A somewhat surprising piece in The New York Times this week reported that the French dual-language program in New York's public school system "is booming," the third-largest such program in the city, after Spanish and Chinese. That commitment is a beautiful thing—for children of Francophone immigrants. But for we natives, the idea that kids need to pick up French is now antique.

Make no mistake: For immigrant kids from anywhere, bilingual education is invaluable. But the idea that American-born children need to learn French has become more reflex than action, like classical music played at the wedding of people who live to modern pop. French in educated America is now a class marker, originating from that distant day when French was Europe’s international language. Fewer Europeans spoke English then, which made French actually useful—at least for Americans who could afford international travel. Those same Americans were also still suffering from an inferiority complex to Europe’s “sophistication.”

Enter the idea that a language that began as a mere peasant dialect of Latin is a language of precision, savoir-faire, and romance: Molière, Voltaire, Pepe Le Pew. Naturally, then, our little ones must even now know some French to qualify as what used to be called "people of quality."

But the era of Henry James is long past. When I was a teenaged language nerd in the seventies and eighties, it was the tail end of a time when kids of my bent knew French first and foremost, and then likely dabbled in other Romance languages, plus some German and maybe a dash of Russian. Grand old pop-linguist authors like Mario Pei could write about what they termed the “languages of the world” in books where European languages took up a good half of the space.

After all, between the twenties and the Immigration Act of 1965, immigration to America was lower than it had ever been. Betty Draper and Lucy Ricardo likely never knew a Chinese person in any real way; to them, immigrants were Italians running restaurants. But as Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye had it, “It’s a new world, Golde.” Somewhere in the nineties, I noticed when teaching linguistics classes that Spanish had overtaken French, and that students were more likely to have studied Japanese, Chinese or Arabic than German or Russian. These are children of the post–Immigration Act era, either by birth or just experience.