Writing teaches a person about language, in a very deep and sensory way, but language also teaches a person about existence in the human sense, existing as a human being, as an individual who is capable of not only perceiving and manifesting, but also articulating an identity. That, to some extent, is our most recurring, most insistent, most necessary and yet problematic, reason for engaging in serious explorations of language usage: how to articulate the untestable reality that is the human self.

It is an art of complex, but not always conscious, strategic engagement, to conjure up, locate and arrange the words necessary to any linguistic task. Assembling words is, to some extent, the fundamentally human undertaking that puts us both at odds with our surroundings and in touch with deeply useful means of reaching out to them, understanding them, bringing them into the folds of our awareness. To breathe a word is to make a claim on the nature of the universe, and our claims are contagious, so getting it right helps us to define the space of our agency, our selfhood.

In simpler terms, what the art of assembling words and their meanings teaches, as one learns what it is to forge new territory, to construct a landscape, to admire and to fear the rules that govern such activity, to honor and to evade those rules, what the whole process teaches is that experience happens in much the same way as language happens. There is a point of contact (a moment in time, a location in space, a ‘situation’ unique in itself) where experience happens, where it is gained, where we participate in its construction and it comes into being, and meaning accrues and something is stated, however quietly.

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such, the dignity of the human intellectual organism, as individual and of value in each case.

I could write a barrage of symphonic lunatic musings, trouble the world with my troubles, obsess, come apart at the seams, but instead, I will have breakfast and read a preferred selection with a soothing lilt, wake and exist and put myself to bed at night with an electrical hum, the din of an untroubled world, penetrating where I dwell and possess myself in solitude. From there, from that integral engagement, through choice and sublime expression and endeavor, I reach out, make contact, and we bridge the distance between us.

The choices we make in our experience have in many ways the consistency of the written word: they persist in their meaning insofar as we ask them to, and they fade away from the initial intent as we lose touch with that part of ourselves responsible for bringing them into our biography. Whether the mind engages its own work with a spirit of dissatisfaction or of pleasure, the experience of engaging the mind as such, of taking note of one’s internal existence, is akin to the expressive moment.

Contemplation becomes language as the individual seeks to emerge from the wells of the internal unknown, and to put a shape and a face on what was found. Everything, in the writerly/readerly moments when such tensions become apparent, is like medicine, for better or for worse. The medicine stays with us, changes our line of sight, molds our favorite haunting, guides us to water, dips us clean, refurbishes us in the tattered elegance of our everyday living.

The changing and refurbishing of one’s private world, even as it is the public face of that private self that is designed or reconfigured, is an intimate description of the process by which every intellect acquires knowledge. Accepting that experience and imagination come together on a plane between the two, and that there, in that landscape of intersection and semiotic contagion, of knowledge transfer and moral support, a vision of reality or of an individual’s experience thereof is formulated by the coming together of experience and imagination… that is recognition of what knowledge is, how it works, and why it must evolve if it is to be honest.

The honesty of knowledge, as opposed to its imagined truth, is a topic for another time, but it ties into the medicinal uses of writing and naming. Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be —we need every skill and angle of dreaming to make the world that encompasses and gives place to our pursuits, our claims on the universe, our attempts at selfhood, sovereignty and interconnection—, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters.

And that can benefit any human being. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. It is the inherently, unavoidably, persistently semi-distant nature of all individual experience —sensorial, intellectual, emotional, spiritual— which writing not only addresses but reiterates and re-presents, thus serving as a means for understanding more deeply, and reinterpreting the difficulties and the joys of, what occurs in the endless flux of daily… temporal… human… existence.

These thoughts are just a beginning of the example of writing as medicinal naming, so I will offer a few examples. I pick up a newspaper, and side by side am able to witness Europe naming its first full-time president, and the president of the United States engaged in an important and never easy diplomatic dance in Asia. Asia, Europe, United States: each of these words gives us a world to mull over and to be filled with.

