Language Log

This column by Christie Vilsack, whose husband, Tom, then served in the Iowa Senate, appeared in the Mount Pleasant News on Aug. 24, 1994, under the headline "Hablas Ingles? Czy Pani Mowi Po Angielsku?" She wrote a weekly column for the paper called Main Street.

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The time has come to make English the official language of this country.

I realized the situation had finally gotten out of hand when I couldn't even communicate with a woman running the cash register at a grocery store in New Jersey. "To whom do I make this check?" I asked. I thought she said, "Food Rush," but that didn't sound right. So I asked again.

The third time, embarrassed, I asked her to spell it. "Rush," she enunciated carefully. F-R-E-S-H, she spelled. I'm sorry, I said. I'm from Iowa and I'm having a hard time understanding people from New Jersey. "That's OK," she laughed. "I have a hard time understanding foreigners who speak English." I wasn't quite sure how to take that.

Later, on the boardwalk, I heard mothers calling to their children: "I'll meet yoose here after the movie." The only way I can speak like residents of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania is to let my jaw drop an inch and talk with my lips in an O like a fish. I'd rather learn to speak Polish.

Listening to me relate my experiences with the language of New Jersey, our friend Doug from Pittsburgh told about a recent trip to West Virginia where a waitress asked him if he wanted a "side saddle." He looked perplexed and studied the menu to see what that might be. His wife, who speaks British English figured it out. "She's asking you if you want a 'side salad,' " Shelly interpreted.

Her uncle, who speaks with an Oxford accent, was flying recently when his seat mate, an American, asked about his surname. "Robinson," he said proudly, rolling his R's. The woman said, "Excuse me?" and repeated her question. "Robinson," he said again wondering at the look on her face. It turned out that she was asking him what they were "serving" for dinner.

In southern Ohio, my waitress drawled, "what cain I get you, babe?" And I overheard a woman at a nearby table in Keokuk recently say, "She don't pay me no never mind."

Last weekend my college roommate and her children arrived from England. Ilene grew up in Westchester County, New York. She calls the fruit "ahrange" and says the news was "hahrable," except now she does it with an English accent. When her children ask, "Where's the loo?" they mean the bathroom. Her 11-year-old was insulted that we had set up a cot for him. At home that means a crib.

Ilene said when she first moved to England, a hotel clerk innocently asked her, "When do you want me to knock you up in the morning?" All he wanted to do was give her a wake-up call.

English as we know it is too complicated. We have to do something before none of us can understand each. After all, if we're going to expect immigrants to learn our language we have to set a good example. How can foreign-born citizens learn English if we can't speak it ourselves?

Even though we require our children to study the English language for 13 years in school, we can't seem to get people to speak English the way grammarians who write textbooks want us to. There has to be some way to make people continue to study the language until they get it right.

Maybe we could tie getting a driver's license with learning to use English correctly. Or maybe with the advent of the fiber optic network, people could be required to study language via computer five minutes a day the same way we convinced people to take the time to floss and recycle. Or maybe, like universal health care coverage, we could require employers to subsidize language classes for all employees.

Maybe we could tax those who prefer not to be grammatically correct or fine those who choose to speak the dialects of their geographical areas and double the fines for those who use slang or colloquialisms.

Think of the day when everyone in our country will speak English as well as the talking heads who anchor the TV news. Think of the day when American fiction will finally be purged of substandard English, so that reading Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn will seem as strange as reading Canterbury Tales in Old English.

Think of the demand for English teachers! English majors would outnumber business majors five to one. Newspapers would devote pages to the language arts and NBC and CBS would fight over the right to broadcast Monday Night Spelling Bees.

Far-fetched? Yes. ridiculous? Of course. Our language is as flexible and diverse as the millions of people who speak it. I enjoy listening to people who are computer literate speak an English I can't understand. I'd be sad if I never heard another Iowan say, "Where's it at?"

I like hearing historian Shelby Steele, from Mississippi, talk about his "people" the way I talk about "my folks." I like finding in the dictionary that a word I use commonly originated in the Greek language or in Spanish or German.

I am fascinated at the way some African-Americans speak to each other in an English I struggle to understand, then switch to standard English when the situation requires. I'm also excited that American Indian children are using computers to learn the nearly extinct languages of their ancestors. I enjoy teaching foreign children our language to complement the several other languages at which they are already proficient.

I am impressed at the extensive vocabularies of many of the international students in my college English classes who make better use of a dictionary than I do.

My college friend marveled at the fluent English spoken by the electrical engineer from a tiny country near Ethiopia who drove a taxi in Chicago. She feared living in Chicago might corrupt his English.

We don't need to mandate English as the official language of this country. People confronted with English as a second language seem more interested in learning to speak it correctly than those of us born here.