Traditionally, the American
way has been to make English the national language -- but to do so
quietly, locally, without fuss. The Constitution is silent on language:
the Founding Fathers had no need to legislate that English be the
official language of the country. It has always been taken for granted
that English is the national language, and that one must learn English
in order to make it in America.
To say that language has never been a major force in American history
or politics, however, is not to say that politicians have always
resisted linguistic jingoism. In 1753 Benjamin Franklin voiced his
concern that German immigrants were not learning English: "Those
[Germans] who come hither are generally the most ignorant Stupid Sort of
their own Nation .... they will soon so out number us, that all the
advantages we have will not, in My Opinion,
History teaches a plain lesson
about language and governments: there is almost nothing the
government of a free country can do to force its citizens to use
certain languages in preference to others.
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be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become
precarious." Theodore Roosevelt articulated the unspoken American
linguistic-melting-pot theory when he boomed, "We have room for but one
language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see
that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American
nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house." And: "We
must have but one flag. We must also have but one language. That must be
the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington's
Farewell address, of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech and second inaugural."
R's
linguistic tub-thumping long typified the tradition of American
politics. That tradition began to change in the wake of the
anything-goes attitudes and the celebration of cultural differences
arising in the 1960s. A 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965
mandated the "bilingual ballot" under certain circumstances, notably
when the voters of selected language groups reached five percent or more
in a voting district. Bilingual education became a byword of educational
thinking during the 1960s. By the 1970s linguists had demonstrated
convincingly -- at least to other academics -- that
black English (today
called African-American vernacular English or Ebonics) was not "bad"
English but a different kind of authentic English with its own rules.
Predictably, there have been scattered demands that black English be
included in bilingual-education programs.
It was against this background that the movement to make English the
official language of the country arose. In 1981
Senator S. I.
Hayakawa, long a leading critic of bilingual education and bilingual
ballots, introduced in the U.S. Senate a constitutional amendment that
not only would have made English the official language but would have
prohibited federal and state laws and regulations requiring the use of
other languages. His English Language Amendment died in the
Ninety-seventh Congress.
In 1983 the organization called
U.S. English was
founded by Hayakawa and John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist. The
primary purpose of the organization was to promote English as the
official language of the United States. (The best background readings on
America's "neolinguisticism" are the books
Hold Your Tongue, by James Crawford, and
Language Loyalties, edited by Crawford, both published in
1992.) Official English initiatives were passed by California in 1986,
by Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South
Carolina in 1987, by Colorado, Florida, and Arizona in 1988, and by
Alabama in 1990. The majorities voting for these initiatives were
generally not insubstantial: California's, for example, passed by 73
percent.
It was probably inevitable that the Official English (or English
Only -- the two names are used almost interchangeably) movement would
acquire a conservative, almost reactionary undertone in the 1990s.
Official English is politically very incorrect. But its cofounder John
Tanton brought with him strong liberal credentials. He had been active
in the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, and in the 1970s served as
the national president of Zero Population Growth. Early advisers of U.S.
English resist ideological pigeonholing: they included Walter Annenberg,
Jacques Barzun, Bruno Bettelheim, Alistair Cooke, Denton Cooley, Walter
Cronkite, Angier Biddle Duke, George Gilder, Sidney Hook, Norman
Podhoretz, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Karl Shapiro. In 1987 U.S. English
installed as its president Linda Chávez, a Hispanic who had been
prominent in the Reagan Administration. A year later she resigned her
position, citing "repugnant" and "anti-Hispanic" overtones in an
internal memorandum written by Tanton. Tanton, too, resigned, and Walter
Cronkite, describing the affair as "embarrassing," left the advisory
board. One board member, Norman Cousins, defected in 1986, alluding to
the "negative symbolic significance" of California's Official English
initiative, Proposition 63. The current chairman of the board and CEO of
U.S. English is Mauro E. Mujica, who claims that the organization has
650,000 members.
The popular wisdom is that conservatives are pro and liberals con.
