Anatomy of the English-only Movement

English-only activism seemed to come out of nowhere in the 1980s, a phenomenon that few living Americans had ever witnessed. Previously no one had warned that the nation's dominant language was endangered by the encroachment of other tongues – creeping bilingualism – or that it needed 'legal protection' in the United States. Suddenly there were legislative campaigns to give English official status, an idea never proposed at the federal level before 1981, and to restrict the public use of minority languages. Such Official English measures have now been adopted by twenty-three states. In 1996, for the first time, Congress voted on and the House of Representatives approved a bill designating English as the federal government's sole language of official business.

Naturally the targets of this campaign – linguistic minorities, bilingual educators, civil libertarians, Indian tribes, and others – regard restrictionist legislation as a serious threat to their interests. Also not surprisingly, they have tended to characterize the English-only movement as a creature of the far right fringe of American politics, born of racial fear and loathing. Since the mid-1980s, when I started reporting on such groups and their activities, I have been asked whether they can be linked to identifiable villains such as the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party. Such connections would certainly be convenient for opponents. If the English-only campaign could be exposed as an extremist conspiracy, mobilizing against it would be a simple matter. Already this theme has featured in counter-attacks. For the most part, however, it is a product of wishful thinking.

True, the language-restriction movement did grow directly out of the immigration-restriction movement, appealing to many of the same attitudes and followers. The immigration-restriction movement, in turn, has accepted support from eugenicists, Klan sympathizers, and other defenders of white supremacy (Crawford, 1992a). Unsavory associations, to be sure. As we shall see, these links have raised questions about the hidden agenda of Official English. And rightly so. Yet I have uncovered no evidence that groups promoting this campaign follow the leadership or share the ideology of racial extremists.

As I usually tell those who call to inquire about the 'Nazi connection,' I have found some ties that, to me, are far more alarming. The founder of the English-only movement was formerly a national leader in liberal groups including the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, and Zero Population Growth. His organization, US English, has won the endorsement of luminaries across the political spectrum. Assorted bedfellows for the cause include former Senator Eugene McCarthy and former President Richard Nixon; literary figures Saul Bellow, Norman Cousins, and Gore Vidal; actors Whoopi Goldberg, Charleton Heston, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; public broadcasting personalities Julia Child and Alistair Cooke; and journalist Walter Cronkite, once dubbed 'the most trusted man in America.'

Reality must be faced: today's anti-bilingual current is a mainstream phenomenon. How deep it runs and what it signifies are more complex questions. When Americans are asked simply, 'Should English be the official language?' the idea seems extremely popular. Variations on the proposal have received 60–90 percent approval in opinion polls and ballot boxes. This pattern has held true across every demographic category – age, sex, income, education level, political, and ideological affiliation – except for ethnicity. Latinos have been the most consistent opponents of these measures, although even their views have sometimes wavered (Schmid, 1992). On the other hand, when pollsters ask whether government should restrict minority language use or terminate bilingual services to those who depend on them, support for English-only policies falls off significantly. It appears that declarations about the primacy of English are more broadly endorsed than edicts to enforce it.

While Congressional sponsors of Official English have usually been conservatives, the legislation has found enthusiastic champions and opponents on both sides of the aisle. Seldom did it function as a partisan issue before the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, when the new majority began to stress bilingualism as a wedge issue to divide Democratic constituencies. The new House leadership pushed through a measure that largely prohibited the use of languages other than English by the federal government. In response, breaking his long silence on English-only legislation, President Clinton threatened a veto, and the bill died without Senate action (see pp. 31–51).

The English-only Debate

Of course, a mainstream idea is not necessarily a rational one, free of prejudice and paranoia. The campaign to 'officialize' English in the United States rests on the absurd claim that the most successful and dominant world language in history is under siege in its strongest bastion. Proponents argue that:

• English has always been our 'social glue,' our most important 'common bond,' which has allowed Americans of diverse backgrounds to understand each other and overcome differences (a notion seductive to liberals).

• Today's immigrants refuse to learn English, unlike the good old immigrants of yesteryear (flattery for Euro-ethnics), and are discouraged from doing so by government-sponsored bilingual programs.

• Languages are best learned in a situation that forces one to do so – where there's no escape from brutal necessity – unlike the situation in a bilingual classroom (reflexive appeal for 'social issue' conservatives).

