[S]uggested social remedies are almost always discussed in the light of questions to which verifiable answers cannot be given: "Are your proposals consistent with sound economic policy? Do they accord with the principles of true liberalism (or true conservatism)?..." And we spend so much time discussing non-sense questions that often we never get around to finding out exactly what the results of proposed actions would be.
During the course of our weary struggles with such non-sense questions, someone or other is sure to come along with a campaign to tell us, "Let's get back to normalcy....Let's stick to the good old-fashioned, tried-and-true principles...America must get back to this....American must get back to that...." Most of such appeals are, of course, merely....INVITATIONS TO CONTINUE DRIVING OURSELVES CRAZY. In our confusion we accept those invitations -- with the same old results.
S.I. Hayakawa
Language in Thought and Action1
The same old results indeed.
It's ironic that Hayakawa, speaking such sense in his excellent book on language, should have become the engine, through his organization U.S. English, behind one of those "non-sense" questions: Should English be made the official language of the United States? Representative Pete King of New York is the most recent crusader on this quest, having introduced a bill to make English the national language and end all federal programs that promote bilingualism.2 And presidential aspirant Senator Bob Dole placed the topic high on his issues menu during his Labor Day speech to the national convention of the American legion in Indianapolis: "We must stop the practice of multilingual education as a means of instilling ethnic pride or as a therapy for low self-esteem or out of elitist guilt over a culture built on the traditions of the West."3 Once again, this specter raises its ugly head.
Before I detail the common assumptions behind the arguments supporting English-only legislation, I'd like to show them in action in an anecdotal way with some artifacts pulled from my files and then extract from these three separate incidents what ties them together:
ITEM: John Hughes, an editorialist for The Christian Science Monitor, writes a piece entitled "Uniting the US with English." In it he praises such groups as U.S. ENGLISH for insuring that "the movement to require [English's] establishment as the sole official language [gains] momentum." If the precious position of English is not protected, "the danger is that the US will become an officially bilingual country" where "whole mini-societies will emerge conducting their business completely in a non-English tongue." The unifying strength of English should be "cherished and enshrined."4
ITEM: The New Hampshire House of Representatives' State-Federal Committee holds a hearing in January 1987, urging the New Hampshire delegates to the United States Congress "to support legislation designating English as the official language of the United States." Representative Mildred Ingram is "150% for the resolution" and feels that "if the foreigners don't want to learn the language, they can return to where they came from!" The measure is eventually shelved, as is a resolution to make English New Hampshire's official language. (However, in a recent legislative session, the Senate passed a bill to make English the official language of the state.)5
ITEM: I receive a letter in response to a radio commentary I do on why it is misguided to make English an official language. The writer declares that the movement to make English official "is a movement merely aimed to ensure a status with which this nation has been in accord for two centuries." We have "one language tradition" in this country, a tradition learned best by the sink-or-swim method forced on our immigrant ancestors. The present endangered condition of English is caused by "aggressive pro-Spanish language zealots" who threaten an "ancient and honorable tradition."
These assumptions fall roughly along three fault lines: tradition, culture, and education.
Each of these assumptions is weak in a number of ways.
Many Americans assume that English has somehow always been the dominant and preferred, the "official," language of the United States. But in fact English was a latecomer to the continent, having been preceded by several thousand Indian dialects and languages and, with the advent of Ponce de Leon in Florida in 1513, Spanish.6 The framers of the Constitution did not designate an official language, and this omission was, as Shirley Brice Heath has pointed out, a carefully planned political strategy.7 Why? One factor was the history colonists carried with them from England. Britain has never had an official language, and it took a great deal of time before English was recognized as the language of the British courts (in 1650, with "An Act Turning the Books of the Law and All Process and Proceedings of Justice, into English," and in 1731, when an "English for lawyers" law passed, mandating that court proceedings could not be in Latin or French).8 The colonists brought with them an ambiguous attitude toward an official language and recognized the divisiveness brought about when such official moves were made.
A second factor in the framers' minds was simply the political situation of the times. If rebellion against Great Britain was going to be successful, they needed the clearest communication within and among groups; this could only be done with a hands-off policy about language.9 The framers knew what they were doing. First, they didn't want to scare off new immigrants, necessary for the growth of the country, by a law which declared one language above all others. Second, the actual situation in the colonies would never have supported such a move. Dutch was spoken widely in New York, Swedish in Delaware, German in Pennsylvania, French in New England and in the Mississippi watershed (including New Orleans), and Spanish in Florida and the Southwest. Not to mention the diverse languages of Indians and the polyglot dialects of slaves imported from Africa and the Caribbean. A little known fact about the making of the Constitution is that the Continental Congress even invited the people of Quebec -- Francophones to the hilt -- to send a representative to the debate on independence.10 The framers obviously believed, for a number of historical and practical reasons, that it was unnecessary and undesirable to declare English the official language of the soon-to-be-created United States.
