They come in droves, and are becoming the majority, except in one or two counties. Few of their children in the country learn English. They import books from Mexico, and of the six local TV stations, two are entirely Spanish, two half Spanish half English, and just two are all English. They have one Spanish newspaper, and one half Spanish. Advertisements intended for everybody are now printed in Spanish and English, the signs in our streets are in both languages, and in some places only Spanish. They write their legal documents in their own language, which (though I think they shouldn’t be) are allowed in our courts, where there’s so much Spanish nowadays that they constantly need more interpreters. I suppose in a few years we’ll need them in the Assembly too, to tell one half of our legislature what the other half says.
Hearing someone speak an unknown foreign language is enjoyable for some, bewildering and even frightening for many others. Hearing a foreign language in their own country is, for millions of Americans, downright infuriating. It vexed so many Americans that the U.S. Senate, in 2006, passed an amendment to a bill declaring English the “national language” of the United States, a status it had happily done without since 1776. The amendment would also have declared that no one would have rights to government services in any languages except English, except such rights as already guaranteed by law. Then-Senator Barack Obama voted against the amendment, which died anyway in the House of Representatives.
We have seen how so many of the conflicts of the world arose from the idea of nationalism and that nationalism, for many, included something like “all of the speakers of my language should have a state to themselves—without speakers of any other language.” But the United States was largely immune to this thinking. After all, all white Americans were descended from immigrants themselves, and for centuries many have proudly carried their heritage with them in happy hyphenation. From Germans and Scandinavians and Irish in the middle of the nineteenth century to Italians, Poles, and Jews at the turn of the twentieth, America has continually been enriched by immigration, new ingredients to the melting pot.
Only recently, with a long-term, heavy-flow history of immigration, has this started to change. Hispanics in particular are seeking special legal rights to use their language in public life and cluster in closed communities that slow their transition to English. America is in danger of becoming a bilingual society. As the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington put it in his 2004 book Who Are We?, the bilingualism of cities such as Miami offers a clue to what the United States may look like in the future if nothing is done. Other language groups—Asians on the West Coast, in particular—cluster in large enough numbers that they too may someday seek special language rights, threatening to destroy America’s English-speaking unity and turn it into a modern Babel. Today’s immigrants simply have too little in common with the mainly European-descended whites who came a hundred years or more ago, and they are unwilling to assimilate. A softheaded, mostly left-leaning belief in “multiculturalism” abets those who would adulterate the identity of the United States. Throw in those who would sanction “Ebonics,” and English-speaking America may be headed for crisis.
All of the above beliefs are widespread—and wrong. They get the history, at both ends, nearly exactly backward. America has a long track record of nativism, including fear and distrust of immigrants speaking languages other than English. States and the federal government have made nervous attempts to ban the use of foreign languages in the public square for a hundred years. Most of those efforts have been spottily enforced embarrassments. Nonetheless, even without official shoves or punishments, the immigrants whose languages so worried our forebears, wherever they came from, have become fully Americanized, most of them monolingual—in English. Don’t believe me? Try finding a German-speaker who doesn’t speak English in Texas, once home to a wave of German-speaking immigrants to towns such as Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, and Weimar. Pick your traditional ethnic enclave—Italians in Brooklyn, Scandinavians in Minnesota—and you would be hard-pressed to find someone raised from childhood in those communities who today doesn’t speak English.
Is today’s immigration from the Spanish-speaking world different, though? We hear Oprima dos para español on the phone; was there ever any Drücken Sie zwei für Deutsch during the period of heavy German immigration? Of course not, because there were no automated phone menus. But lost to our shortsighted vision of history is the fact that German-speakers were so heavily concentrated at the turn of the twentieth century that they shed their German more slowly than today’s Hispanic immigrants are losing Spanish, according to the most careful studies. We have seen fears for English, and skittishness toward a foreign-speaking community in our midst, many times before.
The irony, of course, is that Americans’ fears for English is misplaced because English is, to put it simply, the most wildly successful language in the history of the world. Though Mandarin has the most speakers, nearly all of them are in China. English boasts half a billion native speakers and is the official language of at least one country on all six inhabited continents. It is the language of the world’s only superpower. It is the world’s auxiliary language, learned by Swedes and Italians so that they can speak to each other. It travels as part of the world’s most successful pop culture, whether films, music, or television. And all this, of course, is given a massive boost by the Internet, which as it brings people from around the world together puts an even bigger premium on a common medium of communication: English. Saying that English is “under threat” is something like saying that gravity and the use of the fork are under threat. It was once said that “rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.” But English isn’t even just as dominant as U.S. Steel in its near-monopolistic heyday. Today, Microsoft would be a better comparison: millions of us can’t get through a day without using a Microsoft product, especially its ubiquitous Windows operating system. But even an analogy with Microsoft can’t do full justice to the worldwide power of English. One can imagine Microsoft disappearing in fifty years. English is all but certain to be even more dominant then than it is today. There simply has never been a linguistic success story like it in world history.
The above is so obvious to the rest of the world that it takes an American to miss it. The last chapter looked at language purism practiced by official government bodies: bureaucrats and academicians who toil away coining technical and cultural terms so that their languages will resist importing English words. But countries do another kind of planning, too: bolstering the status of their language as a whole vis-à-vis others. They might forbid government work from being done in English, forbid English advertising or business communication, even specify a maximum amount of television or radio content in English (and a minimum in the local language). Officials who can speak English might refuse to do so even in international settings. They might refuse to allow English to be designated the main or only official working language of a multilingual body. The overarching position is that other major languages must be given an equal seat at the table in international arenas and must be legally protected from English at home.
No people in the world is as famous for doing this as the French. France aggressively promotes the use of its language in international forums: the European Union, the Council of Europe, the United Nations, and the like. France assures that any prospective secretary-general of the United Nations speak passable French, threatening a veto of any candidate who doesn’t.
