english-only yet again

[Dennis Baron]

Colleagues:

In the latest issue of Foreign Policy, Samuel P. Huntington writes that unless the US returns to its Anglo-Protestant, anglophone roots, it faces collapse. His target is Hispanic Americans. I've written the essay below, which I'm shopping around, as a response. I'm sending it to the ads-l fyi, and any comments are welcome.

Dennis

"Spanish, English, and the New Nativism"
by Dennis Baron

Linguistic nativism – the kind that says, “Speak English or go back where you came from” – is a long-standing and regrettable American tradition. It’s also unnecessary. No matter how hard minority language speakers work to preserve their speech, they face an inexorable shift to English. That was true of German in the past, and it’s true of Spanish today. Eighteenth-century nativists like Benjamin Franklin accused German Americans of taking jobs away from English workers, of speaking a debased dialect of their own language, and of refusing to learn English. But it wasn’t long before the Germans, and just about everyone else who didn’t speak English, abandoned their heritage languages.

Today there is a popular perception that English, the language that dominates the entire world, is endangered at home. The new nativists see Spanish as the enemy. They are wrong: while Spanish has eclipsed German as the leading minority language spoken in this country, the 2000 Census reports that 92% of all Americans over five years old have no difficulty speaking English.

But Americans who speak only English, as most do, tend to see other languages as threats. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the governor of Iowa, in his own version of the Patriot Act, struck out at the German enemy, forbidding the use of any foreign language in public. The number of Hispanics in Iowa doubled between 1990 and 2000, and fearing a Spanish invasion, in 2002 Iowa became the twenty-seventh state to make English its official language. But English in Iowa needs no protection: only 2.9% of Iowa’s population are Spanish speakers, and over half of them speak English very well.

English is secure as the language of American government, education, and commerce. But Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington is only the latest scare monger to argue otherwise. In the current issue of Foreign Policy, Huntington warns that “the values, institutions, and culture” of the creators of America – white Protestant speakers of English – are rapidly losing ground to multiculturalism and diversity. Adding academic cachet to the new nativism that calls Miami a foreign country and the American Southwest, North Mexico, Huntington laments that Hispanic immigrants, unlike other groups, retain their heritage language and pose a threat not just to English, but to American stability. He warns that the only way for Hispanics to buy into America without tearing it apart is to learn English: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”  [“The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy (March/April, 2004), pp. 30-45].

Huntington concedes that America no longer defines itself as exclusively white and Protestant, but he insists that the Anglo-Protestant creed, the American dream embodied in the English of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the other founding documents, is something that non-English speakers are just not going to understand. Languages around the world carry the burdens of national or religious ideology, and English is no exception: it’s the language of representative democracy, of global capitalism, of rock ‘n’ roll. But that doesn’t mean that freedom, business and music can’t be expressed in other languages as well.

Huntington charges that unlike other groups, Hispanics oppose official-English laws, that even when their socioeconomic status improves, Hispanics hold on to Spanish, slowing their educational progress and ultimately, their assimilation. He suggests shutting off Mexican immigration to solve the language problem, facilitate assimilation, and preserve the union. A newly-diverse immigrant community, rather than the current predominantly-Spanish-speaking one, would once again adopt English as a common denominator, and the nation could return to normal.

But English, already the common denominator, isn’t the undisputed property of Anglo-Protestants. It’s a language that began in heathen Europe, traveled to Celtic Britain, was leavened with the Latin of Irish monks, the Norse of Viking raiders, and the French of Norman invaders intent on regime change. Even during the brief Anglo-Protestant moment of Shakespeare and King James, English swelled with borrowings from classical languages, Italian, and Spanish. Modern English has absorbed words from Arabic, Hebrew, Native American languages, Yiddish, Polish, Hindi, Bantu, and a host of tongues from Africa, Asia and the Pacific. In turn the British, and later the Americans, exported English around the globe, where local varieties of the language have gone native. In short, English is culturally diverse enough to make an Anglo-Protestant switch to Klingon.

Meanwhile, back home, even with the continuing influx of Spanish speakers to the U.S., Hispanic Americans are losing their Spanish, many of them by the second generation, considerably faster than the language loss of pre-World War I immigrants. And they object to official-English laws like Iowa’s not because they want to keep on speaking Spanish. It’s not the law that drives out the language, but subtle social and economic pressure. Hispanics object to official English legislation – as all Americans should – because such laws say, “We don’t want you here.”

Dennis Baron                                         debaron at uiuc.edu
Dept. of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
english dept.: 217-333-2390