But this laissez faire attitude was motivated by more than just practical politics. It came from a belief, also carried from Britain, that the acquisition of English "was not a matter of Parliamentary statutes," as Frederick Mandabach has said, "but rather one of individual choice for socially-minded individuals."11 This was a sentiment voice by John Marshall when he said that the geographic and social mobility of its citizens would create "an identity of language through[out] the United States," not by law, but by individual choice.12 Under this national policy of no official language, states frequently published their laws in languages other than English during the early history of the republic. From 1805 to 1850, Pennsylvania published its statutes in German as well as English; Louisiana, in French, from 1804 to 1867; and many Indian laws were published in the various Indian languages by both the states and the federal government. There was very little discussion about whether all this linguistic diversity would erode a national identity; multilingualism was a given up until the Civil War.
The historical roots of the English-only movement are found more in the history of the United States after the Civil War than before it. Changes in the points of origin and religious faiths of new immigrants engendered strong distinctions between "us" (immigrants who had been in the United States for a while) and "them" (immigrants who were just arriving). A continuing war psychology -- from the Indian wars of the 1880s and 1890s to the invasion of Russia after World War I -- made the United States less tolerant of multilingualism and multiculturalism. The volatility of the economy after the Civil War and the movement from rural life to urban life put pressure on a displaced and mobile work force, and this competition for jobs made nativists argue that scarce jobs should go to "native" Americans rather than "foreigners."13 Language laws reflected this intolerance. Many laws were passed to prevent non-speakers of English from getting jobs, and 34 states in 1923 had laws forbidding school instruction in anything but English. For a number of reasons (including religious fears and a sentimental patriotism) the United States swung away from a tolerance, and even cultivation, of multilingualism in the period before the Civil War to a dichotomic sanctimony about who were "native" and who were "foreigners."14 One can hear echoes of this history when a Texas judge orders a Mexican-American woman to speak English to her daughter so that she could succeed in an English-speaking country, or when Patrick Buchanan at a news conference says that the country must make English the official language because "we have got to be one nation and one people again."15
It is more accurate to say, then, that the movement for English-only legislation is not a retrieval of a lost national purpose but a revival of a very ugly and very divisive last century. This is not to say that people who advocate English-only are modern versions of Know-Nothings, the KKK, or 100 Percenters (though some skirt rhetorically close to that heritage). There are legitimate concerns about language differences in the United States. But the movement for English-only laws is not a movement reinstating a violated heritage, since the heritage it believes it is preserving never existed. The only time English became an official language was when those who were already here wanted to keep out, or keep down, those were just arriving. In other words, English became an official language as an instrument of oppression and harassment.16
The history of Supreme Court and lower court decisions on language show this clearly. In 1923 the Supreme Court struck down laws in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Oregon which prohibited teaching in any language other than English in either public or private classrooms (Meyer v. Nebraska). Justice McReynolds wrote that
the protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue. Perhaps it would be highly advantageous if all had ready understanding of our ordinary speech, but this cannot be coerced by methods which conflict with the Constitution -- a desirable end cannot be promoted by a prohibited means.17
Other court decisions, such as Farrington v. Tokushige in 1927 and Lau v. Nichols in 1974, as well as in lower court decisions such as <Negrón v. New York in 1968, U.S. v. Texas in 1971, Portales v. Serha in 1974, and Rios v. Read in 1978, have directly or indirectly supported Americans' right to a language other than English.18 English-only laws would erase all these rights and in the process probably cause a great deal of havoc and dissension. I will come back to this point at the end of the essay. Suffice it to say that if American history has anything to say about English, it's that many Americans have had to be protected from patriots who wished to create a linguistic purity where none was, or is, needed.
This argument rests on two assumption: one, that people who speak a common language are somehow unified into a society or nation by that language; two, that people who do not speak a common language are somehow not unified as a society or nation. Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm perhaps said it best when said that English was a "social glue."19 Many cite Canada (more specifically, Quebec) as evidence of what bilingualism can do to a society, and infer from that that the declaration of English as the official language of the United States would save us from such conflicts.