In Africa, we read of malaria, and ambitious efforts at prevention. The “bad air”, old prejudices, confusion, and the new world of possibility. We read that life finds a way, without saying that life finds a way. A windmill, no longer a quixotic phantasm, can help prevent the Maldives from being washed under by out-of-place glacial tides. To say “no, we cannot”, is a kind of obstruction, an effort at contributing to the chaos; the world is coming together, or it isn’t, we are responible, or we are not.

Each of these complex realities, indulged or anointed, or fostered or projected, through language, is a way of approaching the problem of selfhood, the problem of the in-here versus the out-there, of how can we know what lies beyond the all-too-near far edge of our perception? How can we understand the other, if the other is always on the other side of a divide? We fashion channels to relay meaning; we build civilizations of discourse; we cut back the rampant vegetation of incoherence and use language to say that one self might have something to do with another.

Medicine. There is “good medicine”, in the Native American sense, a healing spirit, in the work of language, if we understand that it can be that. We cannot really test our knowledge, or challenge it, or open it up and expand it, without language. Instruments of all kinds, from telescopes to laptops to mirrors to particle accelerators, cannot give us the metrics for judging our surroundings, if we don’t base what they are and what they do on an implied linguistic terra firma.

We name the universe, not so we can classify and forget it, but so we can move out into it with some confidence, so we can test our apprehensions and forge new terrain for experience, not only the conceptual terrain we need to understand ourselves and our role in the world, but the actual terrain which we will feel less comfortable venturing into if we have no way to talk about it, to make guesses about it, to advance our hopes and test our aspirations.

While science and literature are rarely considered parallel pursuits in the way of the same problem, science understands this problem of naming and its connection to knowledge. What, for instance, is a disease? It is a lack of ease, something contrary to discomfort… but what makes it different than discomfort? In Spanish, malestar has both a clinical and an emotional meaning: it can be a state of physical discomfort, severe illness or an emotional malaise.

A syndrome is widely considered to be different from a disease in that it is not a specific entity with a proven cause-effect dynamic: it is more an array of symptoms, or a recurring constellation of particulars, not always the same, which seem to fit a pattern. If we take apart the language, syndrome is a more clinical, more scientifically specific term than disease, but in practice, the reverse is true.

We could say the same of astronomy: asteroids are supposed to be “like stars”, and different from planets, but like planets, they orbit stars, and in fact, gaseous planets such as Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune, can be more like stars in a mechanical, structural sense, than are asteroids. But we use the word in the way that works, and we assign meaning based on experience.

The writer must grapple with these digressions and underminings of purpose in language; the writer must, whether knowing or not, engage in a constant hermeneutic struggle —interpretive interpretation, in relation to meaning intended or accrued— in order to make language what it aspires to be, what we need it to be. The writer is not so much a priest as a pioneer, not so much an entrepreneur as a watchdog.

To make life into something with life of its own —Life is hard… Life is opportunity… Life is too short… Life finds a way…— requires an approach to meaning that is both rigorous and adventurous, and the good writer, whether an amateur writing a memo to a friend or colleague, a single ephemeral composition, or a professional who spends many hours a day wrestling with the merciless bulk of the whole language and its attendant (unspoken) implications, the good writer must manifest that intertwining of rigor and adventure in a way that is credible, sublime and impressive.

Because we all understand the demand, even where it is unconscious, that writing be an advanced example of the process of naming our experience, in the interests of securing and conveying knowledge, in a way that is medicinal, a help to the human being generally and specifically. Every word is an expression of the case-by-case process by which writing makes language —the stuff of our attempts to turn the world into decipherable sounds— into something new, a new terrain, a new chance at seeing, a healing experiment.

That experiment is universally demanded, implicitly or explicitly, by human interaction, because we all need to map out the spaces and parameters of the self, the sometimes complex distinctions between aspiration and action, known and unknown, viable and perilously fragile. We write in order to play out the shape and spirit of the language, to give it human specificity, to make it relevant to not just our past but our future experience.

