[lg policy] bibitem: Does the United States Need a Language Policy?

[Harold Schiffman]

 Does the United States Need a Language Policy? by Bernard Spolsky,
Professor Emeritus, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
2010 Ferguson Fellow, Center for Applied Linguistics

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Some nations include a language policy in their constitution. For example,
France declared French as its official language in amending its
constitution before it joined the European Community in 1992, and many Arab
countries combine a statement about Arabic as their national language
alongside their proclamation of Islam as their official religion. More than
half of national constitutions include one or more language clauses
establishing national or official languages (Jones, 2001). Sixty-three
countries name one official language; in addition, there are seven former
Soviet republics that establish a single state language and another eight
states with one official language and one or more national languages.

Other countries have established language laws outside of their
constitutions. For example, New Zealand, where English is dominant, has
laws making Maori and New Zealand Sign Language official languages along
with English. Israel maintains Hebrew and Arabic as the only official
languages. Mexico has a law requiring public announcements to be in correct
Spanish. The Netherlands requires Dutch for administration but grants some
limited functions to Friesian. Norway (whose constitution is written in
Danish) requires official documents to be in two varieties of Norwegian:
Bokmäl and Nynorsk. Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, has a law making English
and Spanish official (Leclerc, 1994).
History of Language Policies, Laws, and Attitudes in the United States

The U.S. Constitution says nothing about language (though it asserts
freedom of speech in the First Amendment). During and after the war of
independence, the issue of a national language did come up but was left
without any formal decision. Independence from British rule did not lead to
seeking a new national language, although there were later moves to mark
formally the distinctions of an American language,  like the spellings that
Noah Webster proposed (Weinstein, 1982). Marshall (1986, p. 11) has no
doubt: “The Founding Fathers of our country did not choose to have an
official language precisely because they felt language to be a matter of
individual choice.” Recent efforts by U.S. English to make English the
official language have so far been firmly resisted, so their efforts have
been redirected to resolutions of city governments and state legislatures.

U.S. language policy has to be sought beyond the Constitution. During the
First World War, xenophobic feelings bolstered by war-induced nationalism
focused not just on learning English but also, driven by anti-German
sentiment, on discarding allegiances other than to the United States.
German books were removed from libraries, German theatres were closed,
German music was banned, and the teaching of German stopped in schools
(Pavlenko, 2002). Thirty states passed laws obliging foreign-born residents
who could not speak English to attend evening schools, and thirty-four
states made English the only language of instruction in public schools. By
the end of the period, earlier positive attitudes toward bilingualism had
been replaced by a widespread belief that it had little to contribute and
that the teaching of foreign languages in school was a bad thing.
Bilingualism became associated with inferior intelligence and lack of
patriotism. Pavlenko believes that by the 1930s, American ideology was
firmly monolingual.

But there were exceptions. Even before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, U.S.
courts had on a number of occasions defended the rights of speakers of
languages other than English. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled in* Meyer v.
Nebraska* (1923) that while the states could require English as the medium
of instruction in tax-supported schools, they could not do this for private
schools. In 1926, when the Philippines were still a U.S. territory, the
U.S. Supreme Court found that a Philippine Bookkeeping Act that prohibited
the keeping of accounts in languages other than English, Spanish, or
Philippine dialects violated the Philippine Bill of Rights, which Congress
had patterned after the U.S. Constitution.

In 1958, in response to the launch of the Soviet *Sputnik* satellites,
Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which provided
encouragement and financial support for the teaching of Russian and Chinese
and other critical languages (Urban, 2010). During the civil rights
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Congress provided funding for bilingual
education programs that would teach immigrant pupils in their home language
while they were learning the English that all agreed they needed in order
to enjoy citizenship. In a comment that attests to his years of experience
as an H.M. (Her Majesty’s) Inspector of Schools in England and Wales, E. G.
Lewis (1980, p. 369) remarks that “Policy is decided and determined by
those who, reluctantly or willingly, are prepared to pay for it.” This is
what made the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 such a significant decision
in the history of U.S. language management. For 34 years, this law provided
funding for educational programs that taught students in languages other
than English.
Current Status of Language Policies, Laws, and Activities in the United
States

The Bilingual Education Act expired on January 8, 2002, dying a quiet
death. (See Crawford, 2002, for an obituary of the law.) Similar state
programs have been under attack from English-only activists (Brauer, 2006).
In addition, U.S. education is slowly ending or downgrading its few foreign
language programs: Many universities and colleges no longer require a
foreign language, and elementary and secondary schools have moved their
efforts to preparing students for standardized tests in English and
mathematics as a result of the 2002 federal education law, No Child Left
Behind. The law’s accountability measures, which focus exclusively on
English and mathematics, have led many schools to drop foreign language
classes and other nontested subjects. Rhodes and Pufahl (2010) report that
the teaching of French, German, Japanese, and Russian decreased at the
elementary and secondary level between 1997 and 2008, and a third of the
schools they surveyed that had foreign language programs reported that they
had been negatively affected by No Child Left Behind.