This argument has no real substance to it. First, many societies speak a common language yet can scarcely be called unified. Northern Ireland is a good example, as was the United States during the Civil War. The presence of a common language does little to unify a society if that society is racked by other matters, such as religious difference or slavery. Second, many nations speak many languages and still retain a distinctive identity. Sweden has four official languages. Cameroon speaks English, French, and almost 200 tribal dialects. South Africa has 11 official languages. Many more things define a society or a nation than its language, and many societies define themselves by multilingualism rather than monolingualism.
Third, the example of Canada actually points out the opposite of what people think it says. The nastiness in Quebec over language -- which shall be dominant language, French or English? -- happened because a government wanted to make one language, French, official. It was not a problem of bilingualism but of forced monolingualism. It would seem, then, that the lesson learned from Quebec is that "either wholesale rejection of language rights on the one hand, or blanket recognition of languages as official on the other, is going to perpetuate divisiveness and resentment."20 In fact, this can be said of almost all linguistic hotspots cited by advocates of English-only laws: Belgium, Sri Lanka, India. Disunity and violence occur when languages are suppressed, not when they are promoted and honored.
Many people mean many things by the term "bilingualism."21 In the United States, it usually refers to two things: bilingual education in the schools and the fear that Spanish will overtake English as a dominant language in the United States. In referring to bilingual education, the argument is often made that it has separated students into language ghettos and that the only reasonable solution to this problem is returning to the "sink-or-swim," or immersion, method supposedly so successful with immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a version of history pushed by William Bennett, former secretary of the Department of Education.22
However, it was Bennett's own Department that showed that transitional methods (teaching children in their own language so as to ease them into a literacy with English) result in higher achievement than immersion. The study compared 4,000 students in kindergarten, 1st grade, and 3rd grade under three different program types: immersion classes, "early exit" or transitional bilingual education, and &$8220;late exit" or bilingual maintenance programs. First-year results of the four-year study showed that the larger the native language instruction component, the better the students performed in English. The English immersion students' performance was worst in English language, indicating that the greater the exposure to English, the poorer the students' performance. Because the findings apparently didn't support Bennett's hypotheses, the study was cancelled.23
A large body of research conducted over a number of years supports the study's conclusions.24 Yet these studies could be piled one on top of the other, and they would not touch what seems to be a core fear among English-only opponents of bilingual education and bilingualism in general: Hispanics, or more accurately, the fear "among the uninformed that Spanish is well on its way to superseding English as a common language in the United States."25 S.I. Hayakawa, founder of U.S. English and one of the forces behind the English-Only movement until his death in 1992, stated this quite clearly:
The ethnic chauvinism of the present Hispanic leadership is an unhealthy trend in present-day America. It threatens a division perhaps more ominous in the long run than the division between blacks and whites. Black and whites have problems enough with each other, to be sure, but they quarrel with each other in one language....But the present politically ambitious AHispanic Caucus" looks forward to a destiny for Spanish-speaking Americans separate from that of Anglo-, Italian-, Polish-, Greek-, Lebanese-, Chinese-, and Afro-Americans, and all the rest of us who rejoice in our ethnic diversity.
It is not without significance that pressure against English language legislation does not come from any immigrant group other than the Hispanic...The only people who have any quarrel with the English language are the Hispanics -- at least the Hispanic politicians and "bilingual" teachers and lobbying organizations. One wonders about the Hispanic rank and file. Are they all in agreement with their leadership? And what does it profit the Hispanic leadership if it gains power and fame, while 50 percent of the boys and girls of their communities, speaking little or no English, cannot make it through high school?26
Hayakawa is certainly right when he implies that Spanish is used extensively throughout the country, yet the facts don't support his belief that Spanish speakers wish to use Spanish exclusively or even supplant English with Spanish. A 1985 Rand Corporation Study found that 90% of the first generation of Mexican-Americans born in the United States were proficient in English; 50% of the second generation knew no Spanish.27 A study done by the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project showed that 75% of Hispanics over 65 speak English, as do 94% of the Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25.28 There simply is no "threat" of Spanish becoming a language co-equal with or stronger than English. As Isaura Santiago, who once headed bilingual education studies at Columbia University's Teachers College, said, "Immigrant parents invariably want their kids to learn English and learn it well."29
Moreover, what some people see as an Hispanic "take-over" is in fact an assimilation pattern not unlike what the French-Canadians went through (and are still going through) in New England. While many believe that immigrants to this country simply sank or swam in learning how to adapt to their adopted home, the truth is that assimilation into a foreign culture follows a fairly predictable path, especially when it concerns language. The first generation usually keeps the language of the home country. The second generation (the children of the first) often have a foot in both camps, speaking the "official" language outside the home and the "foreign" language inside the home. The third generation is almost exclusively monolingual, often rejecting the native language an antiquated or useless.
