Linguist: Increasing immigration sparks debate over language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Linguist: Increasing immigration sparks debate over language
http://www.bgdailynews.com/articles/stories/public/200403/31/0daJ_news.html

By Jason Dooley, jdooley at bgdailynews.com
Wednesday, March 31, 2004

With the American population becoming increasingly multilingual, debates
over whether the nation should adopt English as an official language
have intensified over the past several years.

But the United States is far from alone in struggling with the issue,
linguist Christina Bratt Paulston said during a lecture at Western
Kentucky University on Tuesday night.

“A couple of weeks ago, 5,000 high-school students rioted in the streets
of Riga, the capital of Latvia,” Paulston said. “They did it because
the Latvian Parliament had passed a law that said all Latvian students
had to have at least 65 percent of their curriculum in the Latvian
language.”
Most of the students were of Russian descent, the children of those who
occupied Latvia for half a century until the early 1990s.

“Nearly all of the Russian speakers in Latvia are monolingual, while
nearly all of the Latvian speakers are multilingual,” Paulston said.
“This is a classic situation for language shift, and the Latvian
Parliament was trying to prevent the death of their language.”

A similar situation exists now in France, where universal public
education was one of the outcomes of the French Revolution in the late
18th century.
The spread of public education in the French language lead to the death
of several other dialects, such as Occitan, Paulston said.

Now, the Academie Francaise closely guards its language – to the point
that the French Supreme Court had to decide whether the word
“hamburger” should be accepted into the French language.

Language rights are becoming a growing issue worldwide as mass
communication and globalization of trade have made the world a much
smaller place, Paulston said.

“We had a church excommunicated by the Vatican not too long ago because
they still wanted to use Latin in the mass,” she said. “So these issues
have been coming up a lot in different contexts.”

The idea of language rights is a fairly new one, but so is the idea of
human rights in general, Paulston said.

“Human rights is a fairly generally accepted notion, but you may be
surprised to hear that it really didn’t exist until after World War II
and the reaction to the Nazi atrocities,” she said.

The United Nations, European Union and other international organizations
are being forced to look at the issue as more and more places like
Latvia face it, Paulston said.

“It’s coming up for the UN, and at present, the EU is blackmailing
countries like Romania, Latvia and Bulgaria for recognition of minority
languages,” she said. “The EU has a charter for minority languages and
they just last week had a conference in Caledonia, Spain, about how
poor the EU is about language policies.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, 28 states have adopted English as their
official language – Kentucky did so in 1984.

Two others recognize two official languages – English and Cajun French
for Louisiana, and English and the Hawaiian language for Hawaii.

“It’s interesting that the Hawaiian language, which is dead as far as
usage, is still recognized as an official language,” Paulston said.
Moves to classify the United States as English-only are probably
ill-conceived, since the vast majority of Americans already speak the
language, as do a majority of people around the world, she said.
Despite an unprecedented spike in immigration to America during the
1990s, only 3 percent of U.S. citizens said they spoke little or no
English in the 2000 census.

However, 47 million Americans, about 20 percent of the country’s
population, said they speak a different language in their homes.
“Most (immigrants) are bilingual,” Paulston said. “That’s what makes
this issue sad – the loss of the heritage language. Ninety-four percent
of second-generation Latin Americans speak English, but only 60 percent
speak their native tongue.”

English-only, then, is a movement with little purpose, she concluded.
“The argument for English-only is based on the idea that the most
dominant world language in the history of the world is under siege,”
she said. “It is not; it has never been stronger.”

Jeanne Logsdon, a Western senior from Louisville, said she hopes America
doesn’t go English-only.

“I’m going to be a teacher, and I don’t want to be in the situation
where I can’t communicate with my students,” Logsdon said. “So if I
need to speak in another language, then that’s fine.”

Logsdon, who speaks some French in addition to English, said she wishes
she had taken Spanish classes during her education to better enable her
to work with students.

“I spent two months in California last summer, working with inner-city
kids,” she said. “Sometimes, it was just awful because they spoke
Spanish and we couldn’t speak to each other.”