<h2>Does the United States Need a Language Policy?</h2>
<h3>by Bernard Spolsky, Professor Emeritus, Bar-Ilan University, Israel<br>2010 Ferguson Fellow, Center for Applied Linguistics</h3>
<div align="left">
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<p>Some nations include a language policy in their constitution. For
example, France declared French as its official language in amending
its constitution before it joined the European Community in 1992, and
many Arab countries combine a statement about Arabic as their national
language alongside their proclamation of Islam as their official
religion. More than half of national constitutions include one or more
language clauses establishing national or official languages (Jones,
2001). Sixty-three countries name one official language; in addition,
there are seven former Soviet republics that establish a single state
language and another eight states with one official language and one or
more national languages. <br>
<br>
Other countries have established language laws outside of their
constitutions. For example, New Zealand, where English is dominant, has
laws making Maori and New Zealand Sign Language official languages
along with English. Israel maintains Hebrew and Arabic as the only
official languages. Mexico has a law requiring public announcements to
be in correct Spanish. The Netherlands requires Dutch for administration
but grants some limited functions to Friesian. Norway (whose
constitution is written in Danish) requires official documents to be in
two varieties of Norwegian: Bokmäl and Nynorsk. Puerto Rico, a U.S.
territory, has a law making English and Spanish official (Leclerc,
1994).</p>
<h3>History of Language Policies, Laws, and Attitudes in the United States</h3>
<p>The U.S. Constitution says nothing about language (though
it asserts freedom of speech in the First Amendment). During and after
the war of independence, the issue of a national language did come up
but was left without any formal decision. Independence from British
rule did not lead to seeking a new national language, although there
were later moves to mark formally the distinctions of an American
language, like the spellings that Noah Webster proposed (Weinstein,
1982). Marshall (1986, p. 11) has no doubt: “The Founding Fathers of
our country did not choose to have an official language precisely
because they felt language to be a matter of individual choice.” Recent
efforts by U.S. English to make English the official language have so
far been firmly resisted, so their efforts have been redirected to
resolutions of city governments and state legislatures. </p>
<p>U.S. language policy has to be sought beyond the
Constitution. During the First World War, xenophobic feelings bolstered
by war-induced nationalism focused not just on learning English but
also, driven by anti-German sentiment, on discarding allegiances other
than to the United States. German books were removed from libraries,
German theatres were closed, German music was banned, and the teaching
of German stopped in schools (Pavlenko, 2002). Thirty states passed
laws obliging foreign-born residents who could not speak English to
attend evening schools, and thirty-four states made English the only
language of instruction in public schools. By the end of the period,
earlier positive attitudes toward bilingualism had been replaced by a
widespread belief that it had little to contribute and that the
teaching of foreign languages in school was a bad thing. Bilingualism
became associated with inferior intelligence and lack of patriotism.
Pavlenko believes that by the 1930s, American ideology was firmly
monolingual. </p>
<p>But there were exceptions. Even before the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, U.S. courts had on a number of occasions defended the
rights of speakers of languages other than English. In 1923, the
Supreme Court ruled in<em> Meyer v. Nebraska</em> (1923) that while the
states could require English as the medium of instruction in
tax-supported schools, they could not do this for private schools. In
1926, when the Philippines were still a U.S. territory, the U.S.
Supreme Court found that a Philippine Bookkeeping Act that prohibited
the keeping of accounts in languages other than English, Spanish, or
Philippine dialects violated the Philippine Bill of Rights, which
Congress had patterned after the U.S. Constitution. </p>
<p>In 1958, in response to the launch of the Soviet <em>Sputnik</em>
satellites, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which
provided encouragement and financial support for the teaching of
Russian and Chinese and other critical languages (Urban, 2010). During
the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Congress provided
funding for bilingual education programs that would teach immigrant
pupils in their home language while they were learning the English that
all agreed they needed in order to enjoy citizenship. In a comment
that attests to his years of experience as an H.M. (Her Majesty’s)
Inspector of Schools in England and Wales, E. G. Lewis (1980, p. 369)
remarks that “Policy is decided and determined by those who,
reluctantly or willingly, are prepared to pay for it.” This is what
made the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 such a significant decision in
the history of U.S. language management. For 34 years, this law
provided funding for educational programs that taught students in
languages other than English.</p>
<h3>Current Status of Language Policies, Laws, and Activities in the United States</h3>
<p>The Bilingual Education Act expired on January 8, 2002,
dying a quiet death. (See Crawford, 2002, for an obituary of the law.)