True, conservatives such as George Will and William F. Buckley Jr. have
written columns supporting Official English. But would anyone
characterize as conservatives the present and past U.S. English board
members Alistair Cooke, Walter Cronkite, and Norman Cousins? One of the
strongest opponents of bilingual education is the Mexican-American
writer Richard Rodríguez, best known for his eloquent autobiography,
Hunger of Memory (1982). There is a strain of American
liberalism that defines itself in nostalgic devotion to the melting pot.
For several years relevant bills awaited consideration in the U.S. House
of Representatives. The
Emerson Bill (H.R. 123), passed by the House last August, specifies
English as the official language of government, and requires that the
government "preserve and enhance" the official status of English.
Exceptions are made for the teaching of foreign languages; for actions
necessary for public health, international relations, foreign trade, and
the protection of the rights of criminal defendants; and for the use of
"terms of art" from languages other than English. It would, for example,
stop the Internal Revenue Service from sending out income-tax forms and
instructions in languages other than English, but it would not ban the
use of foreign languages in census materials or documents dealing with
national security. "E Pluribus Unum" can still appear on American
money. U.S. English supports the bill.
What are the chances that some version of Official English will
become federal law? Any language bill will face tough odds in the
Senate, because some western senators have opposed English Only measures
in the past for various reasons, among them a desire by Republicans not
to alienate the growing number of Hispanic Republicans, most of whom are
uncomfortable with mandated monolingualism. Texas Governor George W.
Bush, too, has forthrightly said that he would oppose any English Only
proposals in his state. Several of the Republican candidates for
President in 1996 (an interesting exception is Phil Gramm) endorsed
versions of Official English, as has Newt Gingrich. While governor of
Arkansas, Bill Clinton signed into law an English Only bill. As
President, he has described his earlier action as a mistake.
Many issues intersect in the controversy over Official English:
immigration (above all), the rights of minorities (Spanish-speaking
minorities in particular), the pros and cons of bilingual education,
tolerance, how best to educate the children of immigrants, and the place
of cultural diversity in school curricula and in American society in
general. The question that lies at the root of most of the uneasiness is
this: Is America threatened by the preservation of languages other than
English? Will America, if it continues on its traditional path of benign
linguistic neglect, go the way of Belgium, Canada, and Sri Lanka --
three countries among many whose unity is gravely imperiled by language
and ethnic conflicts?
ANGUAGE
and nationalism were not always so intimately intertwined. Never in the
heyday of rule by sovereign was it a condition of employment that the
King be able to speak the language of his subjects. George I spoke no
English and spent much of his time away from England, attempting to use
the power of his kingship to shore up his German possessions. In the
Middle Ages nationalism was not even part of the picture: one owed
loyalty to a lord, a prince, a ruler, a family, a tribe, a church, a
piece of land, but not to a nation and least of all to a nation as a
language unit. The capital city of the Austrian Hapsburg empire was
Vienna, its ruler a monarch with effective control of peoples of the
most varied and incompatible ethnicities, and languages, throughout
Central and Eastern Europe. The official language, and the lingua franca
as well, was German. While it stood -- and it stood for hundreds of
years -- the empire was an anachronistic relic of what for most of human
history had been the normal relationship between country and language:
none.
The marriage of language and nationalism goes back at least to
Romanticism and specifically to
Rousseau, who argued in his
Essay on the Origin of Languages that language must develop
before politics is possible and that language originally distinguished
nations from one another. A little-remembered aim of the French
Revolution -- itself the legacy of Rousseau -- was to impose a national
language on France, where regional languages such as Provençal, Breton,
and Basque were still strong competitors against standard French, the
French of the Ile de France. As late as 1789, when the Revolution began,
half the population of the south of France, which spoke Provençal, did
not understand French. A century earlier the playwright Racine said that
he had had to resort to Spanish and Italian to make himself understood
in the southern French town of Uzès. After the Revolution nationhood
itself became aligned with language.
