Mandarin’s popularity sags, hits plateau in US as enthusiasm wanes for American youth

“I did consider it, but I thought Spanish would benefit me more, though I realise there are a lot of Mandarin speakers in the Bay Area,” she said.

Her decision reflects what educators describe as a national trend amid fading interest in Mandarin among Americans compared to when the Chinese economy was stronger and China-US relations more upbeat.

Chinese studies at universities in the US dropped by 26 per cent in 2021 from a peak in 2013, according to the New York-based Modern Language Association’s enrolment database.

The association has not released data since 2021, but employees in schools believe Mandarin has at least plateaued and may have continued to decline.

America’s youth no longer feel excited about travel, business or work in China as they once did, scholars said, while other languages hold their own appeal.

A “cooling off of the Chinese economy” has reduced job opportunities for Americans with Chinese proficiency, said Cornelius Kubler, a professor of Asian studies at Williams College in Massachusetts.

“China is not a country that American youth aspire to any more, so the interest in investing significant amounts of time and effort to learn such a hard foreign language has also decreased,” said Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington.

“People don’t study Chinese for fun, but the practical utility and value of learning Chinese have depreciated.”

Zoey Diaz, who is also a first-year high school student in Alameda, picked Spanish during the previous academic year as she gauged it to be “the major language that people would take” in the US given its proximity to Latin America.

“My brother was doing different languages on the Duolingo [app] and he has done Mandarin before on it, but I want to talk to my family who lives in Nicaragua, so I would use Spanish,” said Diaz.

The coronavirus took a toll on after-school Mandarin study programmes that were normally popular with Chinese-American families who hoped to keep their children plugged into the language and culture.

Students left because they could not attend classes in person during the pandemic, said Noya Lee, vice-president of the Association of Northern California Chinese Schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The association’s membership has declined from 100 schools to roughly 80 over the past five years, added Lee, having previously served more than 10,000 students.

The 70-year-old Shoong Family Chinese Cultural Centre’s after-school programme in Oakland, California, also lost 250 of its 750 students during the pandemic, with lingering effects, said board president Jones Wu.

“Interest in learning Chinese is still pretty good, but it may not be as enthusiastic as it was before,” Wu said.

“The relationship with China – from the US perspective we’re getting a lot of bad press about what the government is doing there.”

Several US universities declined to answer queries about the numbers of Chinese classes offered compared to previous years.

Dimming interest in Mandarin would erode understanding among people from the world’s two biggest economies, said Liang Yan, an economist at Willamette University in the US state of Oregon.

“There are many China experts who have talked about the concern that fewer and fewer people are studying China, so it’s really not helpful to relations,” she said.

And as Mandarin studies sag, Korean is picking up, according to Kubler.

“The obvious reason is Korean popular culture, K-pop, K-drama, and so forth,” he said.

South Korean economic development and its concerns about North Korea have raised the language’s profile further, he added.

American perceptions of China’s early role in the pandemic and “negative reporting” on China in the US have also steered students away from learning Chinese, said Kubler.

But the California association’s membership is slowly growing again, though some Chinese schools have cut hours or added content apart from language study, said Lee.

Mandarin is also regaining magnetism because of new teaching methods that use internet technology to help teachers prepare lessons and students add vocabulary without the stress of memorisation, she said.

Students and their families still see economic value in learning the language, Lee added.

“Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, so the biggest goal is to improve career prospects,” she said.

High school students in the San Francisco area probably think little about China-US relations when picking languages, said Alexander.

Matan Goldman, a 20-year-old student and part-time employee of the University of Oregon’s Centre for Applied Second Language Studies, has pored over Mandarin for nearly three years since he was a high school senior.

“At first it was because I liked Chinese food and a lot of my classmates were Chinese, so when I had room in my schedule, I took the class,” said Goldman.

And this summer, he landed in China for the eight-week Princeton in Beijing study programme at Beijing Normal University.

“[Mandarin] has paid off in that I was able to study abroad and make some friends,” he said.

“I’ve had the chance to study a wide variety of topics I wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”