• Ethnic leaders are promoting bilingualism for selfish ends: to provide jobs for their constituents and keep them dependent by discouraging them from learning English (courting the Hispanophobes).

• Language diversity inevitably leads to language conflict, ethnic hostility, and political separatism à la Québec (playing to paranoia of all stripes).

Virtually no evidence has been produced on behalf of any of these propositions, all of which are demonstrably false. But in this strange debate, factual support has generally proved unnecessary for English-only proponents to advance their cause. The facts are that, except in isolated locales, immigrants to the United States have typically lost their native languages by the third generation. Historically they have shown an almost gravitational attraction toward English, and there are no signs that this proclivity has changed. To the contrary, recent demographic data analyzed by Veltman (1983, 1988) indicate that rates of anglicization – shift to English as the usual language – are steadily increasing. They now approach or surpass a two-generation pattern among all immigrant groups, including Spanish-speakers, who are most often stigmatized as resistant to English.

Language has seldom functioned as a symbolic identifier in the United States, as an emblem of national pride or a badge of exclusivity. America's founders generally espoused an ideological brand of nationalism that stressed agreement on democratic principles rather than bonds of ethnicity (Morris, 1987; Heath, 1992). Exceptions to this pattern have occurred, first, when attempts were made to differentiate American English from the dialect of the mother country (usually a preoccupation of literati); and second, when language restrictions served as a surrogate for other goals, such as religious intolerance, economic advantage, political repression, or racial discrimination.

About 175 indigenous languages survive in the United States today, according to the best documented estimate (Krauss, 1996), perhaps half the number spoken when Europeans first arrived. Yet only about twenty of these are still being learned by children. Absent an ambitious effort to preserve them, the rest seem doomed to extinction within two or three generations. These are the truly threatened languages in the United States today (see pp. 52–65, 66–83).

Meanwhile, speakers of immigrant languages are on the increase, owing to relatively high levels of immigration. But according to the 1990 census, 97 percent of US residents speak English 'well' or 'very well.' Only 0.8 of one percent speak no English at all, as compared with 3.6 percent in 1890, when the efficiency of counting immigrant populations was far inferior to today's. Proportionally speaking, 4.5 times as many Americans were non-English-speakers a century ago, when schooling in languages other than English was, if anything, more common.

Research on second-language acquisition has increasingly showcased the academic benefits of bilingual instruction. Indeed, when language-minority students fail, it is more likely from too little instruction in their native language than too little English. Along-term national study (Ramírez et al., 1991) has documented higher student achievement in developmental bilingual classrooms than in transitional bilingual or structured English immersion classrooms. Admittedly, such findings are counter-intuitive and poorly understood by a majority of the public. But this hardly explains the vehemence of the opposition, which typically has more to do with political than pedagogical considerations.

Finally, there is no evidence whatsoever of linguistic separatism. Unlike Canada and numerous other countries, the United States has no political parties organized along ethnic lines. Minority politicians and advocacy groups generally pursue an agenda of expanding their constituents' access to, and advancement within, American society.

Why, then, are there growing worries about the erosion of English as our common language? What drives the demands for English-only mandates covering most federal and state government functions? Whence the unprecedented claims that English is the major unifying force among Americans and that, unless we protect it, we could soon face turmoil among warring groups? Where do fears about ethnic and linguistic separatism originate?

Such ideas are hardly restricted to marginal followers; they are propagated by the leaders of the English-only movement. Former Senator Steve Symms of Idaho (1983: S 12643), in introducing a constitutional English Language Amendment, warned that 'countless hundreds of thousands have lost their lives in the language riots of India. Real potential exists for a similar situation to be replayed in the United States.' Linda Chávez (1995), conservative pundit and one-time president of US English, accused bilingual educators of seeking the retrocession of the southwestern United States to Mexico. The late semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, the movement's elder statesman, never tired of quoting Theodore Roosevelt at his most intolerant: 'We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house' ([1919] 1926: XXIV, 554).

English-only arguments are so value-laden in their distaste for diversity, so crude in their analogies with other nations, so credulous about the power of social engineering, and so bereft of factual evidence that they are difficult to take seriously. Indeed, it is hard to find in the literature an intellectually coherent statement of the case for Official English legislation – as I learned in compiling an anthology on the subject (Crawford, 1992b).

