English-Only laws in AZ

[Matthew Ward]

Thanks for your thoughts, Don.

On one issue that we are discussing--the idea that bilingualism or
multilingulaism is good for an individual, I do think that serious
progress has been in terms of public attitudes.  It's very rare anymore
for people to argue that it somehow confuses children or such.  Even in
the tiny rural corner of Washington State where I'm originally from,
I've heard parents bragging about their (native English speaking)
children's ability to speak Spanish, and they seem to recognize that
earlier is better.  As a person who speaks a few languages, I personally
get ridiculous amounts of praise for doing something that comes
naturally for many people in parts of the world like South Asia or
Africa.  It seems that, in concept, American society values being able
to speak more than one language.  I do hope that more and more of this
research showing bi and multilinguals having cognitive benefits is
publicized, but I think that a surprising number of  people already
understand this instinctively.

Even the English-Only movement does not generally argue against
bilingualism, it just insists that English is so important to immigrant
children that they should be in an all-English environment as soon as
possible--assuming, of course, that being in an all-English environment
is the best way for them to learn.  I won't even get into that
particular debate right now.  My concern is their obviously implied
definition of English as the only American language, and then their
writing laws that are so badly written and overreaching that they end up
applying to indigenous languages, although the laws are claimed to be
directed at immigrant children and languages.  I could, perhaps, give
them the benefit of the doubt when they say that they support efforts of
Native Americans to preserve their own languages, but if their laws are
in fact working against that end, then all the good intentions in the
world mean nothing.

What really offends me is the combination of the continual equation of
English with American nationhood, as if no other language could
possibility considered "American" (here, I'm using "American" in the
sense of "United States," obviously) with laws that in fact harm
non-English American languages.  It's like a kinder, friendlier cultural
genocide:  you can re-write history so that English is our only
legitimate language, and at the same time, you can help wipe out
indigenous languages so that, in the end, you can say "Well, we don't
HAVE any indigenous languages."  Seems like the two goals work together
very nicely, whether they are intended to or not.  The end result seems
to be wiping cultures and their languages (which, of course, contain
much of any culture's content, in terms of songs, stories, proverbs,
histories, poems, etc.) off the face of the earth and then rewriting
history so that we don't even remember that those cultures
existed--cultural genocide, done in a less violent, more "civilized"
way.  "English for the Children," doesn't that sound nice?  I remember
getting in a debate about this on the Internet a few years back, and one
person's comment was "I never met an Indian who couldn't speak English."
 Well, obviously that person hadn't spent much time in the Southwest,
but what really struck me was how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy his
attitude amounted to:  if all Native Americans can speak English (in
itself, a positive enough goal) then there is no need to preserve their
languages.  One goal justifies the next goal.

One thing you do hear from the English-Only people is things like "We're
not against them teaching their own languages."  Well, of course you're
not.  You can have a class teaching Hopi, just like you can have a class
teaching German or Japanese.  In recent history, people generally
haven't argued with the idea of having a few hours a week to teach a
"foreign" language.  Acting like you're being tolerant for allowing
people to do that is totally disingenous.  It's a totally false
argument.  Sure, you allow them a few hours a week to teach their own
languages.  But, is that really going to preserve languages in the long
term?  Would Hawaiian even exist today if not for the language nests?
 It may well be that these people actually know very well what they are
doing--they know that pretending to give people something by "allowing"
them to have classes teaching Navajo (rather than classes that are
conducted in the MEDIUM of Navajo) actually furthers their goals in the
long run.  Sure, having a class is far better than not teaching it at
all, but if that's all you're allowed to do in public schools, then you
are effectively dooming languages.

On a hopeful note, I think that English-Only can be discredited and
defeated, and that, next time Unz and his bullies try to pass a law,
there should be ads on TV letting people know, in language that everyone
can easily understand, what has happened in Arizona.  "We aren't against
preserving Indian languages."  "Well, actually, you've already passed a
law that, in the name of helping immigrant kids learn English, is
actually working against an indigenous American language that helped win
WWII.  You are demoting American languages to the status of foreign
languages like French, and how can we trust your next law to not do the
same?"  That's a crude, nationalistic way of putting it, but it's also
based on fact.  The English-Only people will use far cruder nationalism
and back it up with baldfaced lies.  I've tried these arguments out on a
wide variety of individuals in my daily life, and when you put it in
those terms, people look at the whole issue in a very different way "Oh
no, those laws shouldn't apply to Indian languages!"  It simply never
occurs to most people that those laws might end up applying to
indigenous languages that pre-date English.

As for "English Fever," it is indeed very real, but it mostly affects
people in countries where English is an official second language--that's
why it affect some urban Africans.  Of course, it affects people where
English is a foreign language, but it mostly involves things like having
their kids start learning English in elementary school instead of
high-schools, and few would argue with the wisdom of that.  For
linguistic minorities in countries where English is the dominant native
language, it's more of a question of survival rather than dealing with
internationalism; obviously, if it's a country speaking another dominant
national language, then the choice they are facing involves the
indigenous languages vs. the dominant national language, rather than vs.
English.  For the English-only people, the argument usually focuses on
the status of English as the de-facto national language of the US.  I
have sometimes heard them use the "English is an international language
argument," but I think that they are aware that this argument is a
double-edged sword:  you could very well argue "Spanish is an
international language, so we should encourage our Spanish-speaking
immigrants to keep their language while learning English."

