English, brought to you tonight by the Republican Party

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

English, brought to you tonight by the Republican Party

The 2008 Republican Party Platform supports English as the official
language of the United States.

That fact may have gone unnoticed this week as speakers at the
Republican National Convention spent most of their time celebrating
war, teen pregnancy, creationism, subprime mortgages, and the
constitutional right of Americans to ignore any inconvenient truth
they like.

Now the Republicans, who have already gone on record favoring an
employer's right to choose English in the workplace, want big
government to intrude even further into the lives of Americans by
making English official. If more Americans spoke English, they argue,
Americans could demonstrate their patriotism while at the same time
making it easier for the government to read our emails and tap our
cell phones.

But official English is a move that the founders never thought
necessary. America in the 18th century was multilingual, a land
permeated by speakers of English, German, French, Swedish, Dutch and
Spanish, not to mention the many African languages brought here by
slaves, and the even greater number of native languages spoken by the
residents of the new world long before the Europeans declared it to be
new (the term "native American" referring instead those American Anglo-
Protestants who thought that Indians, Africans, Catholics, Jews, the
Irish, and just about anybody else who wasn't like them should go back
where they came from).

However, that was then and this is now. Today the United States is a
different kind of multilingual land, one permeated by speakers of
English, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian,
Polish, Arabic, Japanese, French Creole, Hindi, Persian, Urdu,
Gujarati and Armenian, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

...  today's America displays the kind of linguistic diversity that
strikes fear in the hearts of red-meat, small-town nativists, and the
Republicans are justifying their official English plank because for
them English not only symbolizes national unity, it is also "the
fastest route to prosperity in America."

Ignoring for the moment the inconvenient truth (it's not a theory)
that English-speakers brought us the current financial crisis, surely
a threat to prosperity, English, as delegates to the convention might
have put it, serves as a convenient shibboleth allowing the real
Americans to spot the illegal ones.. .

angry? sympathetic? whatever your political leanings or your feelings
about language, read the rest on the Web of Language
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

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