Writing and naming are intertwined; every use of every word is a new naming of a new iteration of something either very much like or very much unlike what came before. It is by this process that we can speak about what is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, and that we can find a way to make the amorphous, ever-evolving life of the universe of experience, into something our own, something malleable, something that reinforces our dignity as human beings. The medicine of language is the medicine of acquiring knowledge, a trick of consciousness, but a trick that points us to the truth, to ways of approximating, testing and relaying, the truth that gives us meaning and humanity.

TheHotSpring.com :: We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics. The obvious problem is that some of our most vital human interests come into conflict more readily with those of others, when massive numbers of people mix and intermingle, individuals and cultures competing with one another for the spoils of a new global system.

But there is no reason this has to be a source of friction, suspicion or violence. It is also true that a more open system is more dynamic, more able to adapt to otherwise ‘trivial’ personal interests, and better able to establish truly just rules for negotiating tense competitive situations where decisions need to be made about whose interests are best served by what result. What is needed is devotion to that open system, and real pragmatic tools for helping that system recognize and address genuine situations of friction or crisis.

There are some 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, and more than half are expected to die off within the next 100 years, possibly much sooner, and possibly well over one-half. This rapid evacuation of global language culture —though some will say it brings the benefits of increased uniformity— robs us all of potential bridges across cultures where understanding can take place. As words disappear, so do ideas, comparisons, metaphors, symbols and the human element of perception.

And the degradation of the global culture, in this fashion, while it may be part of a process of integration which will deliver some much needed benefits for long-term peace and human wellbeing, is a stress on the sense of security or identity of those cultures which survive. A key focus at all times, in the new globalized civilization, must be to ensure that identities are not threatened by the mass expansion of media, rights, capital and movement.

The conflict of the Tower of Babel —a place where we presume too many distinct cultures and interests combined, and an empire collapsed— is a conflict of (abstract/thought-pattern) border tensions provoking animosity and rivalry. Actual border conflicts derive fuel and momentum from abstract border conflicts —visions of the world, racial prejudice, linguistic rivalry, competition for resources—, a tendency 21st century technologies, politics and societal developments must counteract.

Openness is part of the new era of information and communication, which has helped to make the world “smaller” or “flatter” or “come together”, if we think more optimistically. As interests and opportunities coincide across nations and cultures, limiting the degree to which geography determines the life choices of a given individual, we face the need to embrace or to fear and oppose the increased openness that offers the resources and the opportunities to meet our interests.

Similar to the way in which cloudscape-computing allows for much more resilient, secure, and super-fast computation, so a broad, integrated global society, if informed by and served by norms that protect the human individual as a creative and information-gathering entity, can achieve new dynamism and vastly more potent and timely means of problem solving, where needed. The new integrated web, the dawn of hyper-convergence, and the global hunger for digital technologies means human society itself is becoming a sort of universal library or information-store.

Technology can help us not only to communicate, but to share the work of solving basic human problems, and to transcend the nature of oppositional conflict. Productive adversarial systems can be woven into a broad social fabric that helps us to debate, confront and work through the challenges of our times without resort to armed confrontation: the ugliest and ultimately least productive of human talents.

The 21st century need not be the new fall of the Tower of Babel, but could be the agile and well-thought construction of an abstract ziggurat —a fortress, a temple, an storehouse of ideas and guidance— shared by the broad continuum of human societies and attuned to our need to communicate and co-create. If we understand the problem of our times is one of forging cooperative bonds that serve the individual and protect human rights, we will be best armed to persevere in the face of challenges to cultural and individual identity, and reap the rewards —as a species— of the information age.

