In plain English: Making it official
Charles Krauthammer
Linguistic culture: Growing up (as I did) in the province of Quebec,
you learn not just the joys but also the perils of bilingualism. A
separate national identity, revolving entirely around "Francophonie,"
became a raging issue that led to social unrest, terrorism, threats of
separation and a referendum that came within hair's breadth of breaking
up Canada.
Canada, of course, had no choice about bilingualism. It is a country
created of two nations at its birth, and has ever since been trying to
cope with that inherently divisive fact.
The U.S., by contrast blessed with a single common language for two
centuries, seems blithely gratuitously to be ready to import
bilingualism with all its attendant divisiveness and antagonisms. One of
the major reasons for America's great success as the world's first
"universal nation," for its astonishing and unmatched capacity for
assimilating immigrants, has been that an automatic part of
acculturation was the acquisition of English.
And yet during the great immigration debate now raging in Congress,
the people's representatives cannot make up their minds whether the
current dominance of English should be declared a national asset, worthy
of enshrinement in law.
The Senate could not bring itself to declare English the country's
"official language." The best it could do was pass an amendment to the
Immigration Bill tepidly declaring English the "national language." Yet
even that was too much for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who
called that resolution "racist."
Less hyperbolic opponents point out that granting special official
status to English is simply unnecessary: American has been accepting
foreign-language-speaking immigrants forever-Brooklyn is so polyglot it
is a veritable Babel-and yet we've done just fine. What's the great
worry about Spanish?
The worry is this. Polyglot is fine. When immigrants, like those in
Brooklyn, are members of a myriad of linguistic communities, each tiny
and discrete, there is no threat to the common culture. No immigrant
presumes to make the demand that the State grant special status to his
language.
He may speak it in the street and proudly teach it to his children,
but he knows that his future and certainly theirs lie inevitable in
learning English as the gateway to American life.
But all of that changes when you have an enormous, linguistically
monoclonal immigration as we do today from Latin America. Then you get
Brooklyn's successful Babel but Canada's restive Quebec. Monoclonal
immigration is new for the U.S., and it changes things radically.
If at the turn of the 20th century, Ellis Island had greeted teeming
masses speaking not 50 languages but just, say, German, America might
not have enjoyed the same success at assimilation and national unity
that it has.
Today's monoclonal linguistic culture is far from hypothetical.
Growing rapidly through immigration, it creates large communities - in
some places already majorities - so overwhelmingly Spanish speaking
that, in time, they may quite naturally demand the rights and official
recognitions for Spanish that French has in French - speaking Quebec.
That would not be the end of the world - Canada is a decent place -
but the beginning of a new one for the U.S., a world far more
complicated and fraught with division. History has blessed America with
all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism.
But it has also blessed the country, because of the accident of its
origins, with a linguistic unity that brings a critically needed
cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America.
Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call
the desire to retain it "racist."
I speak three languages. My late father spoke nine. When he became a
naturalised American in midcentury, it never occurred to him to demand
of his new and beneficent land that whenever its government had business
with him - tax forms, court proceedings, ballot boxes - that it should
be required to communicate in French, his best language, rather than
English, his last and relatively weakest.
English is the U.S.'s national and common language. But that may
change over time unless it changes its assimilation norms. Making
English the official language is the first step toward establishing
those norms. "Official" means the language of the Government and its
institutions. "Official" makes clear the country's expectations of
acculturation.
"Official" means that every citizen, upon entering America's more
sacred political space, the voting booth, should minimally be able to
identify the words President and vice President and country commissioner
and judge. The immigrant, of course, has the right to speak whatever he
wants. But he must understand that when he enters the U.S., swears
allegiance and accept its bounty, he undertakes to join its civic
culture in English.
(Courtesy Time) |