Language is a mystery that has baffled science and religion since the first recorded utterance of upright man. The Bible makes much mention of the cacophony of languages in the Tower of Babel story, and modern-day anthropologists and linguists still ruminate with no consensus over just what piece of the genetic or environmental puzzle contains the answer to the existence and persistence of varied and distinct languagesoften spoken only a few miles apart.
It is lamented that today only 6700 languages remain on earth. This seems an ample number considering the march of nationalism over the past 150 years during which formerly distinct local languages and dialects were passed by or forgotten in the process of the formation of political statehood. In Latin America in the 1820s and 1830s Spanish and Portuguese replaced native dialects during independence from Spain and Portugal. Later, in Europe, the rise of democracy and dominant tongues left behind dozens of local languages that are now forgotten. The new nations formed after World War II in the wake of the end of European empires in Africa, India, the Pacific and the Caribbean suppressed native languages and dialects to allow the language of statehood to take control of public life.
The newest catalyst to the unification of language is the galloping pace of free market trade and globalization since the 1980s, spurred to breakneck pace with the ensuing collapse of the Soviet monolith and the end of socialist command economies. Now the strain on local languages is not from the forces that build new nations, but rather economic and cultural forces that require the nations themselves to forge a global method of communication, a lingua franca for the New Millennium, an overarching language that transcends local dialect for the purpose of trade, finance, diplomacy and cultural communication.
The need to communicate
In the West, the ancient Greeks get credit for creating the first known lingua franca to facilitate commerce, diplomacy and colonial governance amongst speakers of hundreds of different tongues. Later, the Roman Empire, lording over thousands of local languages, caused Latin to become the lingua franca of the known world. After the fall of the western Roman empire, chaos reigned as no ruler or language could control the warring tribes left in the void of the Roman collapse. Latin went out of use except in the Roman Catholic Church whose priests and scribes kept it alive in the Dark Ages, allowing its survival today as the lingua franca of scholarship and scientific classification.
In the 9th century AD, Charlemagne created the Frankish empire in what is now present day France and Germany, causing French to become the lingua franca of Europe. Today, French survives as the language of diplomacy around the world. German rose from the competing mlange of languages left over from Roman and Frankish days to survive with Latin as the lingua franca of the world of science, and Italian survived from its Roman roots to serve as the language of music and art criticism. In the 20th century, Russian was spread by totalitarianism as a lingual blanket over hundreds of languages and dialects in the former Soviet Union, but was unable to take hold except through force. Chinese, and its myriad dialects, and Japanese serve as the lingua francas of the Oriental world, and, as we are learning the hard way, Arabic, the ancient lingua franca of the Near East, is very much in use today.
The winner
English began its steady climb to world dominance in the modern era in the 16th century with the rise of the British Empire. Riding on the waves of trade and a strong navy, English spread as the dominant lingua franca of the world. The founding of the United States, the most successful nation in history in terms of economic and military power, caused English to supersede all previous lingua francas. Technology and free market world trade assure that it will continue to be the worlds dominant tongue, the medium of communication and the language of democracy that all nations must master to survive in the global economy.
All leaders of foreign nations now speak English in order to communicate with the rest of the world, as do bond traders, tech geeks, scholars, diplomats, business men and womenjust about everybody who is a player in the world economy. Air traffic controllers exemplify this global usage of English. Ever wonder how an Air China pilot communicates to the tower while landing in Moscow? Through English, proving it to be truly the first and foremost international lingua franca.
Bite your tongue
Then why is it that English has been under attack by radicals of the Left since the 1960s? Why aren't we smiling broadly that our language is the dominant lingua franca and is likely to remain so far into the unknown future?
It goes back to the Marxist inspired campus activists of 35 years ago who signed on to the doctrine that America was a corrupt, capitalistic, exploitive and imperialistic evil power that needed to be brought down. The war in Vietnam was the focus but the intent was to bring revolution to Main Street by any means, including violence.
An instructive anecdote from the era occurred at San Francisco State University when radical students and outside activists occupied the administration building where SI Hayakawa sat as president of the school. Hayakawa stood his ground against the demonstrators and gained popular attention, which he used to run for the United States Senate in 1972. He won and for 18 years until his death while in office, he introduced at each session of the Senate a bill to make English the official language of the United States. Each time his bill failed.
