[BITList] Why English Is Not the "Official Language" of the United States

[John Feltham]

Hmmmm!

Will this happen in the future for Australia too ?





http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/why_english_is_not_the_officia.html


November 01, 2009
Why English Is Not the "Official Language" of the United States

By Bernie Reeves
Language is a mystery that has baffled science and religion since the  
first recorded utterance of upright man. The Bible makes much mention  
of the cacophony of languages in the Tower of Babel story, and modern- 
day anthropologists and linguists still ruminate with no consensus  
over just what piece of the genetic or environmental puzzle contains  
the answer to the existence and persistence of varied and distinct  
languages, often spoken only a few miles apart. Despite a spate of new  
books on the origins of language -- including The Horse, The Wheel and  
Language (David Anthony, Princeton Books), which traces the Proto-Indo- 
European language to the steppes of Eurasia by combining anthropology  
and archeology with linguistics -- the quest to find a comfortable  
theory of language remains elusive.

It is lamented that today only 6,700 languages remain on earth. This  
seems an ample number, considering the march of nationalism over the  
past 150 years, during which formerly distinct local languages and  
dialects were passed by or forgotten in the process of forming  
political statehood. In Latin America in the 1820s and 1830s, Spanish  
and Portuguese replaced native dialects during independence from Spain  
and Portugal. Later, in Europe, the rise of democracy and dominant  
tongues left behind dozens of local languages that are now forgotten.  
The new nations formed after World War II in the wake of the end of  
European empires in Africa, India, the Pacific, and the Caribbean  
suppressed native languages and dialects to allow the language of  
statehood to take control of public life.

The newest catalyst to the unification of language is the gallop of  
free market trade and globalization since the 1980s, spurred to  
breakneck pace with the ensuing collapse of the Soviet monolith and  
the end of socialist command economies. Now the strain on local  
languages is not from the forces that build new nations, but rather  
economic and cultural realities that require the nations themselves to  
forge a global method of communication -- alingua franca for the New  
Millennium, an overarching language that transcends local dialect for  
the purpose of trade, finance, diplomacy, and cultural communication.

In the West, the ancient Greeks receive credit for creating the first  
lingua franca of the Western world to facilitate commerce, diplomacy,  
and colonial governance amongst speakers of hundreds of different  
tongues. Later, the Roman Empire, lording over thousands of local  
languages, made Latin the lingua franca of the known world. Chaos  
reigned after the fall of the western Roman Empire, as no ruler or  
language could control the warring tribes left after the collapse.  
Latin went out of use except in the Roman Catholic Church, whose  
priests and scribes kept it alive in the Dark Ages, allowing its  
survival today as the lingua franca of scholarship and scientific  
classification.

In the 9th century AD, Charlemagne created the Frankish empire in what  
is now France and Germany, causing French to become the lingua franca  
of Europe that survives today as the language of diplomacy around the  
world. German rose from the competing mélange of languages left over  
from Roman and Frankish days to survive with Latin as the lingua  
franca of the world of science. Italian emerged from its Roman roots  
to serve as the language of music and art criticism. In the 20th  
century, Russian was spread by totalitarianism as a lingual blanket  
over hundreds of languages and dialects in the former Soviet Union,  
but was unable to take hold except through force. Chinese with its  
myriad dialects and Japanese serve as the lingua francas of the  
Orient. And Arabic, the ancientlingua franca of the Near East, is very  
much in use today (as we are learning the hard way).

The Winner

English began its steady climb to modern world dominance in the 16th  
century with the rise of the British Empire. Riding on the waves of  
trade and a strong navy, English spread as the lingua franca of world  
commerce. The founding of the United States, the most successful  
nation in history in terms of economic and military power, caused  
English to supersede all previous lingua francas. Technology and free  
market world trade assure that it will continue to be the world's  
dominant tongue, the medium of communication, and the language of  
democracy that all nations must master to survive in the global economy.

Nearly all leaders of foreign nations now speak English in order to  
communicate with the rest of the world, as do bond traders, tech  
geeks, scholars, diplomats, businesspeople -- just about every player  
in the world economy. Air traffic controllers exemplify this global  
usage of English. Ever wonder how an Air China pilot communicates to  
the tower while landing in Moscow? In English, proving it to be truly  
the first and foremost international lingua franca.

Then why is it that English has been under attack by radicals of the  
Left since the 1960s? Why aren't we smiling broadly that our language  
is the dominant lingua franca, and likely to remain so well into the  
unknown future? It goes back to the Marxist-inspired campus activists  
of 35 years ago who signed on to the doctrine that America was a  
corrupt, racist, chauvinistic, and imperialistic evil power that  
needed to be brought down. The war in Vietnam was the focus, but the  
intent was to bring revolution to Main Street by any means, including  
violence.

An instructive anecdote from the era occurred at San Francisco State  
University in 1968 when radical students and outside activists  
occupied the administration building where SI Hayakawa sat as  
president of the school. Hayakawa stood his ground against the  
demonstrators and gained popular attention, which he used to run for  
the United States Senate in 1972. He won, and for 18 years until his  
death while in office, he introduced at each session of the Senate a  
bill to make English the official language of the United States. Each  
time his bill failed.

