[lg policy] Much Ado about English

Fri Dec 21 21:26:00 UTC 2012

Much Ado About English

by Deborah Cameron, on the Berfrois blog, 20 December 2012

http://www.berfrois.com/2012/12/deborah-cameron-a-word-of-the-queens/

Last week, the Labour leader Ed Miliband made a much-hyped speech about
'cultural integration'. He faced the usual problem: how to placate that
section of Labour's traditional, white working class constituency which
opposes immigration, without at the same time alienating minorities and the
anti-racist Left. And he reached for what has recently become the usual
solution: restating that least contentious of propositions about
'integration', that everyone in Britain should speak English.

The speech was billed as a U-turn for Labour: 'sorry, we got it wrong when
we were in power, we'll take the integration thing more seriously next time
around'. But what Miliband said about English was just the latest move in a
cross-party pissing contest that has been going on for over a decade; and
if anyone started it, it was the last Labour administration.

In 2001, following outbreaks of street-fighting between white and Asian
youths in depressed northern towns like Oldham, the Sheffield-born Home
Secretary David Blunkett urged Asian parents to help their children
integrate by speaking only English at home. Evidently he hadn't noticed
that the Asian kids who were interviewed on TV spoke English with accents
very similar to his own. In 2005, the Labour government brought in a new
test of both language and cultural knowledge which citizenship applicants
had to pass. Then, in 2006, they created the Department for Communities and
Local Government to oversee policy on 'social cohesion'. Successive
Communities Secretaries have made it their mission to bang on about English
at every opportunity, and to demonize the mythical figure of the migrant
who can't or won't learn it.

Hazel Blears was a tireless promoter of the message: in 2008 she made a
speech accusing local councils of pandering to the shirkers by translating
material into community languages. Earlier this year, her Tory successor
Eric Pickles ticked schools off for letting any child leave without being
able to 'speak English like a native'. In between, the Department found
time to have a go at shops where the Polish-language signs allegedly make
English people feel 'excluded'. And now Ed Miliband is singing from the
same hymn sheet. The next Labour government, he told us, will get even
tougher on translation; it will make parental responsibility for English
language-learning part of a formal 'home-school agreement'; and it will
introduce new English proficiency standards for any public sector worker
whose job involves talking to the public.

By now you might be thinking: this is all very well, but does anyone
seriously dispute that it's important for people who live in Britain to
speak English? Actually, no: I wasn't being sarcastic when I called that
proposition uncontentious. What I do dispute, though, is the existence of
thousands of immigrants who don't know any English, can't be bothered to
learn it and don't care if their children acquire it. All serious research
on the subject finds that minority ethnic groups are well aware of the
importance of English, especially for the next generation-they don't need a
home-school agreement to tell them how much it matters. The research also
finds that migrants' children do learn English-from peers and older
siblings as well as teachers-and often act as 'language brokers' for their
less proficient parents.

As for the Eastern Europeans who are accused of flocking here without
knowing a word of English, the fact is that many choose the UK precisely
because they do know the language: as we Brits are fond of remarking in
other contexts, English is the world's most widely-taught foreign language,
with more non-native than native speakers. Its global currency also makes
it a language people actively want to learn if they do not already know it.
Of course there are some people in Britain whose English is poor or
non-existent, but the idea that our lax multiculturalism has removed any
incentive for migrants to learn and use it is a myth of politicians' own
invention.

What's remarkable about this myth is how recently it was invented, and how
alien it is to our historical traditions. English is not the official
language of the UK, and any attempt to give it that status would meet with
stiff opposition from the speakers of Celtic languages, which have a much
longer history than English in these islands. Until the 20th Century,
English was not the majority language in all parts of the British Isles,
and even in England it did not until recently have much resonance as a
national symbol. Before 2005, when the current test was introduced, there
was no language requirement for British citizenship at all: the view was
fairly widespread that what languages you spoke was not the business of the
state. As recently as the 1990s, a judge who told a defendant of Pakistani
origin that he had to take English lessons as part of his sentence provoked
controversy on the grounds that he had no right to impose such conditions.
Even in 2001 some Conservatives criticized David Blunkett's 'speak English
at home' message to Asians as a breach of the principle that an
Englishman's home is his castle. Some things, we used to think, were more
fundamental to the British way of life than speaking English.

But in little more than ten years we have swapped this traditional laissez
faire attitude (if you'll pardon my French) for a degree of linguistic
chauvinism that would not disgrace a post-Soviet state trying to reassert
its cultural sovereignty after years of Russian domination. Since English
is the world's least threatened language, it does make you wonder what the
hell is going on.

Partly, what's going on is political pandering to racism and
xenophobia-imposing more stringent language requirements is one way to
reduce the number of immigrants Britain lets in, at least from outside the
EU-but I don't think that's the whole story. The pious statements made
about English by the likes of Ed Miliband (and Hazel Blears and Eric
Pickles) never fail to remind me of the old Alexei Sayle ditty that goes:
'It's not class or ideology/ colour, creed or roots/ the only thing that
unites us/ is Doctor Marten's boots'.

In the age of globalization, our increasingly impotent political leaders
are obsessed with defining British national identity, but also increasingly
uncertain about what, if anything, does define it. Clearly, it can no
longer be defined by 'colour, creed and roots'. And attempts to codify some
set of 'British values' have been notably unconvincing, caught between the
overly generic (democracy and the rule of law) and the risibly trivial
(queuing and drinking tea). Speaking English is what we're left with. We
may not be the only or even the most important English-speaking country in
the world, but we can at least claim to have been the first.

There's another advantage to politicians in making English the centrepiece
of their 'cultural integration' policy. While they are uttering such trite
observations as Ed Miliband's 'we can only converse if we can speak the
same language', they can avoid talking directly about the things on Alexei
Sayle's list, the economic and cultural and religious divisions which are
really at the root of the most serious inter-group conflicts. The Asians
who took to the streets of Oldham in 2001 spoke English like the natives
they were (and like the white youths they competed with for jobs and
housing); the 7/7 London suicide bombers left martyrdom videos in
(Yorkshire-accented) English. Our leaders have taken a metaphor ('we don't
speak the same language' meaning 'we don't share the same beliefs, values
and interests') and interpreted it literally ('we'll be fine if we can just
make everyone speak English'). Like the boots in the song, it's a triumph
of style over substance.

-- 
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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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