• Originally published 17 May 2008 for The Hot Spring’s Crisis Policy Forum
• Republished 25 May 2008 for Café Sentido’s project The Written Wor(l)d

HALF OF ALL KNOWN LANGUAGES MAY DISAPPEAR BY 2100, MORE THAN 3,000 CULTURES LOST

The world’s three most widely-spoken languages, English, Spanish and Mandarin, each enjoy more than 450 million speakers worldwide. These languages are increasingly useful for international business and for diplomacy in an interconnected global society. But languages with fewer than 10 million speakers are now considered “minor” and many long-standing cultures are in danger of disappearing, as only a handful of people remain who can speak them.

In North America, there are now only half the number of indigenous languages spoken as there were 500 years ago, when Europeans began to settle permanently. There are 329 distinct languages spoken in the United States, roughly half indigenous, and yet radical conservatives intent on halting immigration are trying to establish English as the single language in which people are allowed to communicate with their government.

Of the 3 major dialects of Lenape, once spoken widely by pre-colonial tribes throughout modern New Jersey, Delaware, New York and Connecticut, only one remains. It is now spoken almost exclusively on reservations in Oklahoma and Ontario, and is largely forgotten by the two youngest generations descended from the Lenape tribes.

In January 2005, the BBC reported on the withering of the Mati Ke language of aboriginal peoples of Australia’s northern coast along the Timor Sea. Only 3 speakers remain. Two are brother and sister and are forbidden by their tribal custom from speaking to one another after puberty. The third does not live in the area and speaks a different dialect of the language. This means that of the three speakers remaining, their is virtually no common interaction, and no one to pass the language to.

There is an ecology of ideas and linguistics, just as there is ecology in natural systems, and the ecology that favors broad diversity in human language is severely out of balance. Fewer words, fewer languages overall, means a less diverse linguistic fauna for representing the flora and fauna of the natural world and of human experience.

A select minority, only 200 of the 6,800 languages in use today are spoken by more than 1 million people, and the trend is toward less diversity, which means less resiliency in the realm of ideas, less formal elasticity through which to arrive at new or common ideas.

In 2003, Sentido reported that 10% of all languages spoken have fewer than 100 speakers. Such languages are in imminent peril of extinction, and many have no formal written grammar or tradition of textual learning to help them survive even in study.

When these languages fall away before the global influence of the most dominant languages, ideas and perspectives are lost with them. All languages are peppered with or nearly whole-built of words derived from other languages, some prior and ancestral, some parallel and contemporary.

The Endangered Language Initiative (ELI) lists 750 languages that have become extinct or are on the brink of extinction. Of the 154 indigenous languages still spoken in the territory of the United States, 7 are spoken by only one person, another 35 by 10 or fewer. Among these are languages whose cultures were once well known, such as Osage, Wichita and Pawnee.

The BBC report from 2005 also recounts a telling story from the age of European exploration of South America. When the German explorer von Humboldt reached the Orinoco village of Maypures, roughly 200 years ago, “he heard a parrot speaking and asked the villagers what it was saying. None knew since the parrot spoke Atures and was its last native speaker.”

In the United Kingdom, which includes the 3 nations on the island of Great Britain, as well as the territory of Northern Ireland, there has been an effort to revive fading languages like Welsh. The effort in Wales has had important successes, and has become popular among young people, as a sign of identity and as a way of crafting a unique and relevant popular culture.

The Ethnopoetics section of Ubu reports that efforts to digitalize fading langauges are being invigorated, but are racing against time and are steeply challenged by the problem of “new media formats”, meaning both the rapid progression of storage methods and the often frustrating inability of new machines to read devices used for storage only a few years earlier.

For that reason, there is an effort to formulate a platform based on XML, the eXtensible Mark-up Language designed to be compatible with all variants of web-coding, and which should provide a means of recuperating files well into the future. The Open Language Archives Community is helping to study and to define such a platform, in conjunction with projects like E-MELD, in the hopes that future generations will be able to research and even recover lost languages.

According to the E-MELD website for its 1995 conference, the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data Project “is a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation with a dual objective: to aid in the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation and to aid in the development of the infrastructure necessary for effective collaboration among electronic archives.”