Similar state programs have been under attack from English-only
activists (Brauer, 2006). In addition, U.S. education is slowly ending
or downgrading its few foreign language programs: Many universities and
colleges no longer require a foreign language, and elementary and
secondary schools have moved their efforts to preparing students for
standardized tests in English and mathematics as a result of the 2002
federal education law, No Child Left Behind. The law’s accountability
measures, which focus exclusively on English and mathematics, have led
many schools to drop foreign language classes and other nontested
subjects. Rhodes and Pufahl (2010) report that the teaching of French,
German, Japanese, and Russian decreased at the elementary and secondary
level between 1997 and 2008, and a third of the schools they surveyed
that had foreign language programs reported that they had been
negatively affected by No Child Left Behind. </p>
<p>One exception to the decrease in foreign language
instruction involves the defense and intelligence establishment. Just
as during the first years of World War II the Army was persuaded to
start programs to teach languages to recruits who would be sent
overseas (Angiolillo, 1947; Spolsky, 1995), so in the years since 9/11
the defense and intelligence communities have seen fit to undertake
major efforts to make sure that the United States will no longer have
just one Pashto speaker working for the National Security Agency and
none for the CIA when it wants to know what is happening in Afghanistan
(Powers, 2002), and that soldier interpreters will be available when
forces are sent overseas. The goals of the Defense Language
Transformation Roadmap (U.S. Department of Defense, 2005), developed to
meet the need for greatly increased language capacity in the defense
community, are ambitious: language policy officers at all levels,
competence in foreign languages for all officers, the strengthening of
the Defense Language Institute as the major U.S. language teaching
institution. These defense-related activities are needed to make up for
the lack of foreign language instruction in the educational
establishment. These activities even include the establishment of model
K–16 language programs that take heritage speakers of Chinese and
Arabic to high levels of language competence while they are developing
professional skills in science, engineering, and other fields (Spolsky,
2001). </p>
<p>These activities are of course open to criticism—for
example, that we are teaching foreign languages so that we can defend
ourselves or invade other nations, or that we are emphasizing practical
skill and missing out on the cultural values that come from a
humanities approach that would open our students to other rich
literatures and knowledge (Parker, 1961). We also are continuing to
treat foreignness as inimical and foreign languages as enemy territory,
even when they are the heritage cultures of our own immigrants. </p>
<h3>The Role of English</h3>
<p>This limited perspective on languages is not restricted
to the United States. In many national educational systems, the teaching
of English dominates and has replaced instruction in other languages
(Lambert, 2006). The European Community has an official policy calling
for schools to teach two foreign languages, intending that English will
not be the only one, but with all their efforts, they find that this
policy is seldom implemented with any energy. In Europe, over half
claim they speak a language other than their mother tongue. For most,
this language is English. The motivation is obvious: Grin (2001) has
shown that in Switzerland, a person with skills in English earns up to
30% more than someone with matched qualifications apart from English.
So it is understandable that three quarters want their children to
learn English for the increased job opportunities it provides.</p>
<p>In Asian and African nations, English similarly
dominates and drowns out calls for teaching other useful and valuable
languages. In much of the world, speakers of endangered languages are
moving through a two-step process, first to drop their own heritage
language for the locally dominant official language and then to add
English, which they believe will give them access to better jobs and
economic opportunities.</p>
<p>English of course dominates in the United States as
well, even in immigrant communities. Research shows that within two or
three generations, most non-English-speaking immigrants to the United
States will have lost or almost lost their heritage languages.