That's right. English, while embraced worldwide as the modern lingua  
franca, is not our official language. Actually, we don't have one, and  
Hayakawa knew why: anti-American activists see English as the language  
of oppression, not democracy and freedom, and they have maintained an  
undercurrent of opposition to it even in the wake of the American  
victory in the Cold War. This explains why anti-American activists  
lobbied for federal monies to support English as a second language in  
our school systems -- not the first language for Spanish-speaking  
immigrants -- working behind the scenes in the labyrinth of the  
federal bureaucracy to alter the curriculum to their whim.

Bobby Kennedy's embrace of grape-worker/union boss Cesar Chavez in  
1968 during his bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency  
of the United States solidified a pressure group to represent Spanish- 
speaking immigrants, legal and illegal. That explains why in a nation  
of immigrants, from the early settlers through the massive waves of  
new citizens who arrived in the late 19th century, one particular  
group is imbued with elevated status. For the first time in our  
history, signage, government documents, and a myriad of transactional  
events in our culture are bilingual, elevating Spanish to equal  
footing with English.

Early new Americans learned English out of pride for their new country  
-- and out of necessity to engage in the capitalistic system. It made  
sense then and it makes sense now, yet the movement to prevent the  
recent wave of immigrants, mostly from Latin America, from becoming  
integrated and successful citizens by not teaching them English as the  
foundation for their success is alive and well-funded. Imagine moving  
to a foreign country and discovering that the government allows you to  
enforce the use of your native tongue by law. It's ridiculous, yet  
it's happening in America today.

Attack of the Deconstructionists

The guerrilla war to demean English became a component of the enduring  
campaign to malign the American system. The student radicals, now  
grownups with tenure, have carried the culture war to the liberal arts  
with a strategy to tear down Western values. Their primary tools are a  
doctrine vaguely named "multiculturalism" and its tactical twin,  
politically correct behavior and language. And language plays the key  
role in this campaign.

According to the campus practitioners of post-modern theory -- the so- 
called "critical scholars" -- the English language is used as a weapon  
by the dominant culture to browbeat the underachievers. The Ebonics  
movement serves as a potent example of the lengths the language  
radicals will go to to denigrate English in order to elevate other  
cultures. Essentially, the theory starts with the premise that  
language prejudices the value of texts. The campus professoriate first  
teaches students to deconstruct written works. For example, a  
professor will stand in front of a class and hold up a sonnet by  
Shakespeare and a box of cereal and charge students to translate the  
words and letters of both texts into symbols, a process called  
symbiotics. After completion of this task, students can see that the  
words of Shakespeare and the advertising language on the back of a box  
of Cheerios are basically the same after they are "deconstructed."

The end result is to demonstrate that our culture ascribes value to  
the words of Shakespeare over the words on the cereal box only because  
we are conditioned to do so by our oppressive, chauvinistic, and  
homophobic white-male-dominated culture. The goal is to convince  
students that after the oppressive words are deconstructed, no nation  
or culture is better than another -- that the architecture of New  
Guinea is equal to the cathedrals of Europe; that the oral tradition  
of stone-age tribal societies is as significant as the literature of  
Europe; and so on and so on. The final conclusion is that what the  
West calls achievement is actually mere propaganda forced on citizens  
by the ruling elite via the English language.

In post-modern deconstructionist departments of English and other  
liberal arts programs, multiculturalism is directly related to the  
movement now labeled "politically correct," an offshoot of the  
language component of the doctrine. In a typical contradiction common  
to intellectual constructs, language is on one hand criticized as a  
code to keep people subjected, but adopted by campus radicals as a  
potent weapon to enforce speech codes that insulate alleged victimized  
cultures and individuals from criticism. The PC police use language to  
enforce their rules, just as they say the West uses language to  
suppress other, less achieving cultures.

The Enemy Within

In an irony that surpasses comprehension, The Modern Language  
Association, an organization of English teachers, is the leader of the  
politically correct movement to bring down English. There has been a  
constant flow of rhetoric from MLA meetings criticizing English as  
racist, imperialistic, chauvinistic, and homophobic. The result is  
that the guardians of our language are actually its worst enemy.

Other Western nations protect their languages. The French Academy,  
attuned to France's high self-regard, vehemently monitors usage in  
classrooms and in the media. In Russia, the Orthographic Commission of  
the Department of Language and Literature meets regularly to protect  
proper usage of Russian. English, however, is not protected by its  
cultural elite. Instead, it is criticized and de-emphasized, most  
notably on college campuses turning out graduates who are reading- 
deficient and writing-handicapped.

Worse, these students have been denied the pride of ownership of their  
tongue and the knowledge and joy it can offer to create a fulfilling  
life.

The US needs to adopt English as our official language before we lose  
our national identity, our cultural heritage, and our system of  
government. And it is far past time to investigate what is happening  
on our college campuses, where post-modern doctrine, radical  
deconstruction theory, multiculturalism, and the "politically correct"  
movement...and the thought police that go with it. The academy should  
be called on the carpet to explain why they are taking public money  
and private tuition to undermine and destroy our heritage. Let's tell  
them in plain English that we want our language back.

Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/why_english_is_not_the_officia.html 
  at November 01, 2009 - 10:56:55 AM EST

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