Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives

TWO. Notes on Language Wars in the USA

Contemporary writer bell hooks says that “language is a place of struggle” (146), and these simple words carry great wisdom. Throughout history, people have struggled over who should have access to what kinds of language and over the ways language has been used to privilege some and disenfranchise others. Within U.S. history, the struggle over language has been intense since the time of first contact with Native Americans, and such struggles continue to surround us today. During the years since that first contact, English has played a pivotal role in national identity, a role that has often pitted English against any and all other languages. Some feel that America has now turned its sights on the whole world, aiming to make English the “universal” or global language. This is a claim that is hotly debated, with those on one side noting, for example, that English is already the working language of 98 percent of German research physicists and the official language of the European Central Bank—in short, well on its way to being the global language. Others argue that, in fact, the United States is now a fully multilingual country, that the Two notes on language wars in the usa total predominance of English is beginning to wane in it, and that by the year 2050 Chinese will still be the most spoken language in the world, with Spanish and Arabic becoming as common as English. If, however, the place of English on the global scene is by no means certain, the English language itself is certain to persist well into the foreseeable future, and, indeed, it may be one of only a handful of languages to do so. Thus for many linguists, the “war” over global English pales into insignificance compared to the alarming rate at which the world’s languages are being lost. There is little danger, in short, that U.S. national identity will be threatened by a loss of English—but the same cannot be said for many of the world’s linguistic communities. So concerned are a number of scholars that they have created the Foundation for Endangered Languages and authorities like David Crystal, linguist and author of numerous books as well as editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, contribute regularly to this group’s fund-raising efforts. In Language Death, Crystal sounds a strong warning: It doesn’t take a language long to disappear, once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research. Take Aleut, the language of the Aleutian Islands, west of Alaska, surviving mainly in just one village. In 1990 there were 60 speakers left; by 1994 there were just 44, the youngest in their 20s. If that rate of decline continues, Aleut will be gone by 2010. (16) Noting that of the world’s six thousand languages, one is dying about every two weeks, Crystal goes on to say that five hundred languages 20 ~ Chapter Two today have fewer than one hundred speakers and fifteen hundred languages have fewer than one thousand speakers (14–15). “If we continue the analysis downward,” says Crystal, “we would eventually find that just four percent of the world’s languages are spoken by ninety-six percent of the population. [But] turn this statistic on its head: ninety-six percent of the world’s languages are spoken by just four percent of the population” (14). I often open my class on the subject of “language wars” with Crystal’s work, and I find that almost all of my students are astonished to find that languages are dying out. I am additionally surprised when I discover that many of them see little cause for alarm. In fact, when they learn that some linguists believe that the world’s languages may be reduced to only a few, they sometimes see that as good news, thinking that then everyone would be able to communicate with ease. I have to do some work to ask them to reconsider what is lost when a language dies and, especially, whether communication would indeed be enhanced if we had only one or two languages. Only slowly do I introduce them to Crystal’s claim that “if that happens, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known...