In 1846 Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm of fairy-tale fame but
better known in the linguistic establishment as a forerunner of modern
comparative and historical linguists, said that "a nation is the
totality of people who speak the same language." After midcentury,
language was invoked more than any other single criterion to define
nationality. Language as a political force helped to bring about the
unification of Italy and of Germany and the secession of Norway from its
union with Sweden in 1905. Arnold Toynbee observed -- unhappily -- soon
after the First World War that "the growing consciousness of Nationality
had attached itself neither to traditional frontiers nor to new
geographical associations but almost exclusively to mother tongues."
The crowning triumph of the new desideratum was the Treaty of
Versailles, in 1919, when the allied victors of the First World War
began redrawing the map of Central and Eastern Europe according to
nationality as best they could. The magic word was "self-determination,"
and none of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points mentioned the word
"language" at all. Self-determination was thought of as being related to
"nationality," which today we would be more likely to call "ethnicity";
but language was simpler to identify than nationality or ethnicity. When
it came to drawing the boundary lines of various countries --
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria,
Poland -- it was principally language that guided the draftsman's hand.
(The main exceptions were Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and the
German-speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia.) Almost by default
language became the defining characteristic of nationality.
And so it remains today. In much of the world, ethnic unity and
cultural identification are routinely defined by language. To be Arab is
to speak Arabic. Bengali identity is based on language in spite of the
division of Bengali-speakers between Hindu India and Muslim Bangladesh.
When eastern Pakistan seceded from greater Pakistan in 1971, it named
itself Bangladesh: desa means "country"; bangla means not
the Bengali people or the Bengali territory but the Bengali language.
Scratch most nationalist movements and you find a linguistic
grievance. The demands for independence of the Baltic states (Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia) were intimately bound up with fears for the loss
of their respective languages and cultures in a sea of Russianness. In
Belgium the war between French and Flemish threatens an already weakly
fused country. The present atmosphere of Belgium is dark and anxious,
costive; the metaphor of divorce is a staple of private and public
discourse. The lines of terrorism in Sri Lanka are drawn between Tamil
Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists -- and also between the Tamil and
Sinhalese languages. Worship of the French language fortifies the
movement for an independent Quebec. Whether a united Canada will survive
into the twenty-first century is a question too close to call. Much of
the anxiety about language in the United States is probably fueled by
the "Quebec problem": unlike Belgium, which is a small European country,
or Sri Lanka, which is halfway around the world, Canada is our close
neighbor.
Language is a convenient surrogate for nonlinguistic claims that are
often awkward to articulate, for they amount to a demand for more
political and economic power. Militant Sikhs in India call for a state
of their own: Khalistan ("Land of the Pure" in Punjabi). They frequently
couch this as a demand for a linguistic state, which has a certain
simplicity about it, a clarity of motive -- justice, even, because
states in India are normally linguistic states. But the Sikh demands
blend religion, economics, language, and retribution for sins both
punished and unpunished in a country where old sins cast long shadows.
Language is an explosive issue in the countries of the former Soviet
Union. The language conflict in Estonia has been especially bitter.
Ethnic Russians make up almost a third of Estonia's population, and most
of them do not speak or read Estonian, although Russians have lived in
Estonia for more than a generation. Estonia has passed legislation
requiring knowledge of the Estonian language as a condition of
citizenship. Nationalist groups in independent Lithuania sought
restrictions on the use of Polish -- again, old sins, long shadows.
In 1995 protests erupted in Moldova, formerly the Moldavian Soviet
Socialist Republic, over language and the teaching of Moldovan history.
Was Moldovan history a part of Romanian history or of Soviet history?
Was Moldova's language Romanian? Moldovan -- earlier called Moldavian --
is Romanian, just as American English and British English are
both English. But in the days of the Moldavian SSR, Moscow insisted that
the two languages were different, and in a piece of linguistic nonsense
required Moldavian to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet to strengthen
the case that it was not Romanian.
The official language of Yugoslavia was Serbo-Croatian, which was
never so much a language as a political accommodation. The Serbian and
Croatian languages are mutually intelligible. Serbian is written in the
Cyrillic alphabet, is identified with the Eastern Orthodox branch of the
Catholic Church, and borrows its high-culture words from the east --
from Russian and Old Church Slavic. Croatian is written in the Roman
alphabet, is identified with Roman Catholicism, and borrows its
high-culture words from the west -- from German, for example, and Latin.
