Language always has its political dimension, as Orwell pointed out to us. Witness the New Hampshire House's recent debate on a resolution encouraging Congress to make English the official language. It brought out the usual crowd of know- nothingists, civil rights proponents, and illogical arguments, such as Rep. Ingram saying that immigrants who didn't learn English were lazy welfare cheats. This debate, to use that term loosely, has happened before in American history whenever the natives fear they're losing privileges to the "foreigners." I'm glad the resolution was later defeated in committee.
If I had my way I would draft a resolution stating that Americans should learn at least, say, three new languages during their lives, especially non-Western languages, such as Chinese and Navaho. I would do this not simply for the cultural diversity it would bring but also because of the very nature of language itself: knowing only a single language restricts us to a very narrow view of the world because, in a real sense, we can only know what that language allows us to know.
A generation ago two linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, theorized that language determined a people's culture, not the other way around. To them, people used language to divvy up the world into what the speakers of the language would then call "reality." Another way of saying this is that we can only know what we have words for, and that what we call "culture" or "reality" is a highly filtered version of the world. It is not the truth, only one possibility among many truths.
Thus English, because of how it's structured, in a sense "allows" only a certain kind of reality. For instance, because we must always have nouns activate verbs, we usually see things in terms of cause-and-effect (which is why science is so popular with Western culture). The Navaho and Hopi languages, however, are much more holistic, seeing the world as one large "verb" which is continually happening (which is why quantum physics would be better expressed in Hopi rather than English).
The upshot of all this is that the more languages we know fluently, the more we have available to us different ways of seeing the world. The more ways we see the world the less prone we might be to wanting to ravage it, or restrict it to certain select groups (such as English-speaking legislators from Acworth). Again, Orwell was right. The purpose of Newspeak, the language he created for 1984, was "to make all other modes of thought impossible." With "official" English we will only be able to have "official" thoughts - that is not what liberty, and supposedly what the United States, is all about.
Adult Illiteracy
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