Ironically, while the number of residents speaking a language other than
English at home is rising, the shift to English is proceeding even
faster. The causes of this language loss are complex. Most researchers
see the major reasons as related to the power and international status
of English in the media and the economy. </p>
<h3>The Need for Language Policies in the United States</h3>
<p>In setting out the nature of U.S. national security needs
for languages and international expertise, Brecht and Rivers (2000)
cite the 1988 amendment to Title VI of the Higher Education Act:</p>
<blockquote>The security, stability, and economic
vitality of the United States in a complex, global era depends upon
American experts in and citizens knowledgeable about world regions,
foreign languages and international affairs, as well as upon a strong
research base in the areas.</blockquote>
<p>Brecht and Rivers (2000) also provide a long list of
countries and the language knowledge that offers access to each country
and its culture. Such a huge task cannot be dealt with by the kind of
programs developed during World War II to teach language to soldiers.
Existing government language programs such as those offered by the
Defense Language Institute and the Foreign Service Institute meet a
small portion of the need, inadequate both in numbers and proficiency.
(It has only recently been realized that overseas postings require
level 4 rather than level 3 proficiency, although the latter is the
highest level aimed at in most programs.) </p>
<p>Fluent speakers could be produced much more effectively
through enriched heritage language programs. The capacity available
has been suggested: “Census statistics for the year 1999 indicate that
10% of the American population, a total of 25,831,000 people, was
foreign-born. This is the largest number of foreign-born residents in
U.S. history” (UCLA Steering Committee, 2000). Brecht and Ingold (1998)
are more specific: “More than 150 languages other than English are
used in this country.” But most of this capability is currently wasted.
Wiley (2007, p. 79) argues that a language policy “based on the
current and historical reality of multilingualism in this country”
could be valuable. But the dominant status of English, together with
the power of overt and covert policies supporting English only, leads to
a dramatic loss of heritage language knowledge in the United States
(UCLA Steering Committee, 2000). What kind of language policy could
reverse this loss? Fishman (2001) showed how difficult is the task for
individual languages. A monolingual English-only hegemony seems to
dominate American society. However, the General Social Survey
(Robinson, Brecht, & Rivers, 2006; Robinson, Rivers, & Brecht,
2006) suggested that while Americans believed that English should be
their official language, three quarters agreed that children should
learn other languages in high school, 65% that foreign languages are as
important as learning math and science, and 67% that English is not
threatened by languages spoken by immigrants. Thus, there may well be
an ideological base for the encouragement of heritage languages, even
though it is not revealed in current political support for foreign
language instruction, as seen in the general exclusion of languages
from both Republican and Democrat education planning. </p>
<h3>The Model of Europe</h3>
<p>How might we change this damaging neglect? Europe offers
one model of multilingualism. What is critically different from the
United States is the high proportion of people with multilingual
skills. As mentioned earlier, more than half of Europeans claim to
speak more than one language, and three quarters want their children to
learn English. Given this, it is no wonder that the Council of Europe
was able a quarter of a century ago to start building its major program
for encouraging foreign language learning that has now culminated in
the Common Framework (Council of Europe, 2001), which provides a common
basis for the development of language syllabi, curriculum guidelines,
exams, textbooks, and so forth across Europe. </p>
<p>Three points are relevant about the situation in Europe: Much of the effort has gone into developing a <em>second </em>foreign
language, with English so well entrenched as the first. Second, the
Council of Europe programs focused on foreign language teaching for
native speakers of a country’s official language; they left the urgent
issues of immigrants and minority language speakers to others. And
third, the Council is now in its declining days, without funds, and it
is too early to be sure that the European Union will carry on these
basic programs.</p>
<p>But the European Union did tackle a second side of
language policy: the concern for minority heritage languages. This