If English is the world’s Microsoft, then French could be its Apple. Like Apple’s sleek silver computers, French is the self-consciously cool alternative choice of many creatives and thinkers who hate the idea of relying on the subpar product that represents the behemoth. If it is a minority preference, the choice to use French is one that many make with pride, and with disdain for those who can’t or won’t. Think about the architect who works from your local coffee shop and wouldn’t dream of working on a PC (even though he’s perfectly capable of doing so, with the same end result). That’s how much of the world feels about French.*
The French and the Americans often see themselves as polar opposites, but they are not always so different. Both are insecure, and for related reasons. Both are nervous in the face of globalization. Both are nervous about their failures to fully assimilate big immigrant populations. These challenges have shaken both countries’ very sense of identity.
The United States and France are also more alike than they think for deeper reasons: traditions of liberty and universal values that rocked the world when they emerged from two revolutions that took place just thirteen years apart. Both America and France have given themselves the mission to remake the world with their values. (In the colonial period, the French called it, charmingly without artifice, la mission civilizatrice.) The spread of a language is seen as a proxy for success in this endeavor.
And finally, both great countries need to relax. The English language is not threatened; nor is French. The “idea of America” is not threatened, either, however much Samuel Huntington thought it might be. And Charles de Gaulle’s certaine idée de la France continues to be a big part of the French identity. Whatever powers may rise in Asia and elsewhere, America and France still have much to offer the world—and in English and French.
Samuel Huntington wrote in Who Are We? that “The role of English in schools and other contexts had come up before in the United States, but the profusion and intensity of controversies at the national as well as state and local levels [in the 1980s and 1990s] were unprecedented.” Anti-immigration Republicans can often be heard saying the same thing. In January 2009 a Nashville city councilman who sponsored an English-only bill, Eric Crafton, told The New York Times that some California legislators needed interpreters because they couldn’t speak English. He didn’t want California’s future for his city, which had seen a boom in immigration. To make his point, Crafton introduced his motion in Japanese, which he had learned in the navy. He wanted to show that he wasn’t against foreign languages in every way but merely pro-English. He worried that it was possible to live—even be elected to office—without learning English in America.
But in fact, as the Times later corrected, Crafton was wrong. There are no California legislators who can’t speak English. Crafton got the factoid from a television program, he said later in retraction. And Huntington was wrong, too. The fevered defense of English in the face of allegedly overwhelming waves of immigrants is no new phenomenon. The epigraph beginning this chapter is not a contemporary complaint about Spanish-speaking immigration to the United States. With “German” changed to “Spanish,” “printing houses” changed to “TV stations,” and the wording modernized slightly, it comes from a letter by Benjamin Franklin in 1753. The original reads
They come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two counties. Few of their children in the country learn English. They import many books from Germany, and of the six printing houses in the province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English, they have one German News-Paper, and one half German. Advertisements intended for to be general are now printed in Dutch and English, the signs in Our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German, they began of late all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (tho’ I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in Our Courts, where the German business so increases, that there’s continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few Years They will also be necessary in The Assembly, to tell one half of Our Legislature what the other half says.
Franklin goes on to make sweeping generalizations about German immigrants: that America got only the most ignorant of the Germans, that they had a tendency to cussedness and rebellion, and so forth. This echoes Samuel Huntington’s worry about what he patronizingly called the mañana (“tomorrow”) culture of Latin America: trust of family and friends over society and public institutions, lack of economic ambition or planning for the future, and so forth. Franklin’s Germans and Huntington’s Hispanics stand in negative contrast to what Huntington called America’s “Anglo-Protestant core.”
Not all early Americans worried about foreign-language speakers coming to American shores as Franklin did. The French Revolution sent French émigrés in large numbers. The Germans continued coming after the American Revolution. They established their own schools and churches in self-contained colonies, using their own languages almost exclusively. The early American leaders, with exceptions like Franklin, did not worry too much about this. They thought about language like they thought about much of the rest of politics: people should be left alone unless there was a good reason to interfere in their lives. The royal language academies of France and Spain were well known but seen as monarchical examples to be avoided. Meanwhile, Benjamin Rush, a Founding-Father-era congressman, wrote that a German college, specifically designed to assimilate incomers and their families with language and other patriotic lessons, would be the best way to integrate Germans: “It will open the eyes of the Germans to a sense of the importance, and utility of the English language and become perhaps the only possible means, consistent with their liberty, of spreading a knowledge of the English language among them.”
The attitude toward assimilating immigrants persisted in its split personality. On one side, roughly speaking, was the notion that people would assimilate when they were good and ready and couldn’t be forced to do so. On the other was the idea that life for non-English-speakers had to be made uncomfortable to make them learn English. It was the former, accommodationist principle that led to a 1795 bill in Congress—which failed by one vote—that all laws be printed and disseminated in German as well as English. (This is, by the way, the source of a persistent myth that German was nearly made America’s official language.)
The early American fear about German was not due only to the existence of big German communities in America. Further contributing to the new country’s sense of insecurity was the fact that German had just enjoyed centuries of prominence in science, literature, and philosophy in Europe, while America was finding its voice as a culture as well as a republic. The same worry led Noah Webster to distance American English from that of Britain with his spelling reforms.
While most immigrant groups dropped their languages in a typical pattern of two to three generations, the Germans held on the longest. They lived in large and contiguous communities refreshed by immigration, particularly in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. Some schools in Cincinnati (where three-quarters of immigrants were German) spent half the day teaching in German—a program that persisted from 1840 to the First World War. Denver opened a German-only school in 1870. Other schools taught at least some of the time in German, especially in cities such as Indianapolis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Saint Louis.
