FLORENCE, Italy—Svetlana Cojochru feels hurt. The Moldovan has lived here seven years as a caregiver to Italian kids and the elderly, but in order to stay she’s had to prove her language skills by taking a test which requires her to write a postcard to an imaginary friend and answer a fictional job ad.

Italy is the latest Western European country trying to control a growing immigrant(移民) population by demanding language skills in exchange for work permits, or in some cases, citizenship.

Some immigrant advocates worry that as hard financial times make it more difficult for natives to keep jobs, such measures will become more a vehicle for intolerance than integration(融合). Others say it’s only natural that newcomers learn the language of their host nation, seeing it as a condition to ensure they can contribute to society.

Other European countries laid down a similar requirement for immigrants, and some terms are even tougher. The governments argue that this will help foreigners better join the society and promote understanding across cultures.

Italy, which has a much weaker tradition of immigration, has witnessed a sharp increase in immigration in recent years. In 1990, immigrants numbered some 1.14 million out of Italy’s then 56.7 million people, or about 2 percent. At the start of this year, foreigners living in Italy amounted to 4.56 million of a total population of 60.6 million, or 7.5 percent, with immigrants’ children accounting for an even larger percentage of births in Italy.

Cojochru, the Moldovan caregiver, hoped obtaining permanent residence(居住权) would help her bring her two children to Italy; they live with her sister in Moldova, where salaries are among the lowest in Europe. She was skeptical that the language requirement would encourage integration.

Italians always “see me as a foreigner,” an outsider, even though she’s stayed in the country for years and can speak the local language fluently, she said.

Read a few news headlines and you’ll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the isolation of individual last speakers, and the wider cultural loss for humanity. These stories often mention how people try to protect such languages. However, they tend to focus less on how such efforts actually help speakers of endangered languages. Such efforts sometimes help, sometimes harm, and sometimes do both.

Encouraging someone to keep speaking a declining minority language could certainly boost his or her sense of identity. But when a bigger language is adopted somewhere, it doesn’t remove everything that came before. Often, intense contact between big and small languages leads to a new mixture - for example, Sheng in Kenya and Tsotsitaal in South Africa. In other cases, such language contact results in a new localized dialect. As linguist Peter Trudgill argues, this can also hold a highly local identity.

Sure enough, enabling a people to use their traditional language can make them feel better about themselves. But is it really helping them? Simply adding your ancestral language as a new school subject isn’t very helpful if your school is falling down, or you’re not eating well. To think anything much can be solved just by performing CPR (心肺复苏) in a minority language is to ignore how complicated human society is and how many different simultaneous (同时的) needs we have.

In Québec, Canada, just under 75% of residents have French as their native language, but the percentage has fallen over the past five years. In 2022, the Québec Legislature passed Bill 96, which requires people to only use French for official speech and writing. This is an example of the prioritization of language, yet it’s unclear whether the law will actually improve Québec residents’ lives, or even help preserve French in Québec.

So promoting endangered languages can be a positive force, but we shouldn’t assume that’s universally true. It is especially difficult for a language expert to say so. Perhaps we should focus less on languages themselves, and pay more attention to the lives of the people who speak them.