Why Latin

I

“My child needs English, not Latin.” The other half of English.

English is really two languages wearing one coat. The words a child uses at home (the, house, go, eat, friend) are old Germanic words, and Latin does nothing for them. But the English of school is a different language: analyze, evidence, hypothesis, democracy, contradiction, consequence. That English is Latin and Greek, almost all the way down.

The linguist Averil Coxhead built a list of the 570 word families that appear most often in academic writing across every subject. More than 82 percent of them are Greek or Latin in origin. These are the words in textbooks, in essay prompts, in the reading passages of every exam a student will sit.

Readers of Korean or Japanese already know how this works. A student who knows the character for light can guess at a word for photosynthesis before anyone defines it. Latin roots do the same work for academic English. A child who knows that contra means against and dict- means say or tell can take apart contradiction, and a hundred words like it, before anyone defines them.

So the choice is not English or Latin. Latin is the other half of English, and it is the half that is graded.

Evidence: A. Coxhead, “A New Academic Word List,” TESOL Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2000).

II

The rarest line on a transcript

In May 2025, students around the world sat more than six million AP exams. Of those, 4,339 were in Latin. Five hundred and forty-three students earned a 5. That is fewer students than attend many single high schools, and the number has fallen by roughly half since 2007.

A parent may hear this as a warning. Hear it instead as an opportunity. There is an idea from biology, made famous in marketing by Rory Sutherland (who, as it happens, read classics at Cambridge): a signal is believed in proportion to how hard it is to fake. A 5 in a subject taken by hundreds of thousands tells an admissions reader that a student did well. A 5 in Latin tells her something about who the student is: someone who chose a difficult thing that no one required.

Harvard’s longtime dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons, said much the same to Bloomberg in 2010. Mastery of Latin, he said, “can end up tipping the student into the class,” and such a student today “would be even a greater rarity, standing out even more.”

The decline of Latin in schools has quietly favored the students who still learn it.

Evidence: College Board, AP Latin score distributions and AP exam volume, 2025; The New York Times, October 7, 2008 (2007 figures); Bloomberg, August 24, 2010, as excerpted by rogueclassicism.

III

A remedy, not a reward

Latin has a reputation as a subject for children who are already ahead. The evidence suggests nearly the opposite.

In the 1970s, the Philadelphia public schools gave thousands of fifth graders twenty minutes of Latin a day. After one year, they were a full year ahead of matched classmates in English vocabulary. Similar programs in other American cities reported similar results. When researchers later reviewed a century of such studies, the benefit to children’s English was clear, and it was largest in the poorest neighborhoods and among children for whom English was a second language.

The likely reason is simple. A child who already reads widely picks up academic words by exposure. A child who does not, or who learned English second, meets those words as strangers. Latin hands her the keys to them, all at once.

Not twenty minutes of drill, then, but twenty minutes of keys.

Evidence: R. Masciantonio, “Tangible Benefits of the Study of Latin,” Foreign Language Annals 10 (1977); E. Bracke and C. Bradshaw, “The impact of learning Latin on school pupils,” The Language Learning Journal 48 (2020); A. Holmes-Henderson and K. Kelly, Ancient Languages in Primary Schools in England, Department for Education (2022), which also notes how few modern controlled studies exist.

IV

Unable to skim

An English reader can skim a careless sentence and land close enough to its meaning. Latin will not allow it. Its word order is free, so the meaning lives in the endings: which word is acting, which is acted upon, who did it, and when. Guess, and the sentence means something else entirely. It is not that Latin is more logical than English. It is that Latin is less forgiving.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, after whom this academy is named, understood why that matters. “It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy,” he wrote, “because they require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge.”

We do not claim that Latin makes children cleverer; psychologists have argued about that for a century, and the honest verdict is unproven. We claim something narrower and easier to see: a student who has spent two years with Latin cannot skim anymore. She reads what the sentence says, not what she expected it to say.

Evidence: R. W. Emerson, “Education,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883). On the old debate over general “mental training,” E. L. Thorndike, Journal of Educational Psychology 15 (1924).

V

“Will it raise her test scores?” The honest answer.

For years, students who studied Latin had the highest average verbal scores of any language group on the SAT. In 2007, the College Board reported that the 86,000 students who had taken Latin averaged 564 in critical reading, against a national average of 502.

A careful reader will object that Latin attracts strong students to begin with, and she is right. So one study did the careful thing: it compared students with the same earlier verbal scores. Students who studied a language still did better on the SAT than those who did not, Latin students among the strongest, and the gain was largest for students who had started with lower scores.

One more honest note: today’s SAT asks less about rare words than it used to, and more about reading hard sentences closely. That is no loss for Latin. Reading hard sentences closely is exactly what a Latin student does every week.

And the students who choose the difficult subject are, in part, the evidence. Choosing it is part of what it says about them.