One exception to the decrease in foreign language instruction involves the
defense and intelligence establishment. Just as during the first years of
World War II the Army was persuaded to start programs to teach languages to
recruits who would be sent overseas (Angiolillo, 1947; Spolsky, 1995), so
in the years since 9/11 the defense and intelligence communities have seen
fit to undertake major efforts to make sure that the United States will no
longer have just one Pashto speaker working for the National Security
Agency and none for the CIA when it wants to know what is happening in
Afghanistan (Powers, 2002), and that soldier interpreters will be available
when forces are sent overseas. The goals of the Defense Language
Transformation Roadmap (U.S. Department of Defense, 2005), developed to
meet the need for greatly increased language capacity in the defense
community, are ambitious: language policy officers at all levels,
competence in foreign languages for all officers, the strengthening of the
Defense Language Institute as the major U.S. language teaching institution.
These defense-related activities are needed to make up for the lack of
foreign language instruction in the educational establishment. These
activities even include the establishment of model K–16 language programs
that take heritage speakers of Chinese and Arabic to high levels of
language competence while they are developing professional skills in
science, engineering, and other fields (Spolsky, 2001).

These activities are of course open to criticism—for example, that we are
teaching foreign languages so that we can defend ourselves or invade other
nations, or that we are emphasizing practical skill and missing out on the
cultural values that come from a humanities approach that would open our
students to other rich literatures and knowledge (Parker, 1961). We also
are continuing to treat foreignness as inimical and foreign languages as
enemy territory, even when they are the heritage cultures of our own
immigrants.
The Role of English

This limited perspective on languages is not restricted to the United
States. In many national educational systems, the teaching of English
dominates and has replaced instruction in other languages (Lambert, 2006).
The European Community has an official policy calling for schools to teach
two foreign languages, intending that English will not be the only one, but
with all their efforts, they find that this policy is seldom implemented
with any energy. In Europe, over half claim they speak a language other
than their mother tongue. For most, this language is English. The
motivation is obvious: Grin (2001) has shown that in Switzerland, a person
with skills in English earns up to 30% more than someone with matched
qualifications apart from English. So it is understandable that three
quarters want their children to learn English for the increased job
opportunities it provides.

In Asian and African nations, English similarly dominates and drowns out
calls for teaching other useful and valuable languages. In much of the
world, speakers of endangered languages are moving through a two-step
process, first to drop their own heritage language for the locally dominant
official language and then to add English, which they believe will give
them access to better jobs and economic opportunities.

English of course dominates in the United States as well, even in immigrant
communities. Research shows that within two or three generations, most
non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States will have lost or
almost lost their heritage languages. Ironically, while the number of
residents speaking a language other than English at home is rising, the
shift to English is proceeding even faster. The causes of this language
loss are complex. Most researchers see the major reasons as related to the
power and international status of English in the media and the economy.
The Need for Language Policies in the United States

In setting out the nature of U.S. national security needs for languages and
international expertise, Brecht and Rivers (2000) cite the 1988 amendment
to Title VI of the Higher Education Act:

The security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States in a
complex, global era depends upon American experts in and citizens
knowledgeable about world regions, foreign languages and international
affairs, as well as upon a strong research base in the areas.

Brecht and Rivers (2000) also provide a long list of countries and the
language knowledge that offers access to each country and its culture. Such
a huge task cannot be dealt with by the kind of programs developed during
World War II to teach language to soldiers. Existing government language
programs such as those offered by the Defense Language Institute and the
Foreign Service Institute meet a small portion of the need, inadequate both
in numbers and proficiency. (It has only recently been realized that
overseas postings require level 4 rather than level 3 proficiency, although
the latter is the highest level aimed at in most programs.)

