Of all the reasons why my husband and I decided to make New York our house twelve years ago, when we arrived from Argentina for the first time, the linguistic diversity of the city was a major consideration. The Spaniard, our mother tongue, was omnipresent and a double language education for our two -year -old son, then two years, was easily available in nursery schools; He now learns his third language in college. We quickly built a community of friends in which almost everyone was bi- or multilingual, speaking, at home, many varieties of Spanish, from the Peruvian to the Colombian, from Mexican to the Dominican, as well as Russian, Hebrew, Mandarin, French, Turkish, Hindi and Arabic – and English was our lingua french. Suspended from a wall from our home office is a framed queens card, entitled “Mother and queens tongues: the capital of world languages“, Of which a friend (whose mother tongue is Jamaican Patois) printed for us of the book” Non-stop metropolis: a New York City Atlas “. He identifies where various languages are spoken in the arrondissement – the most diverse urban community in the world – including Copts, Quechua, Tepehua, Tlapanec, Finnish, Pachto, IBO, and many others.
Today, hundreds of languages are spoken in the United States. The total number is difficult to establish, but it is between three hundred and fifty (the figure of the US Census Bureau) and more than a thousand. This last estimate comes from Ross Perlin, co -director of the Endangered Alliance language, an organization that documented the presence of seven hundred and fifty languages in the New York region. According to the American Community Survey 2019, around sixty million people speak a language other than English at home-an increase of almost three times since the nineteen years. Such an extraordinary diversity has prospered in the context of an exceptional circumstance: the United States has been one of the few countries (including Mexico, Australia and Eritrea) not to designate an official language.
This exceptionalism has now ended. On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive decree proclaiming that it was “for a long time” that the Englishman was declared the official language of the United States. The justification declared is that “a language designated at the national level is at the heart of a unified and coherent society, and the United States is reinforced by citizenship which can freely exchange ideas in a shared language.” According to a PEW research survey of August, the measure has popular support: fifty -one percent of Americans think that it is “extremely important” or “very important” for the country to make its official language in English. For some people, instituting an official language can be a largely symbolic measure, but immigrant rights groups fear that, in particular, it can be used to eliminate bilingual access in education, health care and government services – that it is in fact a step towards official discrimination against national origin. Significantly, this decree reveals a previous one, published by President Bill Clinton, who has mandated that the federal government offers linguistic access to people with a limited English mastery. Its political guidelines noted that “the same type of prejudice and xenophobia that may cause discrimination against people from other nations can be triggered when a person speaks a language other than English”.
Why would this country need an official language? Multilingualism was a constant in American history. At the time of European colonization, around three hundred indigenous languages are known for having been spoken north of the Rio Grande. In and around the island of Manhattan alone, in the 17th century, eighteen languages were used. At the time of the Revolution, there were so many German and Dutch speakers that, in Pennsylvania and New York, the Constitution had to be translated into these languages during the ratification process. For almost two centuries, the unofficial currency of the United States was a sentence in a language other than English: “What’s more“(” Among many, one “).
By nineteen years, fed by a migratory influx of Mexico and Central America, Spanish had become the most spoken language after English. Perlin told me that “the arrival of Spanish as the second serious language” struck “at a very visceral level”. He caused a reaction to bilingual education programs in public schools in states like California – which had prospered under the Bilingual Education Act, from 1968 – and stimulated the rise of movement in English, which has put the pressure of the exclusive language of the federal government. (The iterations earlier of the movement had surfaced in various periods of tension with groups of immigrants, in particular the fire of German books during the First World War; at the time, the German was the second most spoken language in the country documented by the census office.)
One of the pioneers of the English movement only was Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, a naturalized American who was born in Canada, of Japanese parents, in 1906. Hayakawa, who did not speak Japanese, was an ardent defender of the assimilation of immigrants. He praised the internment camps of the Second World War as “perhaps the best thing that could have happened” to the Americans of Japanese origin because, in his opinion, they helped to integrate them into American society. Semantist and author of a popular book on the language, Hayakawa joined the San Francisco State College as a English teacher in the mid-90s. His free-speaking criticism of a student strike earned him the support of the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and, in 1968, Hayakawa was appointed interim president of the college. In this role, he acquired the reputation of repressing student activism, a permanent appointment of president of the college and a national profile which helped launch a political career: he was elected to the American Senate in 1976.
Hayakawa has ridiculed bilingual voting bulletins as “deep racist”, declaring that “the fastest way to get out of the ghetto is to talk about English well”. In 1981, he proposed a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the nation. He did not succeed, but when, after a single mandate, Hayakawa retired from the Senate, he became the honorary president of California English Campaign, who, in 1986, successfully promoted a voting initiative that made English the official state language. He died in 1992, leaving as his inheritance an organization he had co-founded, US English, which always promotes the cause in English only.
Fidated by an increasing anti-immigrant feeling, new iterations of the movement in English have spread across the country, supporting legislation which ultimately made English the official language in more than thirty states. But efforts at the federal level failed, including an attempted Congress in 1995 to adopt a law making English the exclusive language of the federal government and repealing the bilingual requirements of the law on voting rights. He went to the House – Republican President Newt Gingrich, condemned bilingualism as “a threat to American civilization” – but is dead in the Senate. Three years later, in California, the voters approved the proposal 227, which actually eliminated bilingual education for most of the students of the public school. (It was largely repealed in 2016.) In 2011, the representative Steve King, republican of Iowa, who was then withdrawn from the assignments of committees to make racist remarks, launched another attempt to make English the official language of the federal government, sponsoring the law on the unity of the English language. If it were adopted, it would have prohibited federal officials from using any language, but English in government communications, restricted access to federal documents, such as tax forms and voting bulletins, in other languages, and introduced a more strict language for naturalization. He found a fierce opposition, among other things, of the Civil American Liberties Union, who declared, in a press release, that the law would violate the first amendment, on the grounds that linguistic access is a problem of freedom of discourse, and that it would violate the equal protection guarantee of the fifth amendment by excluding residents of access to government services according to their national origin.
It is not surprising that this company for several decades finally succeeded under Trump. During his campaign last year, Trump said: “We have languages in our country. We do not have an instructor throughout our nation which can speak of this language. These are languages - this is the craziest thing – they have languages that no one in this country has ever heard of. This is a very horrible thing. ” It is “ironic,” said PERLIN, that the president was raised in Queens, by a mother born in the external hebrides and whose first language was the Scottish Gaelic. And yet Trump has chosen to kiss not immigration and linguistic diversity, but the xenophobia they have caused.
The reaction against the decree came, first of all, large organizations devoted to the study and teaching of languages. TesolAn association of professionals who teach English to non -native speakers, said that the order of Trump “contrasts strongly with the past, the past and the future wealthy and dynamic multicultural of our country.” The Center of Applied Linguistics argued that “the ability to speak several languages is both a personal and societal active. Multilingual individuals strengthen our position in the global economy and contribute to efforts towards peaceful diplomacy. Students who learn in two languages have stronger educational results than those who only learn in English. ” The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) noted in a press release that multilingualism “improves cognition and health, strengthens communities and brings together families and strengthens our ability to participate as global citizens in a multilingual world. The mandate of the official English will have exactly the opposite effect. ”