But these are pale consolation for those who are losing their families’, their tribes’, their nations’ cultural heritage and who are well aware of the fact that it will pass into extinction when they are no longer able to communicate. Whether by chauvinistic government policies or by cultural seduction or diplomatic convenience, languages used by influential states have historically pushed aside traditional tribal languages.

While historically, English, which is used in a stunning variety of even remote areas, has been charged with “killing” less agile traditional languages, it has also been argued, as by Global Policy Forum, that its ubiquity could help preserve minority languages, by allowing speakers to use English to interact with “powerful neighbors”, not having to cast off their own native languages.

In some areas where minority languages are spoken but are not recognized as official languages of the state, efforts have been made to popularize English usage by factions supporting both the official language and those resisting it in the name of their own local language. This only shows the degree to which history has failed to teach us the most effective method for “saving” a fading language.

It is often the case that the process of extinction is hurried by parents not knowing enough to teach their own children their grandparents’ language. So in 1982, a community aboriginal Maori-speakers founded the Kohanga Reo, or language nests. In a space set aside to function as a community using the traditional Maori language, young children are immersed, surrounded and taught by elderly native speakers and paid teachers.

As the Kohanga Reo “nests” have spread, cultivating what Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow describes as “a cozy, playful atmosphere”, Maori has seen a fortunate resurgence. Whether the language nest format could be transfered to other languages is not clear, though it would address a common problem, where a language “skips a generation”.

In Catalunya, in northeastern Spain, where fascists once persecuted speakers of the regional language, state schools have been directed increasingly toward instruction in this other of Spain’s four official languages. And Spain, as a nation whose most widely known language, Castilian, is spoken by nearly half a billion people, has written into its 1978 constitution a ban on descriminating on the basis of language usage.

After 40 years of brutal persection and arbitrary detentions, Catalunya’s own romance language is now spoken by more people than Swedish, meaning that, aside from its having to compete with both Castilian (Spanish) and English for young people’s attention, it’s a healthy language, recovered from what was intended to be an imposed extinction.

In the year 2000, Whole Earth magazine went as far as to suggest that 90% of the more than 6,800 languages currently spoken could disappear or become “moribund” by the year 2100. Top linguistic demographers tend to suggest the numbers would be more like 50% going extinct by 2100, if current trends are not reversed.

In 2003, the Independent, a UK newspaper, reported that of the 6,809 “living” languages, 90% had fewer than 100,000 speakers. At the time, some 357 languages were known to have fewer than 50 speakers. Studies showed that the rate of language extinction was already ahead of the extremely rapid rate of animal species extinctions, and accelerating.

• UBU: “Endangered Languages, Endangered Poetries”
• ELI: “How many indigenous American languages are spoken in the United States? By how many speakers?”
• ELI: “750 Extinct and Endangered Languages”
• ELI: “From Threatened Languages to Threatened Lives”
• Common Dreams: “Alarm Raised on World’s Disappearing Languages”
• BBC: “In defence of ‘lost’ languages”
• Open Language Archives Community: “Participating Archives”
• EMELD: “Workshop on Morphosyntactic Annotation and Terminology: Linguistic Ontologies and Data Categories for Language Resources”
• Global Policy Forum: “World’s Languages are Fast Disappearing”
• Whole Earth: “Of the 6,000 languages still on Earth, 90 percent could be gone by 2100″

Is the United States an “English-speaking nation”, or a place where all cultures are welcome to converge, mix and evolve? To answer this question, we must consider that there is a natural human tendency to fear what is perceived as the definite and invasive “other”, that which is different and which we feel can be categorized in a way that fits our worries.

The human space is fluid, adaptable, sensitive to evolving circumstance. This is why democracy is the only legitimate form of government. The identity of groups, or for that matter of individuals is not implacable, nor is it absolutely relative. It follows the vicissitudes of the human health and mind, and requires sincere dialogue with the other in order to reach its fullest potential.

