Lingua Franca

It's no surprise, really, that with all this recent immigration fervor, there now comes a concomitant Congressional effort to "protect" English from those hordes of Others speaking whatever barbarian tongues they speak. (Do you ever get the feeling you're living in Rome and there are a bunch of Huns and Visigoths strapping on saddles? Do you ever get the feeling that there are vested interests who want you to feel that way?)

There is a surprisingly good AP report on the issue (ordinarily I think of the AP as a place to go for pure hard news, but this piece is a well-considered analysis). As a linguist named Walt Wolfram notes in the article, "Language (policy) is never about language." It's about feeling like a Roman citizen, hearing these Frankish tongues around the corner. It's about that American insularity that comes with having oceans on either side of us and a (mostly) English-speaking neighbor to the north. It's about feeling so comfortable with what you have that any perceived incursion by something Other becomes intimidating.

I've lived with the issue for a long time, coming as I do from Miami where Cubans are now the majority population. Even among good, open-minded and -hearted liberal Anglos there have always been natterings of discontent about how you "just can't go into a store anymore without hearing Spanish." In 1981 or so, when Senator Hayakawa first introduced a bill seeking to establish English as our national language, I wrote to him trying to set forth my reasons why our lingua franca should be left to find its own way, and he (or a staffer, probably) replied with a very polite letter sticking to his guns. Twenty-five years later, he still thinks what he thinks and I still think what I think, and I don't know that the "language problem" in Miami (or San Diego, or Santa Fe, or wherever) is really so much worse now than it was then.

The pattern I've seen has always been pretty consistent. Someone comes over as an adult from Mexico, from Cuba, from wherever, and they're already pretty firmly fixed in their habits. They establish localized communities where they can buy their own kind of food and, most importantly, speak their own language. Someplace where they feel comfortable in this alien land. Then they have children who grow up learning both languages and are much more Americanized. Then those kids have their own kids who are, almost universally, fully Americanized and speak only the one language. All this without any legislation trying to force the issue.

(The same thing has already happened, successfully, with previous waves of immigration--the Polish and the Germans, for example. In Chicago the Polish neighborhood still survives, but it's slowly shrinking, and I'm sure will eventually be gentrified right out of existence. But in their time, people were just as concerned that the Germans were threatening our good English tongue. Never mind that English is a Germanic tongue to begin with....)

I don't know that I have any real objection to Senator Salazar's version of the Congressional amendment declaring English to be a "common and unifying language"; I just don't see what the point is. Maybe it's like one of those declarations the Congress makes from time to time honoring the contributions of a retired general or politician, a formal We Like You sort of thing that doesn't actually mean anything but makes someone feel good. Nothing wrong with that--unless it takes too much time from other issues in a crowded Congressional docket.

Now, I readily admit that I only speak English. (But I speak it very well.) In Europe, where there are other nations and languages in every direction, it's extremely common for natives to speak more than one language, and I've always wished that in my younger days I had made the effort to learn some other language. I had a little bit of elementary-school Spanish and two years of poorly-taught high school French, so that I can do little more than ask where the bathroom is in a couple of languages. I am therefore just as guilty as any other American of allowing the isolation of monolinguialism to occur, so I feel ever so slightly uncomfortable about the whole notion of insisting that someone else learn my language so that I won't have to learn theirs. And I love English, I think it's a beautiful, supple, expressive (and maddeningly complex) language, plus it has Shakespeare to recommend and that's no small thing. Still, I just can't get behind the notion that the language needs to be protected.

All languages grow and evolve. That's how we got so many languages in the first place. Latin spawned German, French and Spanish, German spawned English, and so forth. Read a little Shakespeare and you will soon realize just how much English has changed in 400-plus years (not to mention how many words and common turns of phrase Shakespeare himself introduced into the language). This evolution is entirely fit and proper, and trying to stem that tide is, it seems to me, a bit like standing on the dock in New Orleans as the storm comes in, holding a single sandbag.