Among all the reasons that led us to make my husband and I in New York our home twelve years ago, when we first arrived from Argentina, the city’s linguistic diversity was one of the main considerations. The Spanish language, our mother tongue, was everywhere, and the dual linguistic education of our two -year -old son is easily available in pre -school; He is now learning his third language, in middle school. Soon we built a community of friends where almost everyone was hanging from a wall in our home office is a framed map of the queens, entitled “Mother and queens: the capital of the languages of the world“What was printed by a friend (his mother tongue is Jamaican Pat) for us from the book”Metropolis non -stop: Atlas in New York City“The place where different languages are speaking in the town – a linguistic, urban, urban society – including Coptic, Kochua, Tiphua, Telabanic, Finnish, Pashto, Eibo, many, and many.
Today, hundreds of languages are speaking in the United States. It is difficult to create the total number, but it is between three hundred and fifty (the character of the American Statistical Office) and more than a thousand. The latest estimate is Ross Perlene, the co -director of the endangered language alliance, an organization that has documented the existence of seven hundred and fifty languages in the New York region alone. According to the 2019 American community surveying, about sixty-eight million people speak a language other than English at home-an increase in three times since the eighties. This extraordinary diversity has flourished in the context of one exceptional circumstance: the United States was one of a few countries (including Mexico, Australia and Eritrea) to not appoint an official language.
This exceptional has ended now. On the first of March, the President Donald Trump The executive order announced that “after a long period of time” the English language was announced the official language of the United States. The declared logical basis is that “the designated language at the national level is at the heart of a unified and coherent society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizen who can exchange ideas freely in one common language.” According to the PEW research survey, this procedure has popular support: fifty percent of Americans believe it is “very important” or “very important” for the country to make the English language its official language. For some people, the development of an official language may be a largely symbolic action, but migrant rights groups are afraid, especially now, can be used to eliminate bilateral access to education, health care and government services-which is actually a step towards official discrimination against English learners, in violation of the laws of civil resistance that emerges on national discrimination. Miscellaneous, this executive order cancels one of the former, which was issued by President Bill Clinton, who imposed on the federal government to provide the linguistic government to reach the limited English competence. Her policy guidelines noted that “the same type of bias and the hatred of foreigners that may be in the root of discrimination against people from other countries may be operated when a person speaks a language other than the English language.”
Why does this country need an official language? The multiplicity of languages was fixed in American history. At the time of European colonialism, it is known that about three hundred languages of indigenous population have spoken north of Rio Grande. Inside and around Manhattan Island alone, in the seventeenth century, there were eighteen languages reported. At the time of the revolution, there were many German and Dutch speakers, in Pennsylvania and New York, the constitution had to be translated into these languages during the ratification process. For nearly two centuries, the unofficial slogan of the United States was a phrase other than English: “Plurbus unum(“From many, one”).
By the eighties of his life, which is fueled by the flow of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, the Spanish language appeared as a more widely spoken language after the English language. Berlin told me that “Spanish arrival as a second language is seriously important” beating “at a very brutal level. A reaction against bilateral education programs in public schools in states such as California-which flourished under the 1968-Language Education Law-has only exceeded the rise of the English movement, which pressed the English language is the exclusive language of the federal government. (The previous repetitions of the movement appeared in different periods of tension with migrant groups, including burning German books during the First World War; at that time, the German language was the second most spoken language in the country and its confidence in the Statistics Office.)
Only one of the English movement pioneers was Samuel Hayakawa, a homogeneous American born in Canada, for Japanese fathers, in 1906. Hayakawa, who did not speak to the Japanese, was violent to accommodate immigrants. He praised the camps in World War II as “perhaps the best thing that can happen” for the Japanese Americans because, in his opinion, they helped integrate them into American society. Hayakawa, a semantic and author of a popular book on the language, joined San Francisco Government College as a professor in English in the mid -1990s. His explicit criticism of a demanding strike was won by the then California Governor’s support, Ronald Reagan, and in 1968, Hayakawa was appointed to the Acting President of the University. In this role, he gained a good reputation in deciding on students ’activity, permanent appointment as head of the college, and a national definition file that helped launch a political profession: he was elected to the US Senate, in 1976.
Haiyakawa mocked bilateral voting as a “deep racist”, saying that “the most speedy way out of the Jewish neighborhood is to speak a good English language.” In 1981, a constitutional amendment was proposed to make the English language the official language of the nation. It failed to pass, but when Hayakawa retired after one period of the Senate, he became the honorary president of the English language campaign in California, which in 1986 succeeded in strengthening the polling initiative that made the English language the official language of the state. He died in 1992, leaving as an organization with an organization that he participated in its founding, which is the American English, which still promotes the English issue only.
The new repetitions of the English movement were feed only through anti -immigrant feelings, and a new repetition throughout the country, which supports legislation that eventually made the English language the official language in more than thirty states. But the efforts made at the federal level in a nutshell, including the attempt of Congress, in 1995, is the age of a law that makes the English language the exclusive language of the federal government and canceling bilateral requirements for the voting rights law. In the House of Representatives – Republican spokesman, Newt Gingrich, has passed the famous dual language as a “threat to American civilization” – but he stopped in the Senate. Three years later, in California, the voters agreed to the suggestion 227, which has already canceled bilateral education for most students of public schools. (It was largely canceled in 2016.) In 2011, actor Steve King launched a Republican in Iowa, which was later removed from the committee’s tasks to make racist notes, another attempt to make the English language the official language of the federal government, and sponsors the English Language Unit Law. If approved, federal officials will actually be prohibited to use any language but the English language in government communications, and the restrictions of access to federal documents, such as tax models and cards, in other languages, and have provided tougher language requirements for naturalization. And severe opposition, among other things, found the American Civil Liberties Union, which said, in a statement, that the law will violate the first amendment, on the basis that linguistic access is the issue of freedom of expression, and that it will penetrate the guarantee of equal protection in the fifth amendment by excluding the population from access to government services on the basis of their origin.
It is not surprising that this endeavor, which lasted for decades during the Trump era, succeeded. During his campaign last year, Trump said: “We have languages that come to our country. We do not have one coach in our entire nation that can speak this language. These are languages - it’s the most crazy thing – they have languages that no one has heard in this country. It is very terrible.” Perlene said, “Ironically,” that the president grew up in Queens, by a mother who was born in external hybrids and was the first Gili Scottish language. However, Trump chose to embrace not migration and linguistic diversity, but the phobia they generate.
The reaction against the executive order first came from the major organizations dedicated to studying and teaching languages. TesolA association of professionals who teach the English language to the non -original speakers said that Trump’s order “stands in a flagrant contradiction with the past, present, and future multi -language and vitality in our nation.” The Applied Linguistics Center has argued that “the ability to speak in multiple languages is both personal and societal origins. Multi -language individuals are strengthening our position in the global economy and unlimited in the efforts made towards peaceful diplomacy. Students who learn two languages have stronger educational results than those who learn only in English.” The American Language Society (LSA) noted in a statement that linguistic pluralism “improves awareness and health, enhances societies and brings together families together and enhances our ability to participate as international citizens in a multi -language world. Official English will have the completely opposite influence.”