The push to establish a single national language can only be sustained on the basis of a number of false premises. We will explore seven such lies and misperceptions here, all of a particular sort, having to do with a way of rationalizing one’s aversion to difference or to change. And, in each case, it is fairly easy to illustrate how the lie works against the interests of both a democratic society and American tradition itself.

1.

The first key false premise is that there is an irrevocable danger to one’s identity, one’s security, one’s community and the integrity of one’s culture, if confronted with difference, if (to use the logic of the open market) one is forced to compete in the realm of ideas.

This is not only patently untrue (as will be shown in the enumeration of the other misperceptions that provoke xenophobia), but it would require that we reject both American history and the values of a democratic society. American society has never been uniform, has always had to find ways to bring harmony among disparate groups, and from the Constitution forward has sought to defend the rights and the role of minorities in society.

During the Second World War, the most decorated division was comprised largely of Japanese Americans from the Pacific Northwest and Native American tribes have lent soldiers, code-readers and specialists to all the wars since then.

E pluribus unum, the national motto, meaning ‘of the many: one’, has long been interpreted not as a call to flatten and evacuate the richness of an immigrant and pioneer culture, but to harness it, to make a more vibrant and adaptable continent-wide market, rich in ideas, abilities, distinctive methods and innovations.

2.

The second basic untruth to examine is that government sanction of a national language leads to greater unity and a stronger uniform sense of national identity. First, it’s worth referencing the brief glimpse of American history above and the words of great leaders who defended the idea of a potent national character, stemming from the global origins of the US population, to see that this is not even the goal of American society.

But more importantly, there are clear examples that show that imposed uniformity does not bring a healthy sense of national identity, but can in fact create and exacerbate divisions in society. France has a national one-culture policy that proclaims French the national language and requires that immigrants assimilate seamlessly into that one culture, leaving behind the trappings and traditions of their homelands.

Children are forbidden from wearing culturally specific clothing in schools, and the 31 other languages indigenous to France are simply ignored by the government as a matter of cultural policy. Foreign languages spoken widely in people’s homes, like Arabic, Berber, Lao and Vietnamese, are relegated to non-French status and communities that maintain close ties to their family culture often find themselves bunched into ethnic ghettoes, where many French citizens commonly identified as non-French due to their cultural background or race, are concentrated through several generations.

The result of this one-language policy has been constant and oppressive tension leading to the near total isolation of communities lacking the resources or the opportunity to integrate into the larger officially French culture, despite being French-born for one, two or three generations.

The explosive tensions promoted by this policy, and reinforced by the tacit discrimination it appeared to permit, led eventually to the riots of November 2005, which began in largely multigenerational, “immigrant” ghettoes in the northern Paris suburbs and spread quickly to 20 such suburbs and eventually 70 cities across the country and into neighboring countries.

The French interior minister (now president of the Republic), Nicolas Sarkozy, further inflamed tensions by suggesting that the young men involved were by nature “scum” and that he would deport everyone who was accused of participation. Apparently ignoring the proportion of French citizens involved, his view seemed obscured by racial considerations. He further pledged a comprehensive purge of immigrants; the one-culture policy fueled this irrational xenophobia, directed at communities officially invited into French society during the post-WWII period of rebuilding.

So, two evident problems with this lie of a sole unifying language: the declaration of a single culture does not erase cultural diversity (for this reason Europe pressured Turkey to eventually recognize its Kurdish minority, which it had officially labeled an historical fiction), and in the case of Paris, most of the “immigrant” youths were French born.

It is not the difference in culture that creates cross-cultural tension, but the refusal of the majority to accept that their nationality is not diminished or degraded by the presence of people who think and behave differently, but who also identify with that larger national identity.

3.

A third major false premise of the English-only movement is the belief in some sort of past golden age in which English was the sole unifying language, spoken by all and to the exclusion of all others. This is not only untrue —the gold rush of 1849 brought not only easterners to northern California, but also communities of adventurous emigrants from China and east Asia, as well as Chileans and Russians in signficant numbers— it is utterly ridiculous in its denial of historical reality.

