Published: 9:05am, 27 May 2015Updated: 11:55am, 22 Feb 2019
Some countries (e.g. China, Spain, France) have official languages and academies that define the "standard.” The United States has never had such a policy, though over half the states, under pressure since the 1980s, have declared an “official language.” This has been pushed by an anti-immigrant agenda. And now the xenophobic break-it-all-so-fast-that-nobody-can-keep-track regime is, by executive order, declaring English an official language.
This will mean that someone needing medical assistance won't be provided a translator; that children whose home language is not English won't be guaranteed help in learning English; and that our strength as a nation without an ethnonationalist core will be diminished.
Research shows that all migrants recognize the need to learn English. The children of migrants do learn it. A Cato Institute study shows that "today's immigrants are more likely to learn English than immigrants in the beginning of the last century.”
The early colonists considered making German the official language of the brand-new United States. They considered Hebrew, French, Greek, though maybe not entirely seriously. We have been debating this ever since, but with extra zeal since the 1980s. Linguist James Crawford has been writing about this for decades, saying in 1997,
“It would mean one thing for a small ‘unilingual’ country—Iceland, let's say—to declare an official language as an emblem of national pride. It would mean quite another for the United States to do so, where the political impact would be to restrict and denigrate minority tongues that already are subordinate to English.”
James Crawford
Denigration is precisely the goal.
In 2000 his book explains the matter even more starkly, titling it At War with Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety.
Human beings can learn many languages well, and most people in the world—though, famously, not Americans—know more than one.
What do you call someone who knows three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who knows two languages?
Bilingual
What do you call someone who knows one language?
American
There is no danger of English being dethroned from its current singular position as a world language without historical precedent. In higher education worldwide—in South Korea and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere—English is the medium of instruction, even without any such declaration (though there are also critics).
We don't need a law like this. It is just about the cruelty.