The Germans were the biggest and most persistent group of foreign-language speakers. But other foreign bogeymen, with new origins, faiths, and languages, would appear over the nineteenth century. In the middle of that century, the American Party (most frequently known as the “Know-Nothings”) won several big election victories in places like Massachusetts and Illinois. The Know-Nothings worried primarily about Catholic immigration, especially that from Ireland. They feared a popish plot to flood the Protestant-majority country with loyal disciples; like many paranoid movements in American history, its adherents kept it a partly secret society. (They were told to say merely “I know nothing” when asked about it.)
Immigrants have tended to cause the biggest backlashes, unsurprisingly, when they cluster. Hence even white, Protestant Scandinavians were the target of anti-immigrant sentiments in places such as the upper Midwest, where laws aimed at “promoting” English were targeted at Swedish and Finnish. But as today, numbers strengthened the immigrants’ hands: large German-speaking communities successfully pressured local politicians to allocate funding for German-language education. In 1900 fully 4 percent of students in the United States were being taught at least partly in German—a far higher proportion than all bilingual programs for all languages combined today.
It was the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century that saw waves of immigration—and backlash—that most resemble today’s. It was the biggest period of immigration in America’s history; in 1920, 13.6 percent of the population was foreign-born, as against 11.7 percent in 2003.
Moreover, the backgrounds of the newcomers didn’t make their arrival easier. Many were Catholic, coming from Ireland, Poland, or Italy. Pogroms in Eastern Europe led to an influx of Yiddish-speaking Jews, linguistic outsiders with the double disadvantage of not being Christian. Overall, 27 million people came to the United States in the fifty years from 1880 to 1930.
But the flow would be shut off quickly. The First World War led to a boost in red-white-and-blue nativism across the board. German signs were destroyed on the streets and German newspapers required to publish English translations, putting many of them out of business. Some states and towns forbade German conversations over the telephone, and one Ohio town introduced fines for speaking German on the street.
The nativist wave was symbolic as well as practical. Washington McCormick, a congressman from Montana, proposed in 1923 making “American” the official language of the United States. He was motivated, perhaps surprisingly, not by the most recent waves of immigration but by a still-existing Anglophobia, sensing that too many Americans continued to live in Britain’s cultural and political shadow. McCormick’s national bill failed, but it sparked a wave of similar bills in state legislatures. Only one succeeded, in Illinois, though “English” was quietly reintroduced in 1969.
The state of Nebraska went furthest, however. In the same First World War–era fervor, it scrapped an earlier requirement that official proceedings of county boards be published in German-, Swedish-, and Czech-language newspapers. More sweepingly, in 1919 it banned the teaching of any subject whatsoever in any language other than English—and that included the teaching of foreign languages themselves before the eighth grade. The law applied not only to public schools but even to private and religious ones. Even in private settings, no one could be taught any language other than English. Exceptions were made for religious teaching (and then only on Sundays or other recognized Sabbath days) and parents teaching their children at home. Coincidentally or not, it is at that age, around the onset of puberty, that children tend to lose their cognitive abilities to learn foreign languages to near-native skill. Nebraska was taking no chances.
The state’s version of “English only” would make modern English-only activists cringe. The measures were clearly xenophobic, aimed, in particular, at Germans and German-Americans. The arguments were often primitively Whorfian. One lawmaker said, “I, for one, believe that there is no language spoken by man that breathes the spirit of American liberty like the language that has come down to us from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers.” Proponents agreed that something about English was particularly suited to the ideals of the republic.
The law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923. The “Sunday only, and only for religious teaching” provision was key: Nebraska was forbidding religious instruction, foreign language or no, six days a week. The defendant had committed the crime of teaching Bible stories to a ten-year-old from a book in German in the parochial school of a Lutheran church. The Supreme Court of Nebraska had returned to Whorfian thinking when it upheld the law, arguing that to teach a child even a separate subject (religion) in a foreign language
was to rear them with that language as their mother tongue. It was to educate them so that they must always think in that language, and, as a consequence, naturally inculcate in them the ideas and sentiments foreign to the best interests of this country.
The federal Supreme Court disagreed. It did not specifically reply to Nebraska’s coarse psychologizing that learning a foreign language “naturally inculcate[s] in [children] the ideas and sentiments foreign to the best interests of this country.” It also agreed that public schools could, certainly, be required to teach English. But to prohibit a private school from teaching anything in any foreign language was unconstitutional. Even if the promotion of a common language was a legitimate interest, “a desirable end cannot be promoted by prohibited means,” Justice James Clark McReynolds reasoned.
The foreigner-phobic feeling in the land was not banished, however. In the early twentieth century, the spotlight of suspicion swung around once again to the most “undesirable” immigrants: often Catholic, Jewish, or nonwhite, from southern and Eastern Europe or from Asia. New laws from Congress included the unsubtly named National Origins Act, which slammed the door to immigration completely for Japanese immigrants and limited the numbers coming from the European countries. The Chinese Exclusion Act had done the same for that nationality in 1882. (One almost misses the days when lawmakers were so frank in naming bills. One wonders what the USA PATRIOT Act would have been called back then.)
At the San Gennaro festival, a cheesy but fun annual street fair of Italian-American pride in New York’s shrinking Little Italy, I once saw a T-shirt for sale reading “Welcome to America: Now Speak English.” Yes, in Little Italy.
In fact, the United States has a remarkable ability to grind down foreigners’ languages, turning them into monoglot Anglophones, no matter where they came from. I live in another heavily Italian neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn. Statues of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Saint Anthony of Padua abound; Italy’s red, white, and green tricolor dots shop windows. Al Capone was married down the street. There are enough Italians that, a few blocks from my apartment, there is a social club for immigrants from a single Italian town, Pozzallo (in Sicily). The block was ceremonially renamed “Citizens of Pozzallo Way.”
And yes, you can hear Italian on the streets and in the parks—but almost exclusively among people over seventy. They all speak English, too, of course, but Italian is both more comfortable and a mark of solidarity with one another. One occasionally hears a middle-generation adult speaking Italian with her parents, but that is rare. And though the kids wear the blue jersey of the Italian soccer team (or, more likely, Sopranos T-shirts), I have never once heard someone under forty speak Italian in the neighborhood.
