<div dir="ltr"><h1 itemprop="headline">Declaring an official language in the United States is unnecessary—and un-American</h1>
<img itemprop="image" alt="" title="A sign displayed at a US polling station features seven languages.">
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The American way of life is alive and well. <span class="featured-image-credit">(Reuters/Stringer)</span>
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<h5>Written by</h5>
<a href="http://qz.com/author/jakeqz/" class="author-name">Jake Flanagin</a>
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<h5>Obsession</h5>
<a href="http://qz.com/on/language/">Language</a>
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<span class="timestamp" itemprop="datePublished">August 04, 2015</span>
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<p class="annotatable">On July 31, Carlos Steven Baez was enjoying a
meal with his mother at a Southern California IHOP when an older white
woman dining nearby overheard them conversing in Spanish.</p>
<p class="annotatable">“We speak English here,” she scolded <a href="https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=532661783550190&fref=nf">as a stunned Baez filmed</a>. “Go back to Spain.”</p>
<p class="annotatable">“You can’t be doing that,” Baez replied. “That’s racist.”</p>
<p class="annotatable">The woman then launched into a nonsensical yet
seemingly well-rehearsed denunciation of bilingualism—linking it to
Nazism and Stalinism while name-dropping every autocrat from Hitler to
Castro. “We want English in the United States,” she said. “We have
freedom of speech … we want that freedom.”</p>
<p class="annotatable">Though clearly not representative of most
Americans, this woman is hardly the first to conflate American patriotic
identity (as symbolized by a superficial understanding of “freedom” and
“liberty”) with policies mandating English-only communication.
Geopolitical history demonstrates the authoritarian bent of one-language
policies, as well as their inability to produce greater nationalistic
cohesion, as is so often their stated purpose.</p>
<p class="annotatable"><span class="pull-quote"><span class="quote-line"> </span><span>Geopolitical
history demonstrates the authoritarian bent of one-language policies,
as well as their inability to produce greater nationalistic cohesion.</span><span class="quote-line"> </span></span>Though
the United States has no official language at the federal level, bills
are continually introduced in both houses of Congress calling for the
establishment of English as the nation’s sole official language. (<a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s678">One such bill,</a>
proposed this March by Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe, is predictably
titled the “English Language Unity Act of 2015.”) Advocacy groups like
ProEnglish—an influential Virginia-based nonprofit—are a major force
behind this kind of legislation.</p>
<p class="annotatable">The Southern Poverty Law Center classified ProEnglish—founded by <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2002/summer/the-puppeteer/john-tantons-network">notorious xenophobe John Tanton</a>—an
active anti-immigrant hate group in 2009. In 2013, ProEnglish provided
legal support to an Arizona community-college student suspended for a
number of reasons including complaining about students “speaking Spanish
in and out of class,” according <a href="http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/071513_pima_english/pima-college-targeted-by-proenglish-group-over-classroom-spanish/">to the Tucson Sentinel</a>.</p>
<p class="annotatable">The student in question, Terri Bennett, became <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/22/dc-exclusive-administrator-answers-charges-of-student-allegedly-booted-for-favoring-english/">something</a> of a <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/22/arizona-nursing-student-suspended-bigot-requesting/">folk hero</a>
in the conservative press that year—a courageous figure standing
resolute against the tides of forced multiculturalism, reverse racism,
and a deterioration of American culture and values.</p>
<p class="annotatable">But what proponents of the English-only movement
probably don’t realize is that their closest ideological comrades are
also some of their most despised: zealots of the Chinese communist
party. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is home to <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/country/CN">nearly 300 individual living languages</a>. And it is also home to one of the strictest monolingual language policies in the world.</p>
<p class="annotatable">“From its inception, the central tenet of PRC
language planning was to promulgate Mandarin Chinese, no matter the
ethnicity of the speaker,” writes Arienne M. Dwyer, a Chinese and Altaic
linguistic anthropologist at the University of Kansas, <a href="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13760/china-s-language-policy-goes-global">in a May 2014 article for World Politics Review</a>.