Evidence: College Board, 2007 College-Bound Seniors: Total Group Profile Report, table 18; T. C. Cooper et al., “Foreign Language Learning and SAT Verbal Scores Revisited,” Foreign Language Annals 41 (2008).

VI

“She wants to study science.” Then she needs it more.

The student headed for medicine needs Latin more than the student headed for literature. The vocabulary of literature is mixed. The vocabulary of anatomy is Latin by international rule: the official terms of human anatomy, agreed by the world’s anatomists in 2019, are in Latin, and every other language, English and Korean included, translates from them.

Botanists had to describe every newly discovered plant in Latin until the end of 2011. Zoologists still give every species a Latin name.

It shows in the classroom. At Cardiff University’s medical school, first-year students who had studied Latin or Greek did better on their anatomy exams. At the Mayo Clinic, students taught the Latin and Greek beneath anatomical terms scored higher and felt more at ease with the vocabulary. Vasoconstriction stops being a string of syllables and becomes a sentence: vessel, together, tighten.

Evidence: FIPAT, Terminologia Anatomica, 2nd ed. (2019); J. McNeill and N. J. Turland, Taxon 60 (2011); S. Stephens and B. Moxham, Clinical Anatomy 31 (2018); S. B. Smith et al., Clinical Anatomy 20 (2007).

VII

You cannot take Latin out of English

In 1999, the courts of England and Wales set out to make the law easier to understand by removing its Latin. Plaintiff became claimant. In camera became in private. The writ became the claim form.

Claimant comes from the Latin clamare, to cry out. Private comes from privatus. Form comes from forma. The reformers had replaced Latin with Latin.

One cannot remove Latin from English. One can only stop noticing it. A student who has studied Latin never stops noticing, and that is a pleasure that lasts a lifetime, as well as an advantage in every subject built on words.

Evidence: the Civil Procedure Rules 1998, in force April 26, 1999; The Critic, “Plain English by committee,” April 2024.

VIII

The one fair language

In every modern language, somebody in the room is ahead: the classmate who grew up speaking it, the one with the native accent. Latin is the exception. There are no native speakers. Every student begins at the same line, and no one will ever correct her accent, because no one alive has the right one.

The AP Latin exam tests reading, translation, and analysis. There is no speaking section. What is rewarded is exactly what can be learned: careful reading, built week by week.

And Latin does not change. A student who learns its grammar at twelve will still be able to read Cicero with it at sixty. Few things a child learns at twelve last so long.

Evidence: College Board, AP Latin Course and Exam Description (2025).

IX

Not faster Spanish: Spanish that makes sense

One popular claim for Latin is that it makes Spanish, French, or Italian quicker to learn. The research is mixed, and some careful studies found no head start at all. We would rather say what is true.

What Latin gives is understanding. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian are Latin’s children, and Latin explains why they behave as they do: why noche, nuit, and notte are cousins, why French verbs end as they do. A student who knows Latin does not find those languages easier to speak on the first day. She finds that they make sense, and a language that makes sense is a language one keeps.

Evidence: L. Haag and E. Stern, “In Search of the Benefits of Learning Latin,” Journal of Educational Psychology 95 (2003).

X

“I hated Latin at school.” It was the method, not the child.

Many adults remember Latin as hours of tables memorized in silence. That memory is accurate, and it is a memory of a method. Even the researchers who doubted Latin’s benefits pointed out that the old studies tested Latin taught by drill alone.

Montaigne learned Latin before he learned French: his father hired a tutor who spoke to the boy in nothing else. He learned it, he wrote, “without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without tears.” Few of us can give a child a Latin-speaking household. But the lesson stands: the language was never the problem.

At Emerson Latin, each age is taught the way it learns: younger children in Latin itself, older students with the grammar named and put to work, every class opened with a game, and most of every hour spent with students speaking, not listening. The Emerson Method →

Evidence: M. de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” Essays I.26; S. Krashen, on the early transfer studies (2016).

XI

A sublime luxury

Thomas Jefferson did not defend Latin as useful. He defended it the way one defends a garden. “To read the Latin and Greek authors in their original is a sublime luxury,” he wrote to Joseph Priestley in 1800, “and I deem luxury in science to be at least as justifiable as in architecture, painting, gardening or the other arts.” In the same letter he thanked, “on my knees,” whoever had given him that education.

Every translation of Cicero is somebody’s opinion of Cicero. A student who can read him has her own. That is the real reason to learn Latin, and every essay above is, in the end, an alibi for it: a set of good reasons to give a family for a choice that is really about a child meeting the minds of two thousand years without anyone standing in between.

The vocabulary, the scores, and the transcript usually follow.

Evidence: Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, January 27, 1800, Founders Online, National Archives.

XII

And now that a machine can read Latin for us?

Then the skill worth having is the one the machine makes easy to skip: reading a hard sentence slowly, by oneself, and knowing why it means what it means. Latin trains exactly that, and in a live class, it cannot be faked. Latin in the age of AI →