In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt, by then out of the White House for ten years, feared publicly that America was becoming a “polyglot boarding house,” in a famous speech that modern opponents of immigration have eagerly e-mailed each other in recent years. But linguists have a different nickname for America: “the graveyard of languages.” Despite past waves of immigration—large and sustained surges that created big and homogeneous foreign communities—inevitably social forces render immigrants’ children English-speakers and their grandchildren monoglot English-speakers.
The process is virtually identical across groups and has been the same for two centuries of American history. The first generation to come arrives speaking only the language of the home country. These new immigrants may learn English imperfectly; those who come as adults will nearly all have an accent. (Henry Kissinger, for example, arrived as a teenager and had not shed his accent seven decades later; his brother, a few years younger, had no German accent.) It is the presence of this first generation in large numbers that gives native-born Americans the idea that immigrants can’t or won’t learn English.
But the key isn’t the arriving generation; it’s the overwhelming forces that turn the first generation born in America into Anglophones. It is, to put it simply, nearly impossible to raise a child in the United States without the child learning English; it would require isolation from the outside world bordering on child abuse. Children born in America, and even those arriving at a young age, inevitably pick up English.
Of course, members of this bridge generation will typically speak the old country’s language, too, learning it in the kitchen from their parents. But it is the bridge generation’s own behavior as parents that eventually, and inevitably, dooms the “heritage” language. Parents are not stupid, nor do they typically perform cruel tricks on their children. Parents of children in the United States know that wherever they live, however many bilingual signs surround them, however many phone menus offer “Oprima dos para español,” and however many fellow speakers of their language surround them, their children will need English to survive and thrive in America.
Thus I have never met a child born and raised in the United States who doesn’t speak English, but I know many who have never learned their grandparents’ language and often not even their parents’. Cliff, a journalist friend of mine, was charmingly given the English name closest to his Chinese one, Shan (“mountain”). But he doesn’t speak the Mandarin of his mother and father. They came from China but sought to speak English to him as often as possible. Minh Thu, another friend, was born in Vietnam and arrived in the United States as a young girl. Unlike Cliff, she speaks fluent Vietnamese—but only because her parents made a constant effort to speak it to her while she was growing up in North Carolina. Her cousins, who came at a similar age, speak virtually no Vietnamese, their parents having worried so much that it would convey a disadvantage that they spoke broken English to their children.
But as economists like to say, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” “English-only” proponents worry that, whatever the historical precedents, the situation has changed. Today’s waves of immigration are from more concentrated linguistic sources, and there is no greater fear than that of Spanish.
Spanish-speakers come not only from populous and poor nearby Mexico. They also make the long trek across Mexico from poorer countries in Central America; they come from Cuba to Miami and from the Dominican Republic to New York. They even come from an American territory, Puerto Rico, where heavy “Americanization” efforts after it was captured from Spain in 1898 failed to turn the island to English. Immigration has increased steadily since the 1920s-era quotas were relaxed in 1965, and with illegal immigration bolstering the legal kind, Hispanics are now the largest minority in the United States.
In 2009, Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, born in the Bronx, to be the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court, in a tacit recognition of Hispanics’ growing political clout. When it came to light that she had once praised the virtues of being a “wise Latina” in a speech, conservatives were apoplectic, many flatly calling her a racist. Mark Krikorian, a professional worrier about illegal immigration, found even the prosody of her name galling, writing in the blog of the conservative National Review magazine:
Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English … and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.
All this reflects a fear that Hispanics will keep their Spanish, while clamoring for rights such as Spanish ballots, Spanish-language education, and interpreters in public offices, pushing America gradually toward bilingualism—in other words, that there is something new and different about this wave of immigration.
Once again, though, there are data to be had. The key isn’t looking around. It is certainly easy to find people in America who don’t speak English or signs and services catering to them. As a New York City resident, I see more of them than most Americans, and I am frequently surprised at the number of signs in Chinese or Spanish with no English translation, even public-service announcements from the city government. This kind of thing serves the millions of foreigners in America who can barely get past “Hello.”
But this is nothing that couldn’t have been seen in 1900s Cleveland or 1750s Philadelphia. The way to find out if things are truly changing is to look back—at what the American-born children of immigrants have done over time as they grow up in America. It is that generation, the bridge generation, that tells us what will happen in the future.
Alejandro Portes and Lingxin Hao decided to take a close look at this generation in San Diego and Miami–Fort Lauderdale. Both cities have some of the highest concentrations of immigrants in the country, the former from Mexico and Asia, the latter primarily Cuban, Haitian, West Indian, and South American. Their subjects were 5,266 eighth- and ninth-graders who answered detailed, anonymous surveys: on which languages they knew, which ones they used at home, and which their close friends spoke. The researchers also compared these numbers against social variables such as the average socioeconomic status of the school, the concentration of immigrants in the surrounding community, and the like.
The study found in detail what so many other studies have shown that linguists nearly take it for granted. Virtually all of the bridge generation speaks English “well” or “very well”: 93.6 percent of the total students surveyed, who either had been born in the United States or had lived there for more than five years. Just about one in twenty children of immigrants had failed to learn English “well” by eighth or ninth grade, and even they had learned it passably.
The numbers are robust across language groups, too: 94.7 percent of Latin Americans spoke English well or very well; the same was true of 90.3 percent of Asians. There were interesting differences within the groups, however. Not surprisingly, second-generation children of Mexicans—by far the largest group of immigrants in America today and often found in contiguous communities that make it easier to live without English—were the least likely to speak English well. But even 86.1 percent of them did. Among Asians, Laotians were the least likely to speak English well—but three-quarters of them still could do so. This was the worst-performing of all national groups studied by Portes and Hao.