One of the first things the newly autonomous Republic of Serbia did, in
1991, was to pass a law decreeing Serbian in the Cyrillic alphabet the
official language of the country. With Croatia divorced from Serbia, the
Croatian and Serbian languages are diverging more and more.
Serbo-Croatian has now passed into history, a language-museum relic from
the brief period when Serbs and Croats called themselves Yugoslavs and
pretended to like each other.
Slovakia, relieved now of the need to accommodate to Czech
cosmopolitan sensibilities, has passed a law making Slovak its official
language. (Czech is to Slovak pretty much as Croatian is to Serbian.)
Doctors in state hospitals must speak to patients in Slovak, even if
another language would aid diagnosis and treatment. Some 600,000
Slovaks -- more than 10 percent of the population -- are ethnically
Hungarian. Even staff meetings in Hungarian-language schools must be in
Slovak. (The government dropped a stipulation that church weddings be
conducted in Slovak after heavy opposition from the Roman Catholic
Church.) Language inspectors are told to weed out "all sins perpetrated
on the regular Slovak language." Tensions between Slovaks and
Hungarians, who had been getting along, have begun to arise.
The twentieth century is ending as it began -- with trouble in the
Balkans and with nationalist tensions flaring up in other parts of the
globe. (Toward the end of his life Bismarck predicted that "some damn
fool thing in the Balkans" would ignite the next war.) Language isn't
always part of the problem. But it usually is.
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there no hope for language tolerance? Some countries manage to maintain
their unity in the face of multilingualism. Examples are Finland, with a
Swedish minority, and a number of African and Southeast Asian countries.
Two others could not be more unlike as countries go: Switzerland and
India.
German, French, Italian, and Romansh are the languages of
Switzerland. The first three can be and are used for official purposes;
all four are designated "national" languages. Switzerland is politically
almost hyperstable. It has language problems (Romansh is losing ground),
but they are not major, and they are never allowed to threaten national
unity.
Contrary to public perception, India gets along pretty well with a
host of different languages. The Indian constitution officially
recognizes nineteen languages, English among them. Hindi is specified in
the constitution as the national language of India, but that is a pious
postcolonial fiction: outside the Hindi-speaking northern heartland of
India, people don't want to learn it. English functions more nearly than
Hindi as India's lingua franca.
From 1947, when India obtained its independence from the British,
until the 1960s blood ran in the streets and people died because of
language. Hindi absolutists wanted to force Hindi on the entire country,
which would have split India between north and south and opened up other
fracture lines as well. For as long as possible Jawaharlal Nehru,
independent India's first Prime Minister, resisted nationalist demands
to redraw the capricious state boundaries of British India according to
language. By the time he capitulated, the country had gained a precious
decade to prove its viability as a union.
Why is it that India preserves its unity with not just two languages
to contend with, as Belgium, Canada, and Sri Lanka have, but nineteen?
The answer is that India, like Switzerland, has a strong national
identity. The two countries share something big and almost mystical that
holds each together in a union transcending language. That something I
call "unique otherness."
The Swiss have what the political scientist Karl Deutsch called
"learned habits, preferences, symbols, memories, and patterns of
landholding": customs, cultural traditions, and political institutions
that bind them closer to one another than to people of France, Germany,
or Italy living just across the border and speaking the same language.
There is Switzerland's traditional neutrality, its system of universal
military training (the "citizen army"), its consensual allegiance to a
strong Swiss franc -- and fondue, yodeling, skiing, and mountains. Set
against all this, the fact that Switzerland has four languages doesn't
even approach the threshold of becoming a threat.
As for India, what Vincent Smith, in the
Oxford History of India, calls its "deep underlying
fundamental unity" resides in institutions and beliefs such as caste,
cow worship, sacred places, and much more. Consider dharma, karma,
and maya, the three root convictions of Hinduism; India's historical
epics; Gandhi; ahimsa (nonviolence); vegetarianism; a distinctive
cuisine and way of eating; marriage customs; a shared past; and what the
Indologist Ainslie Embree calls "Brahmanical ideology." In other words,
"We are Indian; we are different."