Fluent speakers could be produced much more effectively through enriched
heritage language pro­­grams. The capacity available has been suggested:
“Census statistics for the year 1999 indicate that 10% of the American
population, a total of 25,831,000 people, was foreign-born. This is the
largest number of foreign-born residents in U.S. history” (UCLA Steering
Committee, 2000). Brecht and Ingold (1998) are more specific: “More than
150 languages other than English are used in this country.” But most of
this capability is currently wasted. Wiley (2007, p. 79) argues that a
language policy “based on the current and historical reality of
multilingualism in this country” could be valuable. But the dominant status
of English, together with the power of overt and covert policies supporting
English only, leads to a dramatic loss of heritage language knowledge in
the United States (UCLA Steering Committee, 2000). What kind of language
policy could reverse this loss? Fishman (2001) showed how difficult is the
task for individual languages. A monolingual English-only hegemony seems to
dominate American society.  However, the General Social Survey (Robinson,
Brecht, & Rivers, 2006; Robinson, Rivers, & Brecht, 2006) suggested that
while Americans believed that English should be their official language,
three quarters agreed that children should learn other languages in high
school, 65% that foreign languages are as important as learning math and
science, and 67% that English is not threatened by languages spoken by
immigrants. Thus, there may well be an ideological base for the
encouragement of heritage languages, even though it is not revealed in
current political support for foreign language instruction, as seen in the
general exclusion of languages from both Republican and Democrat education
planning.
The Model of Europe

How might we change this damaging neglect? Europe offers one model of
multilingualism. What is critically different from the United States is the
high proportion of people with multilingual skills. As mentioned earlier,
more than half of Europeans claim to speak more than one language, and
three quarters want their children to learn English. Given this, it is no
wonder that the Council of Europe was able a quarter of a century ago to
start building its major program for encouraging foreign language learning
that has now culminated in the Common Framework (Council of Europe, 2001),
which provides a common basis for the development of language syllabi,
curriculum guidelines, exams, textbooks, and so forth across Europe.

Three points are relevant about the situation in Europe: Much of the
effort  has gone into developing a *second *foreign language, with English
so well entrenched as the first. Second, the Council of Europe programs
focused on foreign language teaching for native speakers of a country’s
official language; they left the urgent issues of immigrants and minority
language speakers to others. And third, the Council is now in its declining
days, without funds, and it is too early to be sure that the European Union
will carry on these basic programs.

But the European Union did tackle a second side of language policy: the
concern for minority heritage languages. This followed from its interests
in human rights, an ideal mechanism to let a European supranational
organization involve itself in the affairs of its members. The programs
have been modest, and the decisions on what constitutes a European minority
language were made with a great deal of sensitivity to national concerns
(e.g., Romany, the language of the Roma—formerly known as Gypsies—gains
little; Occitan, a regional language spoken in the south of France, is not
named at all). But human rights did play a major role in supporting moves
for the official recognition of heritage languages and the reversal of
language shift activities to prevent the loss of endangered languages. The
improving status of Basque, Catalan, Welsh, Breton, Friesian, and some
other languages is an important result of these efforts. However, even as
the European Union takes over Council of Europe foreign language interests,
there is no evidence that they see the connections between the three
different kinds of language programs: foreign languages, heritage
languages, and immigrant languages.

The only amalgam of these three ultimately related issues was in the
temporarily successful alliance that Joe Lo Bianco formed that led to the
establishment of Language Australia (Lo Bianco, 1987), a progressive
multilingual policy unfortunately replaced after a few years by a program
emphasizing English and later by a call for teaching Pacific languages like
Chinese and Indonesian (Lo Bianco & Wickert, 2001). Elsewhere, the
interests of these three areas are perceived as competing, and the mutual
advantages of joining in a single policy are ignored.
Principles for U.S. Language Policy

What is needed is to bring together the issues of foreign, heritage, and
immigrant languages and start to build a unified policy that will include
heritage languages, national security, and the traditional values of
learning other languages and cultures. Basic to a U.S. language policy must
be a number of principles. The first is the development of policies  to
ensure that there is no linguistic discrimination—that languages and
speakers of specific languages are not ignored in the provision of civic
services. As Wiley (2007) suggests, immigrant language policies need
provision for both “protective rights” from discrimination as well as
“rights of access” to instruction. The second principle is the provision of
adequate programs for teaching English to all, native-born or immigrant,
old or young. The third is the development of respect both for multilingual
capacity, the cognitive advantages of which have been shown (Bialystok,
2001), and for diverse individual languages. Arising out of this will be
approaches that enhance the status and enrich the knowledge of heritage and
community languages. Fourth will be a multi-branched language capacity
program that

   - strengthens and integrates a variety of language education programs,
   - connects heritage programs with advanced training programs,
   - builds on heritage and immersion and overseas-experience approaches to
   constantly replenish a cadre of efficient multilingual citizens capable of
   professional work using their multilingual skills, and
   - provides rich and satisfying language instruction that leads to a
   multilingual population with knowledge of and respect for other languages
   and cultures.