Of the more than 300 languages currently spoken in the United States, at least 154 are indigenous languages, which predate the arrival of European colonists five centuries ago. Of those native languages still spoken inside the territory of the United States, about half are endangered, 7 have only 1 fluent speaker, and 42 have 10 or fewer speakers.

It is not the multiplication of languages that is the problem, but the disappearance of vast amounts of linguistic culture and knowledge from American society.

Immigrant languages have also played a role in making American society what it is. After decades of being treated as an unwanted ethnicity, Italian Americans, most often poor immigrants from southern Italy, or their descendants, in New York and other cities, speaking their own language, some even to this day, after several generations, introduced a new culinary culture into American society.

At the death of the New York restauranteur Delmonico in 1881, the exiled Cuban poet José Martí, writing in Spanish, noted the outpouring of popular affection for the man and his life’s work, specifically citing the gratitude expressed by many for his having introduced sauces, garnishes and ingredients that all agree enriched American culture and society.

At the founding of the republic, English was deliberately chosen as the language of standard use in law and government, not as a means of establishing a national vernacular, but simply to provide continuity in law, as the entire legal tradition of the British colonies in North America had been drafted in English.

There were even competing camps arguing that German or French should be used, to accentuate the break from England and because there were a large number of colonists who spoke those languages as their mother tongue. In fact, as of the 2000 US census, there were in the United States only 24,515,138 citizens of English ancestry (single or multiple ancestry included), while there were 42,885,162 citizens of German ancestry, 36,419,434 of African-American ancestry, 30,594,130 of Irish and/or Celtic ancestry, and 31,107,889 who were foreign born.

English-language culture has been a leading feature of American society, throughout its history, and has been most prevalent in publishing (books, magazines, newspapers and government documents), but it has never had an exclusive dominion over the American mind, and it does not represent any primary ethnic origin for the non-indigenous United States, as a republic. The United States is, as it has always been, and to its credit, the most linguistically diverse industrialized democracy in the world.

4.

A particularly insidious lie at the root of the English-only movement is the fear of an “invasion” of Spanish speakers. It is simply untrue that the Spanish-speaking population of the Americas could eclipse the English-speaking population of the United States and displace English as the unofficial lingua franca of the republic.

There are an estimated 450 to 500 million Spanish speakers across the globe, 40 million of whom live in Spain and 40 million more of whom already reside in the US itself, most of them speaking English as well. Spanish is also spoken by millions of people in Europe, south Asia and Africa.

The population of the US in 2000 was 281,421,906, according to the US census. The Census Bureau by 2006 estimated that figure at 298,820,183. The total number of people the US Census Bureau reported living in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries (including Mexico and Puerto Rico) in 2006 is 309,631,738.

So, unless every country in Latin America were emptied, there is no risk of a de facto overtaking of the English language in the US; nevermind the fact that there is no evidence of any hemispheric conspiracy to make the US a Spanish-speaking country.

Ultimately, it is the failure of imagination in the way individuals form their own sense of identity that generates the fear, not so much of foreigners or of another language, but of having to compete with fellow citizens who know more than one language.

The English-only movement is pushing very deliberately to limit the richness, vitality and adaptability of American culture, as well as its ability to learn of and respond to international crises or national security issues. It is in this that the nation itself faces the most serious threat to the potency and resilience of its linguistic and democratic culture.

5.

There is also the pernicious suggestion that people speaking other languages are not loyal Americans. This is directly tied to the false projection of “American” as connoting “English-speaking” and “white”.

What’s more, immigrants who have faced political hardship, economic depression, harsh journeys on foot or cramped in tiny enclosed spaces, violent smugglers and real mortal peril, all in hopes of reaching the promise of American society, tend to prize more passionately and more personally the freedoms and the rights afforded by American law than American-born citizens can normally imagine.