In fact, the two set out not to study English learning. So many studies had already shown that second-generation immigrants learn English just as they always have that another such study would have been old news. Portes and Hao were also looking to find which groups held on to their native languages longest, to see whether it was still true that America is the “graveyard of languages” and whether the second generation preferred their parents’ languages or English.
On the preference question, once again, the nativist fears that immigrants want to create a multilingual society are misplaced. Of all the groups surveyed, only one group of the second-generation children slightly preferred their heritage language: just 44.8 percent of Mexican-descended subjects preferred English to Spanish. But overall, 71 percent of Latin American–descended children preferred English, as did 73.6 percent of those of Asian heritage.
What about retention of the heritage language? If the bridge generation is learning English, is it bilingual? In short, no. Just 27 percent of the children studied spoke both their parents’ language and English well. This is because only 44 percent of the whole sample spoke their parents’ language at least “well,” and just 16.1 percent spoke it “very well.” The language drop-off was fastest among Asians. Of Latin Americans, 60.6 percent spoke Spanish at least “well,” perhaps supported by the profusion of Spanish-language media, not to mention the big immigrant communities they live in. But one in five of the Latin American sample spoke Spanish “very well”—hardly a hard core ready to turn America bilingual. The Cuban group was most likely of all groups to be bilingual; 61.3 percent speak Spanish well, but they overwhelmingly prefer English (83 percent). Higher socioeconomic status was also correlated with bilingualism. In other words, richer and better-educated parents were more likely to have the time and motivation to make sure their children learn the heritage language.
With 71 percent of the bridge generation preferring English and just 16.1 percent speaking their heritage language very well, Spanish (like Vietnamese, Cambodian, and the others) seems headed the way of Finnish, German, and Swedish: to a near-inevitable demise as first languages spoken by large groups of Americans. The mistake Huntington made was looking at immigrants and not their American children.
The behavior of the bridge generation is confirmed by another study. Rubén Rumbaut, Douglas Massey, and Frank Bean looked at 5,702 people across four immigrant-derived generations in southern California. Generation “1” arrived in adulthood, generation “1.5” arrived in childhood, generation “2” comprised American-born children of two immigrant parents, generation “2.5” comprised U.S.-born children of one immigrant parent, members of generation “3” had three or four immigrant grandparents, and those in generation “3.5” had just one or two grandparents from abroad. The results are best seen graphically. The first graph shows the proportion of each generation that speaks the language “very well,” and the second shows the proportion that prefers to speak the immigrant language at home. Both are good predictors of language death. Parents who speak the immigrant language only “well” and not “very well” are far less likely to speak that language routinely to their children—especially given the high economic premium on English. And those who don’t prefer the immigrant language even at home are especially unlikely to pass it on to their kids.
Proportion of immigrant group members who speak mother tongue very well by generation
Proportion of immigrant group members who speak mother tongue at home by generation
Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean note that Huntington’s thesis seems only partly correct. Their sample all comes from the five counties of southern California, which taken as a community would form a medium-sized Spanish-speaking country. They note that the community is supported by huge and sophisticated Spanish-language radio stations and television networks. It is also close to Mexico. For this reason, Mexicans and their children stand out on the first graph as keeping their ability to speak their language for longer than Asians or non-Latino whites. But ultimately it is the shape, not the location, of the curve that counts. The authors reckon that those still speaking and preferring Spanish will fall below 5 percent among even Mexicans in the third generation.
It is not only clear that immigrant children are still being transformed into monoglot Americans; it comes at a big cost. Not the abstract “diversity” and culture, beloved of the multicultural left, however important they may be. There are real losses that even proud, English-only, America-first types should regret when languages die out among immigrants’ children in America.
One is that the loss of immigrant languages may literally make us dumber. Repeated studies have shown fluent bilingualism to be accompanied by higher intelligence and intellectual performance. Bilinguals show not just better verbal skills but better overall grades in school and college, higher test scores, and even superior math skills. And studies looking for the direction of causation—are bilinguals smarter or do smarter people become bilingual?—seem to have shown that it is the first: those who become fluently bilingual, especially at an early age, gain a cognitive bonus. One recent study even showed fluent bilingualism warding off old-age dementia.
It isn’t clear whether proud and nationalistic Americans would be happy to throw these gains away in their pursuit of an English-only America. But the types who would prefer English only, who are patriotic and often conservative, may be persuadable by another cost of monolingualism: America is losing a vast and valuable resource, a potential pool of bilinguals who could serve America’s interests. The fields where America is desperately short of language skills is long and well known. America’s intelligence agencies lacked the Arabic-speakers to translate and analyze many intercepted e-mails and phone calls before September 11, 2001; it is similarly short-handed with Arabic, Pashto, and Dari speakers in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. diplomats must be expensively and lengthily trained in foreign languages—the Defense Language Institute expects that it takes eighty-eight weeks of full-time study to master one of the difficult languages, such as Chinese and Arabic, that English-only types are so intent in stomping out of immigrant children’s heads as quickly as possible. In business, Chinese and Japanese negotiators often understand their American partners and rivals’ language and culture (as do virtually all Europeans); Americans must rely on translators and local agents and hope they are competent and honest.
Speaking in favor of foreign languages, of course, should not be taken as downplaying the crucial unifying role of English. Many on the left—including no small number of academic linguists—associate the American attachment to English mainly with a negative, excluding, and unhealthy nationalism. Those on the far, multicultural left associate it especially with the abuse and murder of Native Americans, racism against Latinos, the intentional mixing of African slaves from different language groups to keep them from uniting, and so forth.
But English has a hugely important function. Though the framers thought better than to include it in the Constitution, English is the national language, so obviously so that it really is in no need of protection. Though it varies slightly from region to region, a more or less unified American English binds a diverse and continent-sized country together. It has been a path to assimilation for many groups that earlier, “Anglo-Protestant” Americans thought unassimilable. Americans are rightly proud of this history and of the language that made it possible.
