In Plain English: Let's Make It Official

[Tigermike 3,040]

Agree or disagree? Any thoughts? Is it good or bad, why?

From the Magazine

In Plain English: Let's Make It Official

Having a unifying language is a secret of America's success. Why mess with it?

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Posted Sunday, Jun 4, 2006

Growing up (as I did) in the province of Québec, you learn not just the joys but also the perils of bilingualism. A separate national identity, revolving entirely around "Francophonie," became a raging issue that led to social unrest, terrorism, threats of separation and a referendum that came within a hair's breadth of breaking up Canada.

Canada, of course, had no choice about bilingualism. It is a country created of two nations at its birth, and has ever since been trying to cope with that inherently divisive fact. The U.S., by contrast blessed with a single common language for two centuries, seems blithely and gratuitously to be ready to import bilingualism with all its attendant divisiveness and antagonisms.

One of the major reasons for America's great success as the world's first "universal nation," for its astonishing and unmatched capacity for assimilating immigrants, has been that an automatic part of acculturation was the acquisition of English. And yet during the great immigration debate now raging in Congress, the people's representatives cannot make up their minds whether the current dominance of English should be declared a national asset, worthy of enshrinement in law.

The Senate could not bring itself to declare English the country's "official language." The best it could do was pass an amendment to the immigration bill tepidly declaring English the "national language." Yet even that was too much for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who called that resolution "racist."

Less hyperbolic opponents point out that granting special official status to English is simply unnecessary: America has been accepting foreign-language-speaking immigrants forever--Brooklyn is so polyglot it is a veritable Babel--and yet we've done just fine. What's the great worry about Spanish?

The worry is this. Polyglot is fine. When immigrants, like those in Brooklyn, are members of a myriad of linguistic communities, each tiny and discrete, there is no threat to the common culture. No immigrant presumes to make the demand that the state grant special status to his language. He may speak it in the street and proudly teach it to his children, but he knows that his future and certainly theirs lie inevitably in learning English as the gateway to American life.

But all of that changes when you have an enormous, linguistically monoclonal immigration as we do today from Latin America. Then you get not Brooklyn's successful Babel but Canada's restive Québec. Monoclonal immigration is new for the U.S., and it changes things radically. If at the turn of the 20th century, Ellis Island had greeted teeming masses speaking not 50 languages but just, say, German, America might not have enjoyed the same success at assimilation and national unity that it has.

Today's monoclonal linguistic culture is far from hypothetical. Growing rapidly through immigration, it creates large communities--in some places already majorities--so overwhelmingly Spanish speaking that, in time, they may quite naturally demand the rights and official recognition for Spanish that French has in French-speaking Québec.

That would not be the end of the world--Canada is a decent place--but the beginning of a new one for the U.S., a world far more complicated and fraught with division. History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with a linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it "racist."

I speak three languages. My late father spoke nine. When he became a naturalized American in midcentury, it never occurred to him to demand of his new and beneficent land that whenever its government had business with him--tax forms, court proceedings, ballot boxes--that it should be required to communicate in French, his best language, rather than English, his last and relatively weakest.

English is the U.S.'s national and common language. But that may change over time unless we change our assimilation norms. Making English the official language is the first step toward establishing those norms. "Official" means the language of the government and its institutions. "Official" makes clear our expectations of acculturation. "Official" means that every citizen, upon entering America's most sacred political space, the voting booth, should minimally be able to identify the words President and Vice President and county commissioner and judge. The immigrant, of course, has the right to speak whatever he wants. But he must understand that when he comes to the U.S., swears allegiance and accepts its bounty, he undertakes to join its civic culture. In English.

Time Magazine

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Political correctness will be the demise of what's left of the Republic.

[Captain Liger 0]

Political correctness will be the demise of what's left of the Republic.

238648[/snapback]

Dude, you confuse the living hell out of me. Sometimes I find myself agreeing with things you say (like above) and then the rest of the time you piss me off to no end. What gives? You have like a Dr. Conservative - Mr. Liberal personality. Do they have medication for that?

I heard Mike Reagan and Rusty Humphries speaking about this same issue a few weeks ago and they're right. Bilingualism in Canada nearly tore that country apart. Now is the time for English to be passed as the offical language of the U.S. Did you know that there was a small U.S. town on the Texas/Mexico border a few years ago that voted to make Spanish the official language of that town? It was illegal to speak English there!!!! The town leadership was probably all illegal anyway.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Political correctness will be the demise of what's left of the Republic.

238648[/snapback]

Dude, you confuse the living hell out of me. Sometimes I find myself agreeing with things you say (like above) and then the rest of the time you piss me off to no end. What gives? You have like a Dr. Conservative - Mr. Liberal personality. Do they have medication for that?

238657[/snapback]

LMAO! I'm sorry. I have medication for it, and I take it daily. Sometimes, I think I need to double the dose though.

[sogaaufan 27]

I'd say that Bottomfeeder is a typical American. He makes up his own mind about an issue rather than seeing how "his party" feels about it. I feel as though most people are neither Rep or Dem when you get down to it. Its unfortunate, however, that our politicians jobs are saved by our division. They are perfectly happy to keep us as divided as possible.

Personally, I believe that we should construct a perfect model of the Berlin Wall at the border (complete with snipers and Dobermann Pinschers). I feel that ILLEGAL immigrants are parasites that are sucking the blood out of our country. I can't believe we would need to have such a law as this, but I feel that to learn English is the least these people could do.

Captain, I'm sure you would be pissed off my some of my views on politics. I'm sure there are many that we would agree on. That's why I feel that there is no political party that represents me in the least. I would imagine that most people feel this way to some degree.

[CCTAU 3,334]

I'd say that Bottomfeeder is a typical American. He makes up his own mind about an issue rather than seeing how "his party" feels about it.

Dude, if you had ANY credibility before, you have none now. From the beginning, those of us with any intelligence at all begged for the ignore feature. Why, you must ask? Bottomfeeder. Plain and simple. I have had him on ignore since the beginning. He might say something remotely middle of the road every now and then, but most everthing else comes not from a typical american perspective, but from the typical previously abducted human perspective.

Be careful who you stand up for, you may be the next abductee.