College is where many first-generation students first encounter Norman English as a daily lived language.

Wealthier children absorb Norman English at the dinner table; first-gen students arrive with less of it.

AI can generate Norman prose on demand, but it can't provide the embodied immersion that elite colleges sell.

Spanish dual immersion from preschool through high school could give all children early Norman exposure.

Spanish and English have been part of my life ever since I can remember. My parents were from Mexico, but I grew up in Northern California. When I was in ninth grade, my mom decided she wanted me to be fully literate in Spanish, and so I spent a year with my aunt and her family in Saltillo, Mexico. The dollars that my mom had made stretch to send me to parochial school in Oakland, California, stretched even further in Saltillo. There I was placed alongside expat children of the local GM plant managers and the local elite. It was full immersion in Spanish for one year. When I got back to high school in the U.S., there were so many words that I knew naturally—words like penultimate or remunerative. I sailed through high school. In my second year of college, I went to São Paulo for two years, fully immersed in Portuguese. This jiggled my Spanish and my English, stretching sounds and combinations in new directions. Words traveled across all three languages, and many of those words helped me when I got to graduate school, where I got a Ph.D. in cognitive science and psychology.

The language of science, even of law and of medicine, had always been second nature, and it made my studies easier, especially in STEM fields, which are so Latin-heavy. If it mattered for me, did it matter for others? The data bore it out. Steele and colleagues' evaluation of Portland's dual-language immersion lottery found that everyone........

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