Ethnic minorities in America—and Latinos themselves know they are no exception—need English. In fact, they need it more than richer, far more secure white Anglos do. It is good and proper to encourage English learning, as Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, courted controversy in 2007 by doing. The Austrian immigrant made good told his Latino audience to “turn off the [Spanish-language] television” and learn English as he had.
To tell them to abandon their home languages because they are a threat to American unity, though, is ignorant of the facts and long overdue for consignment to the dustbin of bad ideas from an earlier age. One hesitates to criticize brilliant men such as Ben Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and Samuel Huntington, but history has shown the first two to be wrong about English, and the numbers make it look likely that Huntington will be wrong too. From each man’s era to the next, English has grown more powerful in the United States and the world. It’s doing just fine.
The United States, of course, isn’t alone in worrying about the influx of foreign languages. My plane touches down at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The airport is named after the general and president whose certaine idée de la France still animates many among the French. De Gaulle developed a nuclear bomb for France, yanked his country out of NATO’s military command, and booted the alliance’s headquarters out of Paris. He believed in a strong Europe, with France its undisputed leader, an independent pole of power between the Soviet- and American-led blocs. The main center-right party in France, which has changed offical names repeatedly, is still universally known as the “Gaullist” party, and its leaders—notably Jacques Chirac in recent years—share the America-wary DNA of the general himself.
So what greets the visitor arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport today? Among other things, signs reading “The department store capital of fashion,” “Only the brave,” “I ♥ Italian shoes,” and “Duty free like nowhere else.” The computer company Oracle boasts in an advertisement that it serves “20 of the top utilities.” The American credit-card company MasterCard riffs on a famous ad campaign with a poster reading “Keeping up with fashion? Priceless.” All of these are written not in the language of de Gaulle but in that of George Washington. Even the French ads are infused with English: Peugeot, a French car company, advertises a vehicle—somewhere between a car and an SUV—it calls the Crossover, “avec technologie grip control.”
French intellectuals are known for bewailing this kind of thing, as we saw in the last chapter. But resistance to foreign influences, with the corresponding instinct to build up French, is nothing new to France; building the French state alongside the French identity has meant fighting off competitors to French for centuries.
Today, France stands for many as the emblematic “nation-state”: the complete merger between a people, a state, and a language. (Whenever I ask my students to “Name a nation-state, quickly,” the first reply is nearly always “France.”) But though it may seem axiomatic today, this powerful identification of French and France, the making of France as the nation-state par excellence is actually a remarkable historical achievement—and the result of a long, conscious process. Not only outsiders but many Frenchmen themselves forget that France was not always so Francophone. Shortly after the French Revolution, in 1790, the Abbé Grégoire’s census (mentioned in chapter 5) found that just 3 million French citizens were native speakers of French. Another 3 million spoke French with some competence as a second language. Another 25 million spoke another first language and had little or no standard French to speak of. France was less than one-fifth French.
It took a conscious and assertive policy of extending French, pushing it from its heartland around Paris out to the north, south, east, and west, to make France speak French. Along the way, other languages have suffered—and their speakers have sometimes pushed back.
Take just one of France’s traditionally non-French regions. Brittany was settled by Celtic peoples coming down from the British Isles near the end of the Roman period. It remained a sovereign duchy from 938 to 1532, when it was conquered and incorporated into France. Brest, the regional capital, lies in the westernmost bit of Brittany and so is nearly the westernmost point in mainland France. Breton is a Celtic language, thus part of the Indo-European family. But it is a close cousin of Welsh and Cornish (the latter now extinct), and, though utterly unlike French to the ear and eye, it survived Brittany’s incorporation into France. In the two centuries after the French Revolution, though, Breton was suppressed in the state’s drive to extend French (and only French) to all of France’s territory. Beginning in the 1970s, after centuries of repression, and accompanied by a slow but steady rise in the popularity of Breton music and culture, Breton enthusiasts began fighting for their language.
Not that it is apparent to me as I visit Brest to look into the state of things. In this, the largest city in Brittany, the train station has a large kiosk with books and magazines—not a single one in Breton. A humor book, Ils sont fous, ces Bretons!! (“They’re crazy, these Bretons!!”), pokes loving fun at the culture, the people, and the language—but is written in French. A glossy magazine, Bretons, is dedicated to modern Breton life and features a cover story on Jack Kerouac, who was of Breton heritage. But it, too, is entirely in French.
Striking out trying to find any Breton-ness on my own, I ask at the tourist office whether I might find some Breton culture or people knowledgeable about the language. I’m told that I might find them in Carhaix, a town an hour and a half away, which has an Office de la Langue Bretonne. Hoping to find some help a little closer, I ask the staff of young women whether anyone in the tourist office speaks Breton. Cécile, who has been helping me, frowns with her mouth as she laughs with her eyes, as if thinking carefully how to answer this ridiculous question without embarrassing me. After holding this expression for a few seconds, she recommends a small museum in Plouguerneau, forty minutes or so to the north, where, she thinks, the director might know Breton.
Instead of giving up on Brest, I strike back out on the street to see if I can find any Breton there. But the language is nearly invisible. Some of the official street signs are in both French and Breton—a major symbolic victory for the Breton movement, France being France. But another large newsstand I visit also has no material, among hundreds of magazines and newspapers, in Breton. When I think I’ve finally found a Breton spot—a convivial and crowded bar and restaurant called Tir na N’og—I get excited until I get a little closer and see the sign that means death for all seekers of cultural authenticity: “Irish Pub & Restaurant.”
Moving on, I find the largest bookstore in town; among about twelve cases of books on Brittany and its culture and history, just two carry books either teaching the Breton language or written in the language itself. I peruse one, Le Breton pour les Nuls, a French edition of the familiar, yellow-covered, and American-born _____ for Dummies series, for about twenty minutes. As I read, I periodically look up to see if anyone approaches the Breton-language books in the busy store. No one does.