Throughout American history, from the Revolution, through the Civil War, into the World Wars and including the 2003 Iraq invasion, foreign-born US citizens and non-citizens have fought on behalf of the United States, risking their lives for a country whose ideals they believe in and to which they hope to one day belong.

6.

The sixth lie we must examine, which gives comfort to those who oppose the United States’ brave history of cultural diversity, is that suspicion of something one does not understand, or which is outwardly different, is somehow a useful tool in the furtherance of democracy, helping to seal the system against unwanted intruders.

This assumes many things: one, that democracy must be a closed system (the USSR, North Korea and Cuba have very effectively demonstrated the flaws of hermetically sealed societies)… two, that it is the sole privilege of an essentially distinct human population (who decides which people are essentially and naturally entitled to participate? how does one get around such stratification being antithetical to the US Constitutional system?)… three, that democracy means uniformity (we have covered this above).

Each of these rhetorical bases is contrary to the meaning, the direction and the lessons of American history. And each ignores the phrasing of the nation’s founding documents.

In his famous “I have a dream” speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said the “promissory note” represented by the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had been “returned, marked insufficient funds”. He meant that the nation had to recognize that its core aspirations had not been achieved, precisely because a group identified by outward differences was still excluded from true equality before the law.

It is not by generating new exclusions and separating out the already-here from the imminent newcomers that we will make the United States more American in its identity and ideals, but rather by embracing the diversity of culture and the open humanity professed by the nation’s founding documents, Revolutionary treatises and greatest examples of community spirit.

7.

There is, lastly, the fundamental lie that says that official classification of all other languages as secondary, by establishment of an official state language, does not mean one discriminates or that the system of open democracy becomes less open.

In fact, there is no way around the basic truth that the declaration of a national language has only one purpose: to institutionalize discrimination in a way it has never been done before in the United States. And beyond that discrimination, its most immediate effect would be the degradation of the quality of the system of democratic rights and principles itself.

During the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain, from 1939 to 1975, his government declared Castilian (the language we know as ‘Spanish’) the national language of Spain. People who spoke one of the other languages widely spoken in Spain (Catalan [català], Basque [euskera] or Gallego [galego]), were pushed out of positions of importance, robbed of their property and systematically persecuted for not speaking the proper “Christian” tongue, as Franco’s regime would have it.

Eventually, people were detained, forced to do hard labor, enslaved by the state to build a tomb for the dictator, tortured and killed, because their use of a distinct language was perceived as a grave threat to national unity, despite those languages having been part of Spanish society for a thousand years or more, long before anything like a “Spanish” state came into existence.

When Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492, he was sponsored by the two kingdoms of Castilla-Leon and Catalunya-Aragon, joined in the marriage of Isabel de Castilla and Fernando de Aragon. It was not until the year 1714 that a single Spanish state was established under Castilian rule.

Since the transition to democracy, beginning in 1975, the present day constitutional republic has four co-official languages, persecution on the basis of language usage is forbidden, no matter the language, and the society is more politically and culturally vibrant, more economically prosperous, in closer contact with its neighbors, more sustainable as a political system, observing and protecting the principles of democracy, an example to other nations.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution promised that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … [or] to petition the government for a redress of grievances”. So, the amendment to Senate Bill S.2611, proposed by Sen. Inhofe, which aims to strip all Americans of the right to interact with their government in any language other than English, directly assaults a basic constitutional liberty. It deliberately makes communication between the government and the people less effective and undermines the right of individuals to solicit the correction of an injustice.

That means less accountability in government when facing certain segments of the population, which is a stratification of legal protections and an abstract but very real form of segregation, enacted by law. Enactment of such legislation would not only violate Constitutional principles, it would hamper the ability of the people of the United States to gather information, share information, and assist in the direction of the republic, a right without which democracy is just an idea.

• YourDictionary: “How many indigenous American languages are spoken in the United States? By how many speakers?”
• Wikipedia: “Languages of France”
• US Census Bureau: “Census 2000 Gateway”
• US Census Bureau: “World Population Information”