Thats right, English, while embraced worldwide as the modern lingua franca, is not our official language. Actually, we don't have one and Hayakawa knew why: Anti-American activists see English as the language of oppression, not democracy and freedom, and they have maintained an undercurrent of opposition to it even in the wake of the American victory in the Cold War. This explains why anti-American activists lobbied for federal monies to support English as a second language in our school systems, not the first language, as is consistent with our history. The activists have worked behind the scenes in the labyrinth of the federal bureaucracy to force the English as a second language requirement as a last-ditch stand against the America they hate.
The U.S. is a nation of immigrants, from the early settlers through the massive waves of new citizens who arrived in the late 19th century. These new Americans learned English out of pride for their new country and out of necessity to engage in the capitalistic system. It made sense then and it makes sense now, yet the movement to prevent the recent wave of immigrants, mostly from Latin America, from becoming integrated and successful citizens by not teaching them to learn English as the foundation for their success as Americans, is alive and well funded. Imagine moving to a foreign country and discovering that the government allows you to enforce the use of your native tongue by law. Its ridiculous, yet that is what is happening in America today.
The attack of the deconstructionists
This guerilla war to demean English is a component of the over-all enduring campaign to malign the American system. The student radicals, now grown-ups with tenure, have carried the culture war to the liberal arts with a strategy to tear down Western values through a doctrine vaguely named Multiculturalism and its tactical twin, politically correct behavior and language. And language plays the key role in this canard. According to the campus practitioners of Multiculturalism, the English language is used as a weapon by the dominant culture to browbeat the underachieving ones. The Ebonics movement serves as a potent example of the lengths the language radicals will go to denigrate English.
Essentially the theory starts with the premise that language prejudices the value of texts. Therefore, the campus professorate teach students to deconstruct written works. For example, a professor will stand in front of a class and hold up a sonnet by Shakespeare and a box of cereal and charge students to translate the words and letters of both texts into symbols, a process called symbiotics. After completion of this task, students can see that the words of Shakespeare and the advertising language on the back of a box of Cheerios are basically the same when deconstructed.
The end result is to demonstrate that our culture ascribes value to the words of Shakespeare over the words on the cereal box only because we are conditioned to do so by our oppressive, chauvinistic and homophobic white male dominated culture. The goal is to convince students that after the oppressive words are deconstructed, no nation or culture is better than another, that the architecture of New Guinea is equal to the cathedrals of Europe, that the oral tradition of stone-age tribal societies is as significant as the literature of Europe and so on and so on, the final conclusion being that what the West calls achievement is actually merely propaganda forced on citizens by the ruling elite via the English language.
Multiculturalism, masquerading as an inclusive doctrine of the liberal arts, is actually a purposeful campaign to bring down Western values, most notably the English language. In post-modern deconstructionist departments of English and other liberal arts programs, Multiculturalism is directly related to the movement now labeled politically correct, an offshoot of the language component of the doctrine. In a typical contradiction common to intellectual constructs, while language is on one hand criticized as a code to keep people subjected, it is also adopted by campus radicals as a potent weapon to enforce speech codes that insulate alleged victimized cultures and individuals from criticism. The PC police use language to enforce their rules, just as they say the West uses language to suppress other less-achieving cultures.
The enemy within
In an irony that surpasses comprehension, The Modern Language Association, an organization of English teachers, is the leader of the politically correct movement to bring down English. There has been a constant flow of rhetoric from MLA meetings criticizing English as racist, imperialistic, chauvinistic and homophobic. The result is that the guardians of our language are actually its worst enemy.
Other Western nations protect their language. The French Academy, attuned to Frances high regard for itself, vehemently monitors usage in classrooms and in the media. In Russia, the Orthographic Commission of the Department of Language and Literature is meeting regularly to protect proper usage of Russian. English, however, is not protected by its cultural elite. Instead it is criticized and de-emphasized, most notably on college campuses that are turning out graduates who are reading-deficient and writing-handicapped. Worse, these students have been denied the pride of ownership of their tongue and the knowledge and joy it can bring to create a fulfilling life.
It is high time that this country adopt English as our official language before we lose our national identity, our cultural inheritance and our system of government. It is also time to investigate what is happening on our college campuses where post-modern doctrine, radical deconstruction theory, Multiculturalism and its twin, the politically correct movement and the thought police that go with it, should be called on the carpet to explain why they are taking public money and private tuition to undermine and destroy our heritage. Lets tell them in plain English we want our language back.