What makes for different rates of assimilation seems to be closeness to the mother country, which is why French-Canadians still have a strong French flavor to their Americanness and maintain institutions that serve their French-Canadian heritage (such as banks, fraternal associations, insurance companies, and schools). Hispanics are in the same close proximity to their homelands, and it's not surprising (nor is it any more dismaying than with the French-Canadians) that they retain much of the heritage they bring with them. What many now see as an Hispanic onslaught and overbearingness is more a matter of the pace of assimilation than of any stated goal of linguistic take-over of the United States.30 In fact, English-only legislation would hobble the usually strong assimilative power of American society by insisting on unnecessary and corrosive social and linguistic divisions. And ironically, it might also reduce the ability of English to spread beyond American borders by restricting the flow of people to and from their places of origin.31
* * * * *
The three main arguments of the English-Only contingent don't stand up to analysis. They're dangerous arguments because they're frivolous and rigid, and they reflect less an understanding of language than a desire to reinstate some imagined America that never really, or only barely, existed. But perhaps the most damaging assumption in the English-Only argument is that English-only legislation would (in the words of my letter-writer) "merely...ensure a status with which this nation has been in accord for two centuries" and that English-only laws would not damage any language traditions in the United States. All versions of an English Language Amendment (ELA) that have been introduced in the United States House of Representatives or Senate since Hayakawa's 1981 document suffer from the same deficiency: in their attempt to make English "the official language of the United States" (to use Hayakawa's preamble), none of them would be benign in their actions. The use of interpreters in physical and mental examinations of aliens seeking entry into the United States, court interpreters, native-language speakers in migrant and community health centers, the use of dual-language labels on such products as pesticides -- all of this would probably go by the wayside. Any ELA, no matter how worded, will deny people rights won through the legitimate exercise of democracy and the courts, not concessions simply granted to appease what Representative Mildred Ingram of the New Hampshire legislature once called "a bunch of agitators...who are too lazy to learn our language [and who] enjoy our welfare system to the hilt."32
But even if an ELA could be so constructed as to be free of all self-contradiction and insure that rights would be protected, there still remains a substantial unanswered question: Which English is going to be the official English? It seems to be an automatic assumption there is in fact a uniform English that speakers of English speak. That is an assumption that warrants some digging into.
Well-known screed-makers like Edwin Newman, John Simon, and William Safire have railed against what they see as the deterioration of the English language. These people, and others, have designated themselves as the "language police" of the culture.33 But all one needs to do is read a book like Jim Quinn's American Tongue in Cheek to get a proper dose of perspective on the matter. As he says in his introduction:
For some people the rules of good English are permanent and immutable. Grammar is as fixed and settled a subject as addition and subtraction....The rules, got from who knows where, first promulgated by who knows who and who knows why -- the rules are the rules.34
Quinn's comment highlights part of the assumption behind English-only legislation, that there is a Platonic English, an ideal form that trafficks little, if at all, with the riot of demotics surrounding it. It is this English that will be made official, an English that sees "different thanᰵ as barbaric and "hopefully" as the linguistic equivalent of cancer.
But such an English is a chimera, a mirage. It is more proper to say, not "the English language," but "the Englishes." The English language can never be standardized in the way Latin was, and because of this it cannot serve the same conservative function that Latin did. A small example can demonstrate this. In a city where I used to live one section used the word "tonic" for a soft drink, and another section used "pop." Which is right? Obviously both. Which would be included in the ambit of the official English? Who would decide?
The problem becomes bigger as one moves outside the city limits. G.W. Hunt, in a review of Robert Hendrickson's American Talk: The Words and Ways of American Dialects,35 points out the multitude of words for huge sandwiches on split loaves of French or Italian bread:
Which one would be official? The question is absurd, as is any possible answer to it: can a case really be made for, say, "hoagies" over "torpedoes," or for any other word (possibly manufactured by a computer program, as with "Exxon") that would substitute for all of them?