Though the PRC “emphasizes that fluency and literacy in Mandarin are
key for individual economic advancement,” as English is in the United
States, Dwyer believes these individual-empowerment arguments are
“intentionally simplistic.”</p>
<p class="annotatable">In Chinese schools, Mandarin is “a primary means
of socialization of minority and non-Mandarin Han students,” Dwyer
claims. “So, in the mid-1980s, Beijing began transferring minority
pupils to schools in Han-dominated China under the <em>neidi ban</em>,
or inland class policy.” Eventually a full third of secondary-school
graduates from Tibet were transferred, and by 2011, more than 23,000 of
Tibetan primary-school graduates had been forced to change schools as
well. In Xinjiang, home to the Uighurs, China’s largest Muslim minority,
the ministry of education announced in 2014 that “qualified high-school
graduates” were to be sent to inland China for four years to
participate in “Xinjiang classes.” These special courses were engineered
to teach Uighur youth to “love the socialist motherland [and] safeguard
national unity.”</p>
<p class="annotatable">These policies bear troubling similarities to
those used by US and Canadian residential boarding schools in the the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Designed to forcibly assimilate
Native American/First Nations youth, the institutions did little to
ameliorate the overall conditions of indigenous communities in either
country. “Little wonder that Tibetans and Uighurs consider these
policies to be at best linguicide,” Dwyer adds.</p>
<p class="annotatable">The 1976 Soweto Uprising—<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/southafrica.gideonmendel">a bloody protest</a>
led by black South African high-school students against the
white-supremacist government—is another example of the problems endemic
to one-langauge policies. Students from area schools flooded the streets
of Soweto Township to protest the imposition of the Afrikaans language
in schools, only to be brutally dispersed by police. The uprising is
widely viewed as the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/06/16/soweto.uprising.photograph/">beginning of the end</a>
of apartheid in South Africa, although the policy wouldn’t be fully
demolished until 1994. But it also stands as substantial proof of the
divisiveness and ineffectiveness of forced monolingualism policies.
Clearly, already disadvantaged groups aren’t likely to develop any <span class="pull-quote"><span class="quote-line"> </span><span>Good, old-fashioned, anti-immigrant nativism is alive and well.</span><span class="quote-line"> </span></span>further affinity for a state that dictates how they communicate.</p>
<p class="annotatable">From a communication perspective, these types of
one-language policies aren’t even necessary in the United States.
Immigrant groups tend to linguistically assimilate within a single
generation, as was the case with Germans, Italians, Poles, and Greeks in
the early 20th century. The same can be said for Hispanic Americans: a<strong> </strong>2007 Pew study found that English fluency <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2007/11/29/english-usage-among-hispanics-in-the-united-states/">jumps 65%</a> between first and second generations.</p>
<p class="annotatable">Which brings us back to the unfortunate incident
at IHOP. While the woman in question is an extreme example, the kernel
of her anti-immigrant sentiment is nevertheless identifiable in
conservative elements across the US political landscape. As <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/">recent comments</a>
by GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump indicate, good, old-fashioned,
anti-immigrant nativism is alive and well—the same kind of rhetoric
used by turn-of-the-century xenophobes to <a href="http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/second-generation-last-great-wave-immigration-setting-record-straight">discriminate against immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe</a>.</p>
<p class="annotatable">The American “way of life” isn’t under attack,
because the American way of life cannot be distilled to a single
cultural condition or experience. As it always has, the story of America
is a story that is ever-expanding, growing richer and more
textured—which is kind of the <em>point</em> of this country to begin with, isn’t it?</p>
In its organizational mission, ProEnglish claims
“in a pluralistic nation such as ours, the function of government should
be to foster and support the similarities that unite us, rather than
institutionalize the differences that divide us.” Which is to say that
the function of government should be to foster monism—a theory that
denies the existence of distinctions or multiplicity in society.
Federally enforced linguistic (and by extension cultural) homogeneity?
That’s about as un-American as one can get.<br><br><a href="http://qz.com/470888/declaring-an-official-language-in-the-united-states-is-unnecessary-and-un-american/">http://qz.com/470888/declaring-an-official-language-in-the-united-states-is-unnecessary-and-un-american/</a><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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