The last piece of the picture falls into place when I walk past a crowded school playground. Dozens of children are playing and shouting as children do, and all of them in French. With Breton, as with any language, children learning a language from their parents, not instruction at school, keeps that language alive. Just as none of their parents were buying books in Breton, none of these children were playing in it. If the current trends continue, it may be that in a century’s time no child will.
At last I discover a small Breton cultural office (one that even the tourist office staff had not seemed to know about). Bernez Kerdraon, the director, sits down to tell me more. Brest isn’t the best place to look for Breton, he says—though it is geographically as deep into Brittany as it’s possible to get, it harbors a big naval base, the headquarters of France’s Atlantic fleet. Perhaps Rennes, the other biggest city in Brittany, would have been a better choice? I ask. No, not really there, either, Kerdraon says. You have to go to the countryside and talk to older people. This, I remember silently, is a terminal prognosis for a language.
Kerdraon was raised by Breton-speaking farmers himself—but they spoke French to him. They were born into the era when signs reading “No spitting on the floor or speaking Breton” were common in public places. Dunce caps or a sign of shame around the neck were given to students caught speaking Breton in school. The children had to wear them until they could pass them on to another student they caught in the act. Children learned to police themselves and one another, saving the authorities the work. And Bretons learned to associate their native language with humiliation.
But beginning in the 1970s, Breton music and culture enjoyed a vogue in France, Bretons saw their Celtic cousins in Northern Ireland battling British domination, and political groupings, many left-wing, began to form. Kerdraon and many others began to feel shame at their cultural prostration and began agitating for their language. More militant members destroyed signs only in French, visible symbols of the state that was seeking to erase their language. Gradually, French national policy moved away from active suppression.
Today, the highest guidance on French language policy is a simple statement inserted into the constitution in 1992: “The language of the republic is French.” But the simplicity of that sentence is misleading: it avoids the words “only” and “official,” each of which would trigger extra consequences. It is no longer seen as the done thing to attempt to destroy indigenous languages, and the attitude of the government in Paris has become what some call “hostile tolerance” of the regional languages.
In Brittany, a system of bilingual schools called Diwan (“the seed” in Breton) was set up in 1977. These are the hope of the Breton movement: they provide bilingual education designed to get students to master both Breton and French. (Even the staunchest Breton activist accepts the economic and political need for French mastery.) But in 2009, Kerdraon estimates, 12,000 students studied in these schools—of a regional population of 3 million. With the Diwan movement thirty-four years old, a cadre of committed and bilingual adults raised and steeped in Breton activism could lead the way to a truly bilingual future. But it is far from clear that a big enough cohort of such dedicated Breton boosters exists. Meanwhile, modest cultural centers like Kerdraon’s offer mainly a kind of optional heritage tourism for those with spare time and money. These centers do teach Breton to adults, but this is no way to save a language. Only native acquisition by children can do it.
Kerdraon describes the situation, hopefully, as “the bottom of the wave.” Fifty-five hours of Breton-language material appear each week on the privately funded Radio Kerne. One of the two regional papers prints a single page in Breton every Thursday. Asked if he is optimistic, he says it is hard to be in the circumstances. And when asked if the French government is improving in its attitudes, he shrugs and gives me a look that says simply “You know how it is.”
If Breton is threatened—consigned to old folks in the country and a core of partisans—the other regional languages of France are on different parts of the slippery slope toward language decline and death. Basque and Catalan are spoken in the south, and though they are declining in France, they benefit enormously from the presence of larger, organized, semiautonomous regions in Spain that vigorously promote both languages. Speakers can watch television or hear radio broadcasts and quickly pop across the almost nonexistent borders of modern Western Europe to visit regional capitals such as Barcelona and San Sebastián. The same is true of the Flemish speakers in France’s northeast, who share a language with half of Belgium and all of the Netherlands.
The situation in Alsace, though, is unique. Not only do language groups straddle the border, but that border itself has moved back and forth in recent centuries. Alsace and neighboring Lorraine were part of France until 1871, until they were taken by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War. France grabbed them back in the next round of the Franco-German grudge match, the First World War. France initially offered special laws to the region, many of whose inhabitants speak standard German, Alsatian dialectal German, or Alsatian dialectal French. But these linguistic privileges were gradually rolled back to integrate the region further into France. The presence of Germany next door means that more and more Alsatians, whatever their home language, will learn both standard German and standard French at school; the Alsatian dialects of both are the likely losers.
Finally, there are the Romance dialects: Picard, Gallo, Nissart, Occitan, Provençal, and the like. These are all closely related to French, and their speakers often themselves regard them as little more than substandard “patois.” They are different enough from French to be reasonably classified as separate languages, however, and they do have their ardent backers. But they are either small—as with the northern varieties—or divided, as in the south. “Provençal” and “Occitan” are dialects of each other, or Provençal is a dialect of Occitan, or they are the same thing, depending on whom you ask. But the supporters of “Provençal,” in the southeast and near the Alps, are associated with the political right, and the fans of “Occitan,” in the central south and southwest, are tied to the left. They don’t get along and so have been unable to form a strong united front for the single strongest and uniquely French Romance tongue after French itself.
In other words, French language policy, not unlike Atatürk’s reform of Turkish, has been something of a “catastrophic success.” French is undeniably the national language, in a position of such supremacy and so staunchly backed by the government that there is no indigenous threat to it whatsoever. Just to make sure, France, in a small club of other grouchily nationalist European states, continues to refuse to sign the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, saying that it would contravene French law (and that anyway the regional languages are being cared for). The cost of this success of French, however, may well be the death—or confinement to a museum, at best—of several fullblown languages.
But as all those signs at Charles de Gaulle airport show, just as France was completing its linguistic conquest at home, it was invaded from abroad by English. What are the French doing about it?
