“You come here, you speak our language!”
That is the elevator-pitch version of one of President Trump’s latest executive orders.
In form, it undoes the requirement, instituted under the Clinton administration, that government agencies and organizations offer services and documents in various languages.
In spirit, it does much more — and much worse.
The “English only” idea goes way back. Benjamin Franklin worried about there being too much German spoken in our country. Theodore Roosevelt was on board as well, proclaiming in 1919, “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.” The organization U.S. English, founded by Senator S.I. Hayakawa and the anti-immigration activist John Tanton in the 1980s, has been especially persistent. The group argues that elevating English to official status gives us a common means of communication, encourages immigrants to assimilate and “defines a much-needed common-sense language policy.”
This is nonsense, because we already have a common means of communication: English.
Other languages are spoken in America as well, some even passed down through generations. But Americans use English as their lingua franca regardless of whatever else they speak.
In 19th-century Italy, it was a different story. Piedmontese to the north and Sicilian to the south had so little in common with Tuscan in the middle that they qualified as different languages altogether. What Italians had was what the Strother Martin character in the film “Cool Hand Luke” famously called a failure to communicate. So when the regions were unified into a single nation, elevating one dialect — Tuscan — above the others was necessary.
Not here. For one thing, it is unclear just where in this country Trump thinks people are being raised without the ability to communicate in English. All I can think of is Haredi Jewish communities, where life is conducted in Yiddish and some children do not really learn to speak English. But something tells me they are not the ones on Trump’s mind.
Then there’s the claim that this order will compel immigrants to learn English, and the implication that people who fail to do so are shirking a basic American duty. This attitude is based on ignorance about how people acquire language.
In our midteens — after the end of what linguists call the critical period — our ability to master a new language starts to atrophy. I once lived next door to a couple that had just arrived from Israel. Their 2-year-old knew no English at all and used to squeak “khatul!” whenever he saw the cute black cat I had back then. A few years later he sounded like Macaulay Culkin. That’s how it is for little kids. Those who start living in English at, say, 16 will learn to speak fluently but probably retain a slight accent, and when tired might flub the occasional idiom. Adults starting from zero encounter almost inevitable limits. A brilliant Slav I know came to North America at about 50. His English was great, but with a strong accent and a tendency now and then to render things the way his native language would, such as designating me “an early-waking-up person.” This was normal.
Learning a new language, after all, isn’t just a matter of dutifully memorizing the words for things; you also have to learn how to put them together. Example: A native Spanish speaker is learning English. She’s at an American club and wants to say, “The guy who brought me can’t dance!” (Quick, show music geeks, what’s that from?) First she has to know that the past tense of “bring” is not “bringed” but the hopelessly random “brought,” and that in English we put the direct object (“me”) after rather than before the verb. Or, the woman is a native English speaker at a club in Beijing, new to Mandarin but trying to say the same thing. In Mandarin she’d have to say, “The take-me-come-in-guy can’t dance.”
That’s all part of why immigrants in late middle age or beyond, if they live in communities where almost everyone speaks their native language, may never really find their footing in English. In my neighborhood, where I am frequently assumed to be Dominican, barbers address me in Spanish and older Latinos, especially women, approach me asking me to point them in the right dirección. According to the English-only idea, those older ladies are a problem in some way. How?
Imagine a native Mandarin speaker who is new or newish to English. Let’s say she can get by just fine while navigating a menu or engaging in brief exchanges. Grand. But if she were being admitted to a hospital, taking a citizenship test, voting or doing anything else involving detail or urgency, she would want to be able to use, hear or read her native language. To deny her that is pointless and unfeeling.
But that is precisely what Trump’s executive order will do. In all those settings where ordinary people interact with government functions, nonnative speakers will be forced to muddle through in English alone, regardless of whether that produces any clarity for them — or for the government branch in question.
The only silver lining to all this is that to a considerable extent, modern technology will render the new rule powerless. Google Translate and other apps can now translate straight from the page, as well as interpret between you and another speaker in real time. The executive order “Designating English as the Official Language of the United States” will largely kneel to the power of the iPhone.
But what matters is the spirit of the thing. The English language is under not the slightest threat in America, and providing services in other languages for adults past the critical period is kindness, not disloyalty. A punitive yawp that English be “official” in this country is jingoistic trash talk in the guise of statesmanship.
By the way (alerting the Oxford English Dictionary as well as the upcoming Oxford Dictionary of African-American English!), we now have an even earlier example of the use of “woke” than the one my colleague Emily Berch unearthed two weeks ago. On Sept. 12, 1925, the Black journalist C.F. Richardson wrote, “Until we wake up, ‘stay woke’ (meaning to stay on the job at all times) and exert our full strength and power for our best interests, we shall forever be regarded, and treated as human slaves by the governing class and those in official positions.” Thanks to Fred Shapiro for this discovery (and check out his New Yale Book of Quotations).
Oh — and as for the origin of “The guy who brought me can’t dance!” the answer is the 1941 musical “Best Foot Forward,” with songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and book by John Cecil Holm.
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