Belgium and Canada have never managed to forge a stable national
identity; Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia never did either. Unique
otherness immunizes countries against linguistic destabilization. Even
Switzerland and especially India have problems; in any country with as
many different languages as India has, language will never not be a
problem. However, it is one thing to have a major illness with a bleak
prognosis; it is another to have a condition that is irritating and
occasionally painful but not life-threatening.
History teaches a plain lesson about language and governments: there
is almost nothing the government of a free country can do to change
language usage and practice significantly, to force its citizens to use
certain languages in preference to others, and to discourage people from
speaking a language they wish to continue to speak. (The rebirth of
Hebrew in Palestine and Israel's successful mandate that Hebrew be
spoken and written by Israelis is a unique event in the annals of
language history.) Quebec has since the 1970s passed an array of laws
giving French a virtual monopoly in the province. One consequence --
unintended, one wishes to believe -- of these laws is that last year
kosher products imported for Passover were kept off the shelves, because
the packages were not labeled in French. Wise governments keep their
hands off language to the extent that it is politically possible to do
so.
We like to believe that to pass a law is to change behavior; but
passing laws about language, in a free society, almost never changes
attitudes or behavior. Gaelic (Irish) is living out a slow, inexorable
decline in Ireland despite enormous government support of every possible
kind since Ireland gained its independence from Britain. The Welsh
language, in contrast, is alive today in Wales in spite of heavy
discrimination during its history. Three out of four people in the
northern and western counties of Gwynedd and Dyfed speak Welsh.
I said earlier that language is a convenient surrogate for other
national problems. Official English obviously has a lot to do with
concern about immigration, perhaps especially Hispanic immigration.
America may be threatened by immigration; I don't know. But America is
not threatened by language.
The usual arguments made by academics against Official English are
commonsensical. Who needs a law when, according to the 1990 census, 94
percent of American residents speak English anyway? (Mauro E. Mujica,
the chairman of U.S. English, cites a higher figure: 97 percent.) Not
many of today's immigrants will see their first language survive into
the second generation. This is in fact the common lament of
first-generation immigrants:their children are not learning their
language and are losing the culture of their parents. Spanish is hardly
a threat to English, in spite of isolated (and easily visible) cases
such as Miami, New York City, and pockets of the Southwest and southern
California. The everyday language of south Texas is Spanish, and yet
south Texas is not about to secede from America.
But empirical, calm arguments don't engage the real issue: language
is a symbol, an icon. Nobody who favors a constitutional ban against
flag burning will ever be persuaded by the argument that the flag is,
after all, just a "piece of cloth." A draft card in the 1960s was never
merely a piece of paper. Neither is a marriage license.
Language, as one linguist has said, is "not primarily a means of
communication but a means of communion." Romanticism exalted language,
made it mystical, sublime -- a bond of national identity. At the same
time, Romanticism created a monster: it made of language a means for
destroying a country.
America has that unique otherness of which I spoke. In spite of all
our racial divisions and economic unfairness, we have the frontier
tradition, respect for the individual, and opportunity; we have our love
affair with the automobile; we have in our history a civil war that
freed the slaves and was fought with valor; and we have sports, hot
dogs, hamburgers, and milk shakes -- things big and small, noble and
petty, important and trifling. "We are Americans; we are different."
If I'm wrong, then the great American experiment will fail -- not
because of language but because it no longer means anything to be an
American; because we have forfeited that "willingness of the heart" that
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote was America; because we are no longer joined
by Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory."
We are not even close to the danger point. I suggest that we relax
and luxuriate in our linguistic richness and our traditional tolerance
of language differences. Language does not threaten American unity.
Benign neglect is a good policy for any country when it comes to
language, and it's a good policy for America.
Photographs by Mel Lindstrom
Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic
Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; April 1997; Should English B the Law?; Volume
279, No. 4; pages 55-64.
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