English, brought to you tonight by the Republican Party

[Joel S. Berson]

Well put, Dennis.

I did feel one minor tremblor of historical anachronism,
however.  You wrote "... 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)."  The
founding fathers were of course 18th century, and "new world" became
a term to refer to the Western Hemisphere in the second half of the
16th century (OED).  But American "nativism" was a movement that
began later, in the 1820s-1830s.

Joel

At 9/6/2008 03:22 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:
>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
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org