followed from its interests in human rights, an ideal mechanism to let a
European supranational organization involve itself in the affairs of
its members. The programs have been modest, and the decisions on what
constitutes a European minority language were made with a great deal of
sensitivity to national concerns (e.g., Romany, the language of the
Roma—formerly known as Gypsies—gains little; Occitan, a regional
language spoken in the south of France, is not named at all). But human
rights did play a major role in supporting moves for the official
recognition of heritage languages and the reversal of language shift
activities to prevent the loss of endangered languages. The improving
status of Basque, Catalan, Welsh, Breton, Friesian, and some other
languages is an important result of these efforts. However, even as the
European Union takes over Council of Europe foreign language interests,
there is no evidence that they see the connections between the three
different kinds of language programs: foreign languages, heritage
languages, and immigrant languages. </p>
<p>The only amalgam of these three ultimately related
issues was in the temporarily successful alliance that Joe Lo Bianco
formed that led to the establishment of Language Australia (Lo Bianco,
1987), a progressive multilingual policy unfortunately replaced after a
few years by a program emphasizing English and later by a call for
teaching Pacific languages like Chinese and Indonesian (Lo Bianco &
Wickert, 2001). Elsewhere, the interests of these three areas are
perceived as competing, and the mutual advantages of joining in a
single policy are ignored. </p>
<h3>Principles for U.S. Language Policy</h3>
<p>What is needed is to bring together the issues of
foreign, heritage, and immigrant languages and start to build a unified
policy that will include heritage languages, national security, and the
traditional values of learning other languages and cultures. Basic to a
U.S. language policy must be a number of principles. The first is the
development of policies to ensure that there is no linguistic
discrimination—that languages and speakers of specific languages are not
ignored in the provision of civic services. As Wiley (2007) suggests,
immigrant language policies need provision for both “protective rights”
from discrimination as well as “rights of access” to instruction. The
second principle is the provision of adequate programs for teaching
English to all, native-born or immigrant, old or young. The third is
the development of respect both for multilingual capacity, the
cognitive advantages of which have been shown (Bialystok, 2001), and
for diverse individual languages. Arising out of this will be
approaches that enhance the status and enrich the knowledge of heritage
and community languages. Fourth will be a multi-branched language
capacity program that</p>
<ul class="list"><li>strengthens and integrates a variety of language education programs, </li><li>connects heritage programs with advanced training programs,</li><li>builds on heritage and immersion and
overseas-experience approaches to constantly replenish a cadre of
efficient multilingual citizens capable of professional work using
their multilingual skills, and</li><li>provides rich and satisfying language instruction that
leads to a multilingual population with knowledge of and respect for
other languages and cultures.</li></ul>
<h3>References</h3>
<p class="reference">Angiolillo, P. F. (1947). <em>Armed Forces’ foreign language teaching: Critical evaluation and implications</em>. New York: S. F. Vanni.</p>
<p class="reference">Bialystok, E. (2001). <em>Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition</em>. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.</p>
<p class="reference">Brauer, R. (2006). <em>The strange death of liberalism</em>. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.</p>
<p class="reference">Brecht, R. D., & Ingold, C. W. (1998). <em>Tapping a national resource: Heritage languages in the United States</em> (Position paper). Washington DC: National Foreign Language Center.</p>
<p class="reference">Brecht, R. D., & Rivers, W. P. (2000). <em>Language
and national security in the 21st century: The role of the Title
VI/Fulbright-Hays in supporting national language capacity</em>. Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt.</p>
<p class="reference">Council of Europe. (2001). <em>Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment</em>. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.</p>
<p class="reference">Crawford, J. (2002). <em> The Bilingual Education Act, 1968-2002: An obituary</em>. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.languagepolicy.net/books/AEL/Crawford_BEA_Obituary.pdf">http://www.languagepolicy.net/books/AEL/Crawford_BEA_Obituary.pdf</a></p>
