7-25-06, 10:45 am
Many countries sing their national anthems in more than one language. “Oh Canada” is sung in French and English. In the old USSR, the two successive national anthems were sung in the multiple languages of the country. In South Africa, the national anthem combines the music of three different songs and words from four languages. It starts out in Xhosa, moves to Tswana, then to Afrikaans, then to English. The sky has not fallen.
In the United States, a Spanish version of the Star Spangled Banner was written under government commission in 1919. It has also been sung in German, Yiddish, Finnish, French and O’odham, a Native American language spoken in Arizona. To complete the farce, it turns out that Bush himself has sung the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish in past campaign events, though he denies it.
So why is the Republican right once again creating an uproar about nothing? An examination of how the language and nationality issue plays out both in the United States and in other countries can give us the answer.
Which Languages are “Foreign”?
Right-wing language chauvinists claim that English is “the language of the United States” and that all others are “foreign.” But in the United States today, at least a few people still speak each of 170 ancient Native American languages. Larger indigenous language communities include Hopi, Western Apache, O’odham, Navajo, Zuni, Dakota and several others. Some indigenous communities want to preserve their languages and have created educational and cultural institutions to achieve this goal. Nowhere does the desire to maintain the indigenous language mean that people do not want to learn English.
There are other non-English languages that have been around here at least since colonial days. Besides Spanish, established in New Mexico in the late 1500’s, (before English was spoken at Jamestown), French in Louisiana and Maine, and Plattdeutsch (Low German) in Pennsylvania have been used continuously since before independence.
None of these are “foreign” languages; all have deep roots in the USA. But for our right wing, these are all threats to English that should disappear, because they clash with the right’s organic concept of the nation and national unity.
The Right-Wing Take on Nationality and Language
For the far right, nationality is not just a matter of shared citizenship or beliefs in democracy, justice, freedom and the rule of law. It requires shared culture and language as well. It is guided by a mystical belief in the uniqueness of “American” cultural characteristics. It is not just that to be an American you should believe in democratic elections, since most people in the world do. You must also adhere to the surface manifestations of the self-evidently superior Anglo-Saxon culture and subscribe to all the national myths. You must agree that the United States is unique, special and superior.
A good example of this mentality is the 2004 book Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity by Samuel P. Huntington. Huntington asserts that the core values of the founding fathers, and therefore of the United States today, were those of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants only, and that groups which do not assimilate into this core national culture cannot contribute anything. He meant this to apply to Latinos, but his thesis implies, without saying so, that African Americans, Jews and Catholics also can not contribute anything except to the extent that they abandon their own cultural characteristics.
Huntington’s thesis really sums up the whole right wing stance on nationality. If you bring in elements from foreign cultures, even if they do no demonstrable harm, and in fact reinforce democracy and freedom, you are “contaminating” our country and “threatening” its unity and integrity. “Foreign” language use is therefore a self-evident threat.
There is a strong element of racial and ethnic prejudice in this stance, which changes over time. In the 1850’s, the big “threat” was Irish immigration. Anti-Irish agitation led to rioting fomented by the infamous “Know Nothing” Party. Later in the 19th century, Eastern and Central European immigrants (especially Jews), as well as those from Asia, were the lurking “inassimilable” menace to the organic unity of the United States.
Recently, however, there have not been riots about Irish symbols on St. Patrick’s Day. With time, these things have become relatively inoffensive in the eyes of the right wing, perhaps because of changing retrospective attitudes toward white European immigrants. However, the sight of a Mexican or Puerto Rican flag or the sound of Spanish drives the right crazy. Spain and South Africa
The organic concept of nationality promoted by Huntington resembles very closely that of the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain. Before Franco gained power in 1939, Spain was a country with several different linguistic and cultural traditions, including, besides Castilian, Basque, Galician and Catalan-Valencian. Each of these national groups wanted regional and linguistic autonomy. The Spanish left, to varying degrees, was willing to accommodate this diversity, but to Franco and the right it was anathema. In the right-wing view, to be a citizen of Spain meant that you adhered not only to the Spanish laws, but also to Castilian language and social customs, as well as traditional Catholicism. When Franco took power, all concessions toward the language minorities were reversed, and they were driven underground. After Franco died, the demands of language minorities surfaced again, and use of these languages is once more recognized.
The Franco attitude toward nation, culture and language is characteristic of, but not unique to, fascist movements and regimes. There was supposed always to be one nation, one leader, one culture, one language and, under Catholic clerical fascism, one religion. The purpose was to serve the interests of the big bourgeoisie by suckering the masses, including part of the working class, into fighting Communists, anarchists, socialists, Jews or imaginary foreign enemies, instead of the class enemy.
