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I see that we're discussing language learning and historians again, so I'd like to give a few cents of my own as someone who actually reads a lot of languages and is highly ambivalent about the entire thing:
1. It is important to acknowledge that some fields use language training to gatekeep. A recent nasty AHR review of a wonderful book reminded me how philology is fetishized in Islamic Studies to the extent of an inner-disciplinary culture war that is just ridiculous & insidious.
2. Having said that, languages are one of our field's main tools. We all know studies that are based on poor reading of the original. We all criticize scholars who study regions like Africa without reading the language. We believe that writing on people whose language you can't
read is harmful, ignorant and wrong.
3. Some regions have easier linguistic situations than others. It is much easier to "spread" linguistically in Slavic-speaking or Romance-speaking Europe than, say, in the Baltics. Starting to learn Finnish from scratch is difficult.
3. Some regions have easier linguistic situations than others. It is much easier to "spread" linguistically in Slavic-speaking or Romance-speaking Europe than, say, in the Baltics. Starting to learn Finnish from scratch is difficult.
4. Some fields, like cultural history, are more linguistically heavy than others. One of my favorite professors in undergrad admitted to having a weak grasp of Latin, but just enough to mine it for prosopographic data and do it wonderfully.
5. Language learning is, in many respects, like writing. You need to do it well in some respect to be a historian. Some of us do it better than others. I am definitely not the best writer and many are better archival historians than I am.
Every historian is made of a different balance of qualities, mine is stronger in languages. But a certain level of language knowledge, as is writing, is absolutely necessary and often cannot be reduced without setting the new grad student up to failure.
The only viable solution I see is setting aside funding for language study, paying language instructors to specialize in "language for reading purposes", and to help students find a balance - without setting them up for failure by downplaying how crucial it is for their work.
