Language and American Citizens
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville claimed, "Language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring link which unites men. All the immigrants spoke the same language and...
...if we confuse helping non-English speakers to make their way to English with legitimating continued use of a "foreign tongue," we undermine the basis of our free institutions...
...There is also possibility, promise, enlargement, entry into a bigger story...
...All the immigrants spoke the same language and were children of the same people...
...Schools, however, are not families...
...Unfortunately, it seems easier nowadays to make the grand gesture than to do the hard work of rebuilding our civic institutions...
...if we fail to insist that all government business go forward in English...
...But we are living in a certain time and place...
...Another characteristic of our time and place is a generalized fearfulness and anxiety...
...It doesn't require the force feeding of English across the board...
...My answer is a cautious "yes," but that case should not take the form of punitive "English-only" laws...
...If we fail to teach newcomers the English language...
...This is what it is meant to do...
...to revivify all the many associations that helped to shape our passions and interests, including the always difficult move from an immigrant past into an American present...
...None of my grandparents' twenty grandchildren speaks a German dialect...
...If a political culture loses a sense of confidence and authority, draconian measures rush into the breach...
...We are rightly concerned with what is happening to civic life inAmerica...
...The English-only people might argue that the reason it isn't unusual is that my mother and her siblings grew up at a time when we had an Englishonly public sphere and schools were dominated by English...
...I mean a stance that goes far beyond calling for transitional instruction to ease students over a fourtosix-year period into English...
...that preaches the false but soothing notion that education should never change us in any fundamental way...
...The fate of the republic, no less, lies in the balance...
...and his older brother, Bill...
...When her youngest brother, Ted, began formal instruction some twelve years later, he was already an English speaker, having been taught English by my mother...
...The bilingual ideologists cling to the illusion that you can educate children into their "own" culture and help them to remain whatever their point of family origin suggests that they are...
...Support for "English-only" is running high—around 70 percent to 80 percent...
...But we should demonstrate this concern in efforts to strengthen our public schools overall...
...I oppose the Arizona law...
...English-only legislation that goes beyond symbolic affirmation of the importance of a shared language to embrace punitive measures is another...
...That is, immigrant parents will find it difficult to converse with their grandchildren unless they have themselves picked up a generous store of English words—and most do...
...This is a mistake...
...Therefore, such militance is a sign of civic weakness, not strength...
...If a sin of the past was creating shame in children about their parents or grandparents' odd ways, a sin of the present is deluding ourselves that education should just deepen a pre-existing identity—or even, in certain forms of Afrocentricity, for example, invent a past that has no historic warrant...
...These common points of origin, symbolized by language, helped to lay the basis of American democracy and made possible "true liberty...
...to help rebuild our civic institutions, including our political parties...
...What do I mean by bilingual ideology...
...How do we best serve our children...
...We try to do by compulsion what we don't seem to be doing as part of a normal evolution...
...My grandmother didn't bother to become a citizen until she was sixty-five or so—I helped to prepare her for her exam—but that wasn't because of language skills...
...But, then, so was much of the bilingual ideology that no doubt provoked English-only fervor...
...Transition to English takes place rather quickly—in roughly three generations...
...There is pathos, wrenching, sadness, separation in this story...
...Is there a legitimate case to be made along these lines...
...Do we require the glue of language to hold us together...
...And—in this Tocqueville was right—language is "perhaps the strongest and most enduring link...
...Nearly all immigrant communities read newspapers in their "own" language...
...Such efforts speak to our lack of confidence in our ability to transmit our culture...
...We do not emerge at the other end the same person—the same child—we were when we went in...
...Yes, we do, but a common language means having some widely shared understanding of public speech...
...to this latter task, the Englishonly movement contributes nothing...
...in one society by contrast to some other...
...I submit that the source of English-only militance is our collective failure to sustain and transmit a strong yet critical version of our own past and present...
...What does it mean to take our bearings in this time and place...
...But they also instill fear in the hearts of many of our fellow citizens and would-be citizens...
...But education always does...
...How can we guarantee a fair opportunity to all...
...President Bill Clinton opposes it, although, as governor of Arkansas, he signed a version of an English-only law...
...Our family story is probably not that unusual...
...The American union movement was always a colorful mix of immigrant traditions and languages, although some claim that is precisely why an indigenous labor-based party akin to European social democratic parties never emerged on these shores— there was no single tongue to help unify working men and women...
...The Arizona law contains penalties for noncompliance and bars all official use of languages other than English in all governmental forms (including voting ballots...
...My mother could speak only a German dialect when she began first grade in a one-room school building in rural Colorado...
...My grandparents learned enough English to say what they wanted to say to us, although my grandfather fell silent a lot...
...Even as Europe was riven by conflicts between dynasties and over religion, the Americans, exiles though they may have been, carried with them "that fertile germ of free institutions" that "had already taken deep root in English ways...
...They may assuage a certain anxiety...
...For English-only legislation suggests that we do not trust the newcomers among us enough to find their way to us...
...This is the sort of insight the most articulate "English-only" advocates point to when they insist that more is at stake than a common language for commerce or for everyday community...
...The other more symbolic efforts are anemic...
...two other sisters, Mary and Martha...
...Many teachers had to know enough of certain immigrant tongues to help lead children into English...
...Senator Bob Dole supports English-only legislation now pending in Congress...
...q SUMMER • 1996 • 57...
...She just didn't see the point until she heard 56 • DISSENT Language and American Citizens so many of her children and grandchildren talking politics that she decided maybe she should be able to vote...
...This is only partly true...
...You cannot do that through failure to transmit the promise of a culture—a democratic culture—to all citizens...
...But tacit or informal English dominance is one thing...
...In my own family the transition happened much faster...
...to join us and to make their own contributions to our common life...
...Some of these newspapers, like the Yiddish Forward in New York City, have had great histories...
...Instead, it is a dogma that proclaims indifference, at best, conceming public life and identity...
...They are precisely the unfamiliar...
...With the Supreme Court poised to take up the question of Arizona's constitutional amendment, and with some twentytwo other states having passed symbolic officialEnglish laws, the question promises to become a hot topic during this fall's presidential campaign...
...He had a huge incentive to learn enough English for public transactions, however, and he could bargain with anyone at a farm sale in good commercial, rough-and-ready English...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