In South Africa, under the old apartheid regime, the philosophy of language and nationality was similar, but was given a different twist because of the hierarchical racial composition of the country.
When South Africa got practical independence from Britain in 1910, English was dominant and not only indigenous African languages, but also Afrikaans, were discriminated against. In the 1930’s, the right-wing Afrikaner nationalist movement sought to make Afrikaans the dominant language. However, as the movement developed, its leadership concluded that it would not do to declare perpetual war on English speaking whites, because uniting the whites against the Blacks was a higher priority. So the formula became that to be a “real (white) South African,” you had to express white, European Protestant culture, and you could do so in either Afrikaans or English. Though some Anglo and Afrikaner whites never accepted it, this policy was generally successful in uniting the white population against the indigenous African population.
As a “divide and rule” tool, the leaders of the apartheid regime tried to apply this “organic” idea of culture and language to the indigenous African population as well. Apartheid ideologues exaggerated the cultural and linguistic differences among the nine major African language communities, and used these stereotypes to create the famous “Bantustans” in which each group was supposed to develop their little imaginary states in accordance with what the regime said were the special national characteristics of each.
The educational philosophy that went along with this charade was called “Bantu education.” In its original formulation, it was intended to train the vast majority of Black children only for menial occupations, and a select few for subordinate administrative roles. When this produced bitter protest, the government changed its rhetoric but not its essential goal of using language for racial domination. Children were educated in their indigenous language in primary grades, and then, starting in 1976, were to be transitioned into education in Afrikaans in the advanced grades.
The proposal to switch secondary education from English to Afrikaans led directly to the Soweto uprising of 1976. Some people outside South Africa thought the demand of the Soweto protesters was to have education in their own indigenous languages. It was not; they wanted their schooling to be mostly in English. Why?
With the exception of a few expatriates, neither Afrikaans nor any of the indigenous languages is used anywhere outside South Africa and its immediate neighbors. All publishing and broadcasting in Afrikaans and the indigenous languages was tightly controlled or censored by the apartheid government. Progressive Afrikaans language writers such as the novelist Andre Brink (A Dry White Season) and the poet Breyten Breytenbach found that they could not publish in South Africa if they were going to write things against the government. And if they tried to publish outside of South Africa there would be no audience to read their works in Afrikaans, because virtually all Afrikaans speakers lived in South Africa. Ironically, the same applied to literature written in any of the African languages. Yet the South African government and its institutions were perfectly willing to allow the publication of things in all these languages that supported the government. There were newspapers and other literature published in Xhosa, Zulu etc. during the apartheid days, but they could only rarely and cautiously play an oppositional role.
But English is a world language with several hundred million native speakers, and every conceivable kind of idea is open to people who read it. So anti-apartheid activists saw education in English as one way of equipping the younger generation with knowledge that would allow them, not only to survive, but to resist and eventually overcome the apartheid system of race and class oppression.
There is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with any of these languages, including Afrikaans. You can say “workers of the world, unite” in Afrikaans or Zulu as well as in German or English. But, for political and not linguistic reasons, you could not say such a thing in print in apartheid South Africa. So the liberation movement prioritized literacy in English.
As soon as the apartheid regime fell from power, the new African National Congress government moved to develop all the major national languages for every kind of use. The right to use the language of one’s choice was entrenched in law. The Pan South African Language Board and the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, were set up to develop all eleven official languages and to handle complaints of discrimination. The government moved to create news, educational and entertainment programming on TV and radio in all eleven major national languages. School curricula were revised to encourage South Africans of all races to study African languages as well as English and Afrikaans. This is a work in progress, with English still dominant, but there is an active effort to end language discrimination. Apartheid promoted bogus linguistic diversity for the purpose of dividing the working class and ensuring both class and racial domination. The new South African government promotes genuine linguistic diversity for the purpose of eliminating discrimination by language, thus objectively helping to unite the working class and fight class and racial domination. Potential conflict over language has been defused by a policy of equality and inclusion.
South Africa is not the only example of linguistic diversity in the context of national unity. Switzerland fully recognizes four official languages (German, French, Italian and Romansch). In fact, the frequent claims by the English-only crowd that allowing multiple languages leads to national dissolution does not hold water. Where language is a focus of conflict, you generally find that the argument is over discrimination against a minority language. French-Canadian discontent was caused by longstanding Anglo-Canadian discrimination, not by the mere existence of two languages. The worst conflicts in recent years, from Bosnia and Rwanda to Iraq, have had nothing to do with language.