If this sort of taxonomic problem is not daunting enough (it is, after all, possible that Newman or Simon or Safire would come up with a plausible answer), it will become properly daunting if we look at the English language both historically and internationally. In the Introduction to The Story of English, the book published to accompany the PBS program, the authors accurately point out that a more proper title for their book would have been The English Languages because language is "always in flux, and...its form and expression are beyond the control of school-teachers or governments."36 Because English is a "continuum of speech," no one variety of it can be said to constitute the English that certain groups want to enshrine. Of course, as someone once said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, and if the English-only advocates gather a large enough contingent we may find so-called Standard English (itself merely a point on the long continuum of Englishes) garrisoned in our lives. But such linguistic imperialism would never accomplish what it wants because the efforts of people to use language will always outrun official prohibitions, the way peasant English outlasted imperial Norman French, the way Sniglets will pass by any dictionary of contemporary usage. English and its speakers have never been quiet or staid enough to be captured by the embalmers, not since Daniel Defoe proposed an academy to police the language (a verb, by the way, from Mencken), not since Jonathan Swift backed him up in "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue,&$8221; not since John Adams proposed to the Continental Congress the creation of a "public institution for refining, correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language," not since Hayakawa tried to freeze-dry the language in an ELA. As Samuel Johnson said in the preface to his dictionary, anyone who tries to "embalm his language" should be justly derided as a fool and a bully.37
And this historical argument, centered on inevitable and unquenchable change and experiment in the language, takes on even more power if one adds to it what is happening with English throughout the world today. One could, with only a little violence to reality, state there is a fairly uniform American English spoken by most of the citizens of the United States. But one can't say that this English is the English that people are speaking in different parts of the world. Irene Wong, in an article discussing what sorts of English people in the non-Western worlds speak, saw three models: Native Speaker (the complete system of the language), Nuclear English (a simplified variant for most communicative needs), and Utilitarian English (a variant which is more instrumental than Nuclear English).38 Braj B. Kachru makes distinctions between native speakers of the language, speakers who use it as a second language, and speakers who use it as a foreign language.39 These three groups, and the three models proposed by Wong, are also nuanced by a locale's peculiar history and culture. On an international scale, any particular English language is a dense matrix of history, commerce, local customs, technology, and inventiveness. The English language becomes less of a body of sacred syntax and vocabulary than a rough scaffolding from which are built various and thrilling (and non-standardized) architectures of meaning. The absurdity of talking about creating an official English is even more insistently absurd when seen from Malaysia, India, New Zealand, or Africa.
One last point needs to be mentioned about an "official" English. Advocates of English-only laws often say that they are not trying to eradicate any other language but are simply stating that English should be &$8220;the only language of official use." But the "official use" of English has been a standing subject of ridicule and criticism because it often obfuscates instead of clarifies and makes official business tedious and haphazard (if not completely useless). What are we to make of such circumlocutions as "update the revenue mechanism" for tax increase, "fallout sojourn in the countryside" for an evacuation, "pavement deficiency" for pothole, or "hard chilled" and not "frozen" for chickens at 26 degrees Fahrenheit?40 It is not changes in the English language or "competition" from foreign languages that poses the greatest threat to English but, as Robert MacNeil has said, the "flatulent, flabby, flaccid English that assails us from the pens and tongues and typewriters of so many decently educated Americans."41 The English of "official use" can be a vigorous tool for disinformation and impediment. Organizations like U.S. English cannot guarantee that English-only legislation will make English used in an "official" capacity clear or undeceitful; their assurance that it can be is at best a red herring, at worst an unworkable dream.
What becomes clearer to me as I do more reading about English-only sentiments is that the essential battle is not about language at all but about what kind of place certain people think the United States ought to be, and what kind of place certain people in the United States ought to have. The battle is laced with a strong, and sometimes aggressive, nostalgia, best expressed through the metaphor of the "melting pot." For many debaters, the "melting pot." is a shorthand for a certain historical belief in how immigrants shed their foreign ways for American ways. In this model all immigrants gladly and readily gave up the customs of their homelands, almost greedily assumed American attitudes, swam mightily in the confusing sea of English, and worked hard to make themselves trustworthy natives. It's not relevant that it didn't happen that way; the archetype of the "good immigrant" is often the historical touchstone of the English-only movement. And many English-only proponents are upset that certain groups are not following this "melting pot." route, that groups such as Hispanics are seeing bilingual education, as Jose Cardenas has pointed out, as a "socio-economic political issues" and are fighting the political fights necessary to obtain what they want.42 This model of the proper method of assimilation for foreigners, this mix of nostalgia and admonition, was neatly voiced by Connecticut State Senator Thomas Scott when he pushed in 1987 to make English the official language of his state:
Migration is a voluntary act, and the concept of the melting pot, long the envy of the world, did not come about through our nation's carelessness about the greatest unifier in the history of mankind, a common language. In America, that language is English, and it needs and deserves to be recognized as such.43
But the English language is not the "social glue" of America, and English-only laws are a crude way to make "new immigrants" look and act like "old immigrants." The English language is simply a magnificent servant for the real connective tissue of American culture: a shared belief and commitment to democracy and freedom of equality and opportunity. English-only laws would only compromise that commitment and contradict our own premises as a country.
(March 1996)