References

Angiolillo, P. F. (1947). *Armed Forces’ foreign language teaching:
Critical evaluation and implications*. New York: S. F. Vanni.

Bialystok, E. (2001). *Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and
cognition*. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Brauer, R. (2006). *The strange death of liberalism*. Santa Barbara, CA:
Greenwood Press.

Brecht, R. D., & Ingold, C. W. (1998). *Tapping a national resource:
Heritage languages in the United States* (Position paper). Washington DC:
National Foreign Language Center.

Brecht, R. D., & Rivers, W. P. (2000). *Language and national security in
the 21st century: The role of the Title VI/Fulbright-Hays in supporting
national language capacity*. Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt.

Council of Europe. (2001). *Common European framework of reference for
languages: Learning, teaching, assessment*. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press.

Crawford, J. (2002). * The Bilingual Education Act, 1968-2002: An obituary*.
Retrieved from
http://www.languagepolicy.net/books/AEL/Crawford_BEA_Obituary.pdf

Fishman, J. A. (Ed.). (2001). *Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing
language shift, revisited: A 21st century perspective*. Clevedon, Avon,
United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters.

Grin, F. (2001). English as economic value: Facts and fallacies. *World
Englishes, 20*(1), 65-78.

Jones, J. P. (2001, 2006). Constitution finder. Retrieved from
http://confinder.richmond.edu/

Lambert, R. D. (2006). Foreign language teaching policy. In K. Brown (Ed.),
*Encyclopedia of languages and linguistics* (2nd ed., pp. 555-558). Oxford:
Elsevier.

Leclerc, J. (1994). *Recueil des législations linguistiques dans le
monde*(Collection of language laws in the world). Quebec, Canada:
Centre
internationale de recherche en aménagement linguistique.

Lewis, E. G. (1980). *Bilingualism and bilingual education: a comparative
study.* Albuquerque and Oxford: University of New Mexico Press and Pergamon.

Lo Bianco, J. (1987). *National policy on languages*. Canberra, Australia:
Australian Government Publishing Service.

Lo Bianco, J., & Wickert, R. (Eds.). (2001). *Australian policy activism in
language and literacy*. Canberra, Australia: Language Australia.

Marshall, D. F. (1986). The question of an official language: Language
rights and the English Language Amendment. *International Journal of the
Sociology of Language, 60,* 7-75.
Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

Parker, W. R. (1961). *The national interest and foreign languages* (3rd
ed.). Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Pavlenko, A. (2002). “We have room for but one language here”: Language and
national identity in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century.*Multilingua, 21
*(2/3), 163-196

Powers, T. (2002, January 17). The trouble with the CIA. *The New York
Review of Books, 49*(1). Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/
­articles/archives/2002/jan/17/the-trouble-with-the-cia/?page=1

Rhodes, N., & Pufahl, I. (2010). *Foreign language teaching in U.S.
schools: Results of a national survey*. Washington, DC: Center for Applied
Linguistics.

Robinson, J. P., Brecht, R. D., & Rivers, W. P. (2006). Speaking foreign
languages in the United States: Correlates, trends, and possible
consequences. *Modern Language Journal, 90*(4), 457-472.

Robinson, J. P., Rivers, W. P., & Brecht, R. D. (2006). Demographic and
sociopolitical predictors of American attitudes towards foreign language
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Spolsky, B. (1995). Behind the ASTP myth. In G. H. Richins & R. K. Belnap
(Eds.), *Selected papers from the proceedings of the twentieth annual
symposium of the Deseret Language and Linguistics Society, 3-4 March
1994*(pp. 119-124). Provo, UT: Deseret Language and Linguistics
Society.

Spolsky, B. (2001). Heritage languages and national security: An ecological
view. In S. J. Baker (Ed.), *Language policy: Lessons from global
models*(pp. 103-114). Monterey, CA: Monterey Institute of
International Studies.

UCLA Steering Committee. (2000). Heritage language research priorities
conference report, University of California, Los Angeles September 21-23,
2000. *Bilingual Research Journal, 24*(4), 465-474.

Urban, W. J. (2010). *More than science and Sputnik: The National Defense
Education Act of 1958. *Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

U.S. Department of Defense. (2005). *Defense language transformation
roadmap. *Retrieved from
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050330roadmap.pdf

Weinstein, B. (1982). Noah Webster and the diffusion of linguistic
innovations for political purposes. *International Journal of the Sociology
of Language, 38,* 85-108.

Wiley, T. G. (2007). Immigrant language minorities in the United States. In
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Diversity and change* (pp. 53-85). Berlin, Germany, and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.

http://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=639093




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