The English-Only Movement
In this country, for a long time, multiple language use was not always considered threatening. Long before “bilingual education,” there were schools, both public and parochial, in many parts of the United States which used languages other than English for instruction. But as the United States moved in an imperial direction at the end of the 19th century, and as class struggle intensified involving millions of immigrant industrial workers, the idea that the English language was essential to loyalty began to gain currency. Anti-immigrant zealots mixed up issues of language, race and culture in their jeremiads against people of “inferior stock” coming in from Eastern and Southern Europe. The First World War led to the suppression of German, and the Red Scare of the postwar period led to attacks on anything foreign as subversive. The project of wiping out the Native American languages advanced. Children were snatched off the reservations and put in boarding schools in which they were physically punished for speaking the languages of their home communities. Older Native Americans often still speak of this traumatic experience with bitterness. A bizarre effort to wipe out Spanish in Puerto Rico obviously failed.
However, the civil rights and Latino, Native American and other anti-discrimination movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s opened up more space for public use of languages other than English. Bilingual-bicultural education began to be the norm for the teaching of language minority children, from the inner city to the Indian reservations.
The right-wing reaction took fire at the beginning of the 1980’s with the English-only movement, initiated by former San Francisco State University President S. I. Hayakawa and Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton, and supported by California millionaire Ron Unz. A campaign of attacks against second language use and bilingual-bicultural education began to grow to dangerous proportions. The English-only movement shares funders, activists and support networks with the anti-immigrant movement. Although from time to time some supposedly liberal environmentalists and defenders of “American workers” get into the mix, the overall movement is heavily involved with the political ultra right.
The strategy of the English-only movement has been to tap national chauvinist feelings of the Anglo American population to energize the base, while putting out false information to the wider public in order to defuse potential defense of non-English language use. While most studies show well-designed bilingual education programs comparing well with instruction in English only, the Unz forces claimed the opposite. In state after state, they succeeded in getting legislatures to declare the state to be “English only.” In some states they have done real damage to educational programs and access of language minorities to public services. A crucial goal of the English-only movement has been to put a stop to the printing of ballots and other official election materials in languages other than English (with the extra goal of removing non-English ballot requirements from the Voting Rights Act). This goes hand in hand with efforts to force voters to prove their US citizenship at the ballot box (instead of just when they initially register to vote). The obvious intent is to suppress the vote of language minorities, who tend to vote for the Democrats.
Thanks to the efforts of Unz and others, Propositions 227 in California and 203 in Arizona, which mandated the dismantling of the states’ bilingual education programs, were approved by voters in 1998 and 2000, respectively. Unz and his allies subsequently put out false claims that the end of bilingual education in California had brought sharp increases in student achievement. These claims have been amply refuted by scholars such as Kenji Hakuta and James Crawford (much valuable online material on this issue is to be found on Crawford’s Web site at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jWCRAWFORD/engonly.htm).
Strident anti-multilingualism campaigns resort to the big lie as scare tactic, claiming that English is “under attack.” In fact, the second generation is always fluent in English, and this applies to Latino immigrants as well as others.
Language chauvinism has the same purposes as the anti-immigrant campaign: To create scapegoats for the English-speaking masses so that their attention is deflected from the real causes of our country’s many social problems. If you can convince people that the schools are in trouble because of bilingual education, their attention will be distracted from the fact that huge Republican tax cuts for the rich as well as the wastefulness of an illegal war are starving public education. As in Franco’s Spain, the mystical combination of nation and language is supposed to cover up class contradictions, while the suppression of minority languages ends up dividing, and not uniting, the working class.
But language minorities are fighting back at all levels, from the struggle to renew the Voting Rights Act without gutting its language provisions, to the fight against English-only referenda and legislation at the state and federal levels. This is an essential fight for the working class, just as is the fight against racism and national chauvinism, because of its relationship to class unity. What Should be Fought for in Language Policy?
Progressive people should support language minorities in their struggle by recognizing their right to use and develop their languages in public and private. At the same time, we should be fighting for adequate public funding for the teaching of both English and other languages to the whole population. We should support the Voting Rights Act with its ballot language stipulations and fight for dual language programs in the schools that aim not just to substitute English for the child’s home language, but also to develop fluency in multiple languages for all children, including those whose home language is English.
--Emile Schepers is a contributing writer for Political Affairs. Send your letters to the editor to
