United States language bill counters an empty threat

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): On the first of August, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill making English the official language of the United States. Take that, Spanish-speaking dogs!

One of the obsessions of current American politics is the fact that over 10 percent of the republic's population (counting illegal immigrants) has Spanish as a mother tongue. The proportion is far higher in regions along the Mexican border and in south Florida, and backers of the bill raised the specter of the eventual partition of the United States if the tide of Spanish is not stopped. Bilingualism is bad. Look at Canada, for example.

"They started recognizing French as an official language...and now Canada is on the verge of a break-up," explained Bob Livingston of Louisiana, chairman of the House appropriations committee.

"Ghetto mentalities. The destabilization of Quebec...the devaluation of the very idea of a common nationality," chimed in his colleague Robert Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican. And the very same week, across the border in Canada, some northern, French- speaking rednecks were doing their best to confirm the worst fears of the southern rednecks.

Quebec, though always mainly a French-speaking territory, has also been home to a substantial English-speaking minority for over two centuries. But English, which had been one of Quebec's two official languages ever since the 1760s, was deprived of that status after the election of the first separatist (Parti Quebecois) government in 1976.

The PQ, which preaches that French can only survive in North America within a unilingual and independent Quebec republic, even made it illegal to display commercial signs in English. A later, less dogmatic Quebec government passed new legislation in 1993 that allowed shops to post signs in English too (provided that the French signs were twice as big, or twice as numerous) -- but this legal change had little practical effect at the time.

Most shops in Quebec, even in Montreal where the bulk of the English-speaking minority lives, stuck to French-only signs, in order to avoid attacks by nationalists who take the sight of English as a personal affront. So recently a grassroots English- rights movement began organizing consumer boycotts of stores that did not display even the limited English signs that the law allows.

This engendered outrage in the PQ government, back in power in Quebec since 1994. Quebec's Deputy Premier Bernard Landry warned that if the English insisted on exercising their rights under the law, then the law would just have to be changed.

On July 31, after the campaign about signs had won major victories in Montreal, Louise Beaudoin, provincial minister responsible for the French Language Charter, repeated the PQ's official position: "We want Montreal to be massively French in its signage, in its language of work..." -- regardless of the fact that over half a million Montrealers actually speak English.

This sort of ugly intolerance in Canada is grist for the mill of American rednecks demanding that the U.S. government only communicate with its citizens in English. It's particularly useful because the language being persecuted in Quebec is English: it can even be used to conjure up nightmare images of the last anglos in Spanish-speaking Texas fleeing across the new border to safety.

But in both Quebec City and Washington, the politicians demanding the suppression of other languages on the grounds that their own community's language and dominant political position is at risk secretly know that is a lie. For English is no more threatened in the U.S. than French is imperiled in Quebec.

What Quebec's experience over more than two centuries since British troops stormer Quebec City in 1759 really proves is that even conquest rarely changes the language of the local majority.

All the western territories in the Great Lakes-Mississippi basin where French explorers had not yet been followed by French settlers -- from Detroit, Duluth and Des Moines to St. Louis, Baton Rouge and New (Nouvelle) Orleans -- quickly filled up with English- speaking immigrants instead. But Quebec itself remained French.

Indeed, since the province became part of the otherwise mostly English-speaking country of Canada in 1867, the proportion of French-speakers in Quebec has grown at every decennial Canadian census, from 75 percent in 1867 to about 89 percent today. But the pretense that English threatens French is needed to justify intolerant behavior in Quebec, just as the assertion that Spanish threatens English excuses all sorts of bad behavior in the U.S.

The truth is that the primacy of English has never been at risk in the United States, not even in the latter half of the 19th century when the United States went through decades of such massive immigration that a majority of the country's residents were foreign-born. Many of the newcomers never fully mastered English (which is why subtle linguistic devices like irony virtually dropped out of American popular culture for almost a century). But their children did.

That's what usually happens with immigrants: the second generation begins to adopt the local language, culture and values, and by the third generation they are natives. Second-generation Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. almost all speak English, just as the second generation of Asian immigrants in Britain speaks English, and the second generation of Algerian immigrants in France speaks French, and the second generation of Turks in Germany speaks German, and all the Koreans in Japan speak Japanese.

In the United States, President Clinton may ultimately veto the English-only bill as he promised, depending on which way the electoral wind is blowing. In Quebec, the chances for a sensible and tolerant outcome are less good, because the tribalists actually control the government. But in both cases, the 'problem' is merely a pretext concocted by cynical or paranoid politicians. There is no language threat.