What is really going on here? What do English-only advocates hope to gain from this campaign? What are its social and ideological roots? Does its popularity stem primarily from ethnocentrism, a (mostly) white backlash against immigrants from the Third World? Or primarily from a conception of 'American identity' that happens to differ from that of linguistic minorities?

After tracing voting patterns, attitude surveys, and legislative debates, social scientists remain divided over these questions. Schmid (1996) favors the former explanation, citing an 'ideology of exclusion' that manifests itself in 'a symbolic clash between a dominant and minority culture' (p. 54). Other factors driving the English-only movement include 'the perceived costs' of newcomers in increased welfare and unemployment, anxieties about cultural change, and 'the ascendancy of anti-immigrant organizations' (p. 63). By contrast, Citrin et al. (1990) characterize the English-only movement as essentially a nationalist phenomenon. 'Without denying the role played by anti-minority sentiments,' they argue, support for Official English mainly reflects a 'positive attachment to the symbols of nationhood' – in particular, 'the consensual belief that the English language is and should remain a defining characteristic of American society' (p. 549).

No doubt both conclusions are supportable on the basis of opinion polls, which reveal varied and contradictory attitudes on this issue. Yet the English-only movement cannot be clearly understood without looking beyond what its followers say about their beliefs and intentions. To discover the sources of English-only ideology, it is necessary to probe the underlying causes and uses of language restrictionism. In advancing my own answers to these questions, I will begin by reviewing the historical precedents that exist for language conflicts in the United States as they involve both immigrants and colonized peoples, and then draw on these themes in analyzing our contemporary language politics.

Historic Patterns of Language Conflict

First, a word of caution. Historical authority has been much abused in the English-only debate, as partisans try to buttress their positions, pro or con, by citing 'traditions' of linguistic uniformity or diversity, ethnic assimilation or separatism, cultural intolerance or libertarianism. Since contradictory traditions have flourished, ample evidence can be marshaled to support, or debunk, any of these interpretations. Despite their differences, partisans on both sides tend to share a fundamentally a historical approach to language policy. They rely on free-floating ideologies (the melting pot, racism, 'linguicism') rather than on social, economic, or political factors to explain events. In fact, there has been little ideological consistency in responses toward minority languages in the United States. Policies have ranged from repression to restriction to tolerance to accommodation, depending on forces that usually have little to do with language.

Ideologies, which take on an autonomous life of their own, do play a significant causal role in intergroup conflicts. Yet it must be remembered that conceptions of race, ethnicity, and language are hardly universal, transcending time and circumstance. They are socially constructed. How we think about them is grounded in material realities – demographic patterns, political alignments, economic conditions – which are ever changing. Terms like bilingualism and language minority have acquired special meanings over the past two decades in the context of increased immigration and its transformation of once-homogeneous communities. Ethnocentrism took different forms in the 19th century, when few Americans would have thought of Norwegian homesteaders, Chinese contract laborers, Italian textile workers, New Mexican vaqueros, and Lakota warriors as a single class defined by their limited English skills. Attitudes and policies toward these groups varied significantly, depending on their numbers, political power, economic status, territorial position, land ownership, military prowess, 'racial' distinctiveness, and a host of other traits. Especially in the case of language, a secondary theme in US ethnic conflicts, generalizations about an American tradition – whether bilingual or 'unilingual' – become meaningless.

Where historical analysis is valuable is in exposing the forces at work in shaping language attitudes and language policy. While each of these instances is unique, a product of its own period and place, taken together they exhibit significant parallels. Thus history can provide a kind of depth perception in viewing today's English-only phenomenon – an approach that analyzes language politics in its social context and highlights its interdependence with non-linguistic factors. Along these lines, I will advance the following hypothesis:

Language conflicts generally incorporate symbolic struggles over cultural, religious, ethnic, or national identity. Yet they represent more than contending philosophies of assimilation and pluralism, disagreements about the rights and responsibilities of citizens, or debates over the true meaning of 'Americanism.' Ultimately language politics are determined by material interests – struggles for social and economic supremacy – which normally lurk beneath the surface of the public debate.