Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

John Cowan wrote:

> Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>
> > Would the Americans here be offended if I stated that there seems to be a
> > considerable sentiment of "linguaphobia" in American society?
>
> >  It just seems pretty
> > extreme to me, no, actually quite _disgusting_, to expel a person for
> > speaking a foreign language (out of necessity too).
>
> Just so, although it is mild compared to some of what has taken place in
> schools: people have had boards hung around their necks or even been beaten
> for speaking their own languages, particularly Native American langs,
> even outside of class!  From the 1930s to the 1970s it was policy to discourage
> the speaking of Native languages, and children were moved thousands of miles
> to restrictive boarding schools to achieve this end.
> One school system in Missouri even decided that everyone who didn't speak
> English like (white) Missourians had a speech defect, and needed remedial
> therapy.
But I think this misses the point, somewhat:  the question is not whether linguistic
repression in America goes on, but *why* that repression goes on, and specifically
whether that repression is a result of American culture.  As I said in my last response,
repression because of linguistic background goes on or has gone on in (virtually) all
societies and nations:  the Germans repressed the Sorbians, the Spanish the Basques and
Catalans, the Turks the Kurds, the French virtually everyone not French. Pointedly,
the Canadians, a nation in almost all ways similarly situated to the US, used identical
methods of repression for its linguistic minorities, the native Americans and to a lesser
extent the Quebecois as well. The list goes on and on.  In all of these cases, language was
a pretext on the part of an elite to manipulate the majority to further its grip on power.  [This
was what Madison warned us about in the Federalist Papers:  it is the rights of the minority
that need to be protected from the majority, not the other way around. By obliterating
distinctions among people, there can no longer be rallying points for discord, because human
beings, being what they are, can use any point of apparent difference to divide.  Hitler in fact
used this to great effect by abolishing the Länder and "atomizing" German society to greater
enhance his personal power at the expense of everyone else.]  There is no reason to think
that America would be any different from all these other cultures, if repression on account
of language is used as the metric, because these actions can be more easily explained as
the result of a general human impulse for power.

On a further theoretical level, the notion of "culture", like that of "language" as we have
recently discussed, is ephemeral and unable to be rigorously or objectively defined.
While I do not believe we must reject it outright, since, also like "language", it is a
useful notion at times, we must always remind ourselves of its inherent weakness as
a starting point for discussion.   So, I would be wary about thinking that Americans
are any more "linguaphobic" as a rule than other countries.  Objectively measurable
facts like monolingualism do not automatically equate to linguistic xenophobia.  America,
and all human societies, are far too complex for such a generalization (as indeed you
noted later).

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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