In 1994, Maurice Druon, the permanent secretary of the French Academy, published Letter to the French About Their Language and Their Soul. In it he captured the attitude that is often taken by foreigners as typically French: “Lack of respect for language reveals a lack of respect for everything” and “France cannot retain its rank as a great country, and carry out policies on the world level, unless she continues to have a military deterrent and a mastery of a universal language.” The odd conflation—what are “military deterrent” and “universal language” doing side by side?—seemed to showcase a particularly sharp-edged linguistic nationalism.
That same year, France took the most notorious step to protect the language in modern French history: the National Assembly passed the Toubon Law, named for the culture minister of the Gaullist-conservative government of the day. The Toubon Law made French “obligatory” in five domains: education, employment, advertising and commerce, media, and scientific meetings and publications. It begins grandiloquently, “French is an essential element of France, the language of teaching, work, commerce and public service, and is the special link for the Francophone community.” The law—and its application—are responsible for much of France’s reputation as panicky and heavy-handed when it comes to language.
The law’s provisions seem harsh on their face. For this reason, many French politicians and pundits, especially on the left, mocked it upon its appearance—some called it the Loi Allgood, “all good” being a rough part-for-part translation of Toubon (or tout bon). The critics were partly right and partly wrong. The law has gone some way in protecting French but in other domains has been ineffective at best and embarrassing at worst.
Toubon originally envisioned that the law would extend so far as to cover even private speech and writing and broadcasting on private radio and television. It would have required individual companies to use official words, coined by special “terminology commissions” in government ministries, instead of popular English borrowings. The Constitutional Court quickly decided that this would be an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech, violating the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
But the Toubon Law still did provide for punishing individuals and entities who flaunted the requirement for French in public domains such as advertising. Semi-official groups, such as the Association for the Defense of the French Language and The Future of the French Language, were sanctioned to act as complainants in legal cases. The consumer-protection and fraud office was appointed official watchdog.
Several high-profile cases have made the Toubon Law seem both effective and harsh. Georgia Tech, the engineering college based in Atlanta, runs a satellite campus in Lorraine. The program’s website was at one time entirely in English. For this, the Association for the Defense of the French Language and The Future of the French Language brought legal charges: as a piece of public advertising in France, the website was required to be in French. The case was thrown out on a technicality, but Georgia Tech was required to translate crucial parts of the website into French and refer visitors to the main, American-based website for other information.
Most of the cases brought under the Toubon Law have been piddling. France Télécom was taken to task for offering services called Tatoo (not “tattoo”) and Wanadoo, but the case was thrown out for lack of French translations of these nonsense words. Guilty findings are relatively rare, and fines are small—one reason, no doubt, that so many English words can be seen around France. On the walk between the Saint Michel Métro station along the Seine to the French Academy, where I had an interview for this book, I took pictures of every English word I saw on the street. In just those few hundred meters, I saw a dozen examples of English: “brunch,” “city tour,” “Canadian pub,” and more. This is admittedly a touristy part of town, but it shows that Toubon has hardly eradicated English in France.
French law did take a big bite out of one big offender, however, when in 2005 a court found GE Medical Systems, which had an office in France, guilty of providing technical documentation for internal employee use only in English. A 2006 appeals court upheld the original ruling and a fine of € 580,000—almost $700,000.
On examination, though, French policy as applied in cases like this is not entirely unreasonable. GE had been asked repeatedly by its French union to provide translations for the documents. GE (a huge multinational that could easily pay for translations) claimed that the documents were intended primarily for foreign workers in France. The union replied, reasonably enough, that this effectively marginalized French workers who did not speak English in their own country.
Elsewhere, the Toubon Law nicely disguises its anti-English intent: one subsection declares that anything translated from French for the benefit of foreigners must be translated into at least two foreign languages. Though clearly aimed at English, this is neatly dressed up as a nod to diversity and multilingualism, and so English sits alongside Spanish on many signs.
Some French-language policy is positive, not negative. A “Pascal Fund” provides generous monies for international conventions and scientific gatherings to provide translation and interpretation services—a practical gesture, given that requiring such proceedings be entirely in French would immediately drive all international scientific meetings from France.
French law in this regard is thus a mixed bag, not all as bad as the Toubon Law. It has not resulted in quite the catastrophes predicted by many when the law was being debated and when it came into effect. My magazine, The Economist, in 1995 quoted an analyst who (incorrectly) predicted that it could make complex financial deals 60 percent more expensive, making pools of capital available to the French economy dry up. Others saw it as nakedly protectionist, motivated not by cultural but by economic insecurity—onerous French laws would make it harder for high-tech products (requiring extensive technical documents) to be exported to France without French translation. This would make it harder for multinationals such as GE to set up and operate in France.
Some opponents of the Toubon Law thought it was aimed not at rich multinationals but at nonwhite immigrants to France and their children. The idea, thought critics of Toubon, was to make life miserable for immigrants so that they would leave. The law was in fact passed around the same time as the tightening of immigration laws (the Pasqua Laws, under the same conservative government). But the Toubon Law has not been a “solution” to immigration, because language is not the chief problem for France’s immigrants. Many come from former colonies where French is prevalent and already speak French. The issue is not language but the stigma of immigrants’ darker skin and their relative poverty. Many Arabs in France don’t even speak Arabic properly. One prestigious private school in Paris accepts only bilingual students. It can find many French-English and French-Italian bilinguals but can’t find enough Arabic-French bilinguals to fill classes designed for them.
As for globalization, Toubon has done little to alter the playing field for France one way or the other. France’s resistance to globalization is in fact vastly overreported: the country is host to big, high-tech, successful multinational companies in carmaking, pharmaceuticals, and armaments, even if they are less well known than those in luxury, fashion, and food products. The vast majority of Americans would be stunned to disbelief to find that the French worker is more productive, on a GDP-per-hour basis, than the American worker is.*
The problem of both globalization and immigration is the French reluctance to certain kinds of change, not an aversion to all