<p class="reference">Fishman, J. A. (Ed.). (2001). <em>Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: A 21st century perspective</em>. Clevedon, Avon, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters.</p>
<p class="reference">Grin, F. (2001). English as economic value: Facts and fallacies. <em>World Englishes, 20</em>(1), 65-78.</p>
<p class="reference">Jones, J. P. (2001, 2006). Constitution finder. Retrieved from <a href="http://confinder.richmond.edu/">http://confinder.richmond.edu/</a></p>
<p class="reference">Lambert, R. D. (2006). Foreign language teaching policy. In K. Brown (Ed.), <em>Encyclopedia of languages and linguistics</em> (2nd ed., pp. 555-558). Oxford: Elsevier.</p>
<p class="reference">Leclerc, J. (1994). <em>Recueil des législations linguistiques dans le monde</em> (Collection of language laws in the world). Quebec, Canada: Centre internationale de recherche en aménagement linguistique.</p>
<p class="reference">Lewis, E. G. (1980). <em>Bilingualism and bilingual education: a comparative study.</em> Albuquerque and Oxford: University of New Mexico Press and Pergamon.</p>
<p class="reference">Lo Bianco, J. (1987). <em>National policy on languages</em>. Canberra, Australia: Australian Government Publishing Service.</p>
<p class="reference">Lo Bianco, J., & Wickert, R. (Eds.). (2001). <em>Australian policy activism in language and literacy</em>. Canberra, Australia: Language Australia.</p>
<p class="reference">Marshall, D. F. (1986). The question of an official language: Language rights and the English Language Amendment. <em>International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 60,</em> 7-75.</p>
Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
<p class="reference">Parker, W. R. (1961). <em>The national interest and foreign languages</em> (3rd ed.). Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.</p>
<p class="reference">Pavlenko, A. (2002). “We have room
for but one language here”: Language and national identity in the U.S.
at the turn of the 20th century.<em> Multilingua, 21</em>(2/3), 163-196</p>
<p class="reference">Powers, T. (2002, January 17). The trouble with the CIA. <em>The New York Review of Books, 49</em>(1). Retrieved from <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/">http://www.nybooks.com/</a>articles/archives/2002/jan/17/the-trouble-with-the-cia/?page=1</p>
<p class="reference">Rhodes, N., & Pufahl, I. (2010). <em>Foreign language teaching in U.S. schools: Results of a national survey</em>. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.</p>
<p class="reference">Robinson, J. P., Brecht, R. D., &
Rivers, W. P. (2006). Speaking foreign languages in the United States:
Correlates, trends, and possible consequences. <em>Modern Language Journal, 90</em>(4), 457-472.</p>
<p class="reference">Robinson, J. P., Rivers, W. P., &
Brecht, R. D. (2006). Demographic and sociopolitical predictors of
American attitudes towards foreign language policy. <em>Language Policy, 5</em>(4), 419-440.</p>
<p class="reference">Spolsky, B. (1995). Behind the ASTP myth. In G. H. Richins & R. K. Belnap (Eds.), <em>Selected
papers from the proceedings of the twentieth annual symposium of the
Deseret Language and Linguistics Society, 3-4 March 1994</em> (pp. 119-124). Provo, UT: Deseret Language and Linguistics Society.</p>
<p class="reference">Spolsky, B. (2001). Heritage languages and national security: An ecological view. In S. J. Baker (Ed.), <em>Language policy: Lessons from global models</em> (pp. 103-114). Monterey, CA: Monterey Institute of International Studies.</p>
<p class="reference">UCLA Steering Committee. (2000).
Heritage language research priorities conference report, University of
California, Los Angeles September 21-23, 2000. <em>Bilingual Research Journal, 24</em>(4), 465-474.</p>
<p class="reference">Urban, W. J. (2010). <em>More than science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. </em>Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.</p>
<p class="reference">U.S. Department of Defense. (2005). <em>Defense language transformation roadmap. </em>Retrieved from <a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050330roadmap.pdf">http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050330roadmap.pdf</a></p>
<p class="reference">Weinstein, B. (1982). Noah Webster and the diffusion of linguistic innovations for political purposes. <em>International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 38,</em> 85-108.</p>
<p class="reference">Wiley, T. G. (2007). Immigrant language minorities in the United States. In M. Hellinger & A. Pauwels (Eds.), <em>Handbook of language and communication: Diversity and change</em> (pp. 53-85). Berlin, Germany, and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.</p>
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