Language Log

Under the intriguing heading, "After Century in a Log Cabin, Emma Buck Dies at 100 or 101," the NY Times ran an affecting obituary the other day for Emma Buck, who died on the Illinois farm "originally settled by Miss Buck's maternal great-grandparents, Christian and Christina Henke, German immigrants from East Friesland who came by boat from New Orleans and settled in western Illinois, about 35 miles down river from St. Louis, in 1841."

What caught my eye was that Ms. Buck was described in the piece as "speaking in a thick German accent." That's a dramatic reminder of how tenacious  foreign languages could be in rural America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's unimaginable that any child born today whose great-grandparents immigrated to America before the Second World War would still be speaking English with an accent -- in fact such a child is almost certain to grow up knowing no more of his or her ancestral language than the names of a few ethnic dishes, at best. But that's the specter Semantic Compositions considers in a thoughtful post entitled "Huntington contra Nunberg," which contrasts  some of the things I have said about  English-only in  a recent  LanguageLog post and an earlier article in The American Prospect with the views offered by Samuel Huntington in his recent book Who Are We? (The post is the third of a four-part discussion of Huntington,  of which the other parts are here, here and here.)

As SC notes, Huntington acknowledges that patterns of Spanish retention suggest that Hispanics are following the same pattern of linguistic assimilation that earlier generations do -- though, as the Times obituary reminds us, a lot more rapidly than people did a century ago. But Huntington also suggests, as SC puts it, that "this time it's different." SC offers a cogent summary of Huntington's arguments:


SC's response to this is too complex and nuanced for me to summarize here, but he winds up giving credance to the possibility of the specter that Huntington raises, though allowing that "It is probably 30-40 years too early to attempt to verify these claims empirically." And in his fourth and final post, gives a qualified endorsement to some of the symbolic measures that Huntington advocates -- a roll-back of Executive Order 13166, for example, which mandates the accommodation of LEP speakers for programs receiving federal funding (apart from the provision of emergency services), and an end to offering driver's licence tests in languages other than English.

The point about licences SC bases on the assertion that


This example is worth considering. For one thing, I don't know whether most states restrict the issuance of driver's licenses to citizens -- frankly, that claim surprises me -- but I do know that there is no such requirement in many states with large immigrant populations, like New York and California. And a good thing, too. When I'm driving my daughter to school in San Francisco, the last thing I want to run into -- figuratively or literally --  is a driver who is ignorant of the rules of the road because he or she had insufficient competence in English to take the license exam.  Here as elsewhere, that is, making it harder for LEP residents to access various privileges and services doesn't impost a burden merely on them.

More generally, the argument against giving driver's licences to those with limited English proficiency, like the argument for rolling back 13166, rests on some questionable assumptions. First, it assumes that immigrants will learn English only if that becomes a means to attaining certain legal privileges and government services, rather than out of an interest in acquiring the cultural and economic benefits that English proficiency confers -- and by implication, it suggests that immigrants are too ignorant or lazy, or too much under the thrall of native rabble-rousers, to recognize those advantages. Hispanics are right to bristle at that implication, which has no grounding in fact.

Second, it assumes that a language learned for these reasons alone would be the vehicle for inculcating a stronger sense of identification of the national culture. (There have been many cases in which states have been able to impose a national language on minorities who were otherwise reluctant to learn them -- you think of the Slovaks in Hungary, the Hungarians in Slovakia, the Catalonians, and the Irish -- but it's hard to think of any instance in which that has enhanced the sense of identity with the national culture, in the absence of broader cultural and economic opportunity.)

Third, as I suggested in my earlier post, it presumes that English itself can be the bearer of the values implied by the phrase "Anglo-Protestant creed" -- a kind of irredentist Herderianism that linguists, at least, will recognize as a persistent fallacy in thinking about the relation between language and national identity. Somehow, that is, a people doing their daily business in English  will naturally come to identify with the majoritarian  cultural values  it stands in for.  Tell that to the Irish.

In fact, English is too useful and important to imagine that any immigrant group would be willing to turn its back on it in order to maintain a marginal, ghettoized existence. Whether the acquisition of English will continue to bring with it a sense of belonging to a national culture depends entirely on the economic and social opportunities that assimilation offers to immigrants, and on our ability to refashion the idea of American citizenship to meet new challenges. To date, the prospects are every bit as promising as they were a generation ago -- and a lot more so than they were in Emma Buck's day. Paul Starr put this point beautifully in the closing paragraphs of his  review of Huntington's book in the New Republic (unfortunately available only to subscribers):



Posted by Geoff Nunberg at June 24, 2004 02:59 AM