On a side note, several years ago, "English Fever" reached a point in S.
Korea where a few wingnuts actually proposed making it an "official
second language," something which, understandably, made a lot of Koreans
very upset (very proud people who know what it's like to have a language
imposed on them--given another 50 years of Japanese occupation, and
Korean could well have been endangered!).  The whole idea, of course,
was science-fiction from any realistic language-planning perspective.
 The ironic thing is that now, only a half-decade later, China has
replaced the US as S. Korea's biggest trading partner, and there is a
growing trend of people choosing Chinese over English for
foreign-language studies.  The same thing happened in Japan a few years
back, with some polls even suggesting more interest in studying Chinese
than English.  I do not believe that Chinese is under any position to
replace English in any time for the foreseeable future, but I do think
that English will find itself increasinly challenged by global
multilingualism--in a shinking, multilingual world, it simply makes good
business sense for countries to have their citizens able to speak a
variety of foreign languages, rather than just having everybody learn
the same language.  Send two identical corporations to do business in
Brazil, one with Portuguese-speaking employees, and the other with
English-speaking employees, and see which one does better business.
 That's one reason why I think that English-Only avoids talking too much
about English being an international language:  doing so not only
contradicts their ridiculous "English is endangered" arguments, it also
would seemingly support certain kinds of bilingual education that
support immigrant kids keeping their native languages--why spend a lot
of effort trying to get English-speaking people to learn foreign
languages and simultanously support policies that encourage immigrants
speaking the same languages to forget those languages?  It's just an
enormous and silly waste of resources.

I'd like to see the English-only movement discredited across the board,
but obviously, the most crucial thing for now is to keep them from
affecting efforts to preserve indigenous languages in any way.

PS:  Don, do feel free to re-post any of my posts anywhere you want.

Donald Z. Osborn wrote:

>This is a very interesting thread with some very important strands, if you will,
>that it would help to sort out. Or at least I'm needing to do that and hope it
>will be useful for me to share it.
>
>1. Bilingualism is good for you. I'd tend to agree with what Mia said on this,
>without denying Susan's reference to failed efforts to focus on such a message.
>It seems to be a much surer long-term foundation (or part of it) for arguing
>for bilingual education than otherwise clever arguments such as what Matthew
>suggested (e.g., that English-only laws make Navajo a foreign language). Such
>reasoning risks dividing support for indigenous languages in education from
>support for immigrant languages (an unintended message). The basic cause of
>bilingual education probably needs to be broader to succeed.
>
>2. First-language education is a matter of quality education as well as a matter
>of human (linguistic) rights. This would be the other part of the foundation
>for the case for bilingual education.
>
>3. What is really being argued against can therefore be recast as "monolingual
>non-first-language education," which in the US puts children of non-English
>speaking households at a disadvantage (per #2) and removes a potential
>advantage (per #1). This not an arguement against English, of course, but
>English-only.
>
>4. Monolongual paradigm. One of the challenges of pursuing this line of
>reasoning (nos. 1-3) is that it runs up against what I think of as a paradigm
>that considers more than one language to be a disadvantage to individuals and
>societies, and that having more than one language means learning one or
>both/all less well. This is not just a US phenomenon, but held in some other
>countries, even multilingual ones (the notion of a single language for
>nation-building came from Europe, for instance).
>
>5. "English fever." Another seemingly distant but very real consideration is
>that there seems to be an organic need in today's globalizing human society for
>an international lingua franca. English for better or worse (let's not get into
>that discussion now) is for the moment at least, spreading to fill that role.
>It's easy for people looking at that to think that the best thing in the world
>for their kids and the other kids in their society is to learn English really
>well. This thought manifests itself in different forms as it passes through
>geographic and political prisms (to stretch a metaphor), from "English only" in
>some dominantly English first-language contries (notably the US), to parents in
>countries where English is a language trying to speak English only and not
>their first languages to their children in the hopes that that will benefit
>them later on in life (some examples in urban Africa), to the increased
>importance of teaching English to non-English speakers (examples worldwide,
>including China, where there are a lot of English learning schools, programs,
>etc.).
>
>6. Matthew's example of someone saying "We're not against preservation of Native
>languages, but they have to be practical. They couldn't use them if they go to
>Germany," is an example of nos. 4&5 above, and also probably an unstated
>hierarchy of languages. The speaker would probably not say something similar to
>Germans. this kind of thinking, which if you look at it is fundamentally a
>monolingual paradigm.
>
>7. Language rights and bilingual education are international issues too, like
>English fever. IOW, I'd agree with what Susan wrote about endangered languages
>but take it a step further. It may be that proponents of indigenous and
>endangered languages are more conscious of the international dimensions than
>others focusing on bilingual education in particular countries. In any event,
>more could be done.
>
>8. There is another hidden strand here and that is the less extreme position of
>English-only (and similar propositions) that reduces first language (L1)
>education to a stepping stone to fluency in a second/additional language (L2).
>This of course is opposed to "additive bilingual" approaches that recognize the
>intrinsic importance of L1.
>
>Don Osborn
>
>
>

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