. On our southern border is Mexico, and a great body of water (the Gulf).

And guess what, sports fans? On our short border with Quebec, there is a fair amount of bilingualism — English and French. And on our longer border with Mexico, there’s a fair amount of bilingualism — English and Spanish. Exactly as you would expect. That’s the way these things work.

It’s not so much that Europeans know foreign languages out of intellectual curiosity or virtue; it’s that the languages come naturally. Take the Swiss (who give us an easy example): They live in a little country with four official languages. They are bumping up against “other” languages all the time. Now take Nebraskans: They live in a great big state in the middle of a great big nation, and are a long, long way from other languages.

But all the world’s languages come to America — just as all the world’s people do.

Let me interrupt to tell a little story — kind of interesting. I have a dear old friend who was born in Geneva. She spoke only German with her father, and only English with her mother. And French, of course, was on the streets. “You were so lucky!” everyone says. She just nods and smiles. But she’ll tell you privately that she never felt really comfortable in any one language — never felt truly at home.

Back to my expounding. Consider that, for better or worse — and I say better — English is the world’s lingua franca. And that bears on the question of Americans and foreign languages. We are born into a language that virtually the entire world speaks or seeks to speak. For hundreds of millions of people around the world, there is a great incentive to learn English. To learn other languages: less incentive (much).

By the way, have you experienced an old phenomenon in Paris? You speak to them in French, and they answer you in English (however badly). You speak to them in English, and they give you a stream of offended French. Sometimes being an American means not being able to win.

Anyway, this business of foreign languages — ignorance of — is one of many clubs with which to beat Americans. A pity Obama is embarrassed. He need not be, really.

In this column and elsewhere, I have quoted something the first Bush said, way back in the 1984 vice-presidential debate (with Ferraro). It has always stayed with me. He said, “I’ll be honest with you: It’s a joy to serve with a president who does not apologize for the United States of America” (meaning Reagan). Would Obama be that kind of president? We are to have a “decent respect to [for] the opinions of mankind,” said our Founders. Yes, indeed. But we should show a little self-confidence too, where it’s justified.

In turning over these questions, I talked with some of the smartest, ablest, most experienced people I know — people who have been engaged with languages, societies, and so on for a long time. May I share with you some of what they said?

I liked this from Roger Kimball: “Americans may be insular, but everyone else is, too. Who’s to say that someone from Peoria is more provincial than someone from Grenoble or Bonn? It’s just that Americans are less self-righteous about it all.” So true. Furthermore, Obama has “bought into a left-liberal cliché” — yet another one.

Paul Hollander, the anti-Communist sociologist (how often can you write that phrase?), was born in Hungary. Naturally, his parents and grandparents knew German, given the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In a later era, Hungarians learned Russian — unwillingly. Sometimes language is imposed, at point of bayonet.

(By the way, many Eastern Europeans, though they know Russian, won’t breathe a word of it. This despite the fact that Russian is, of course, a great world language.)

Hollander points out that the American education system is weak in foreign languages — but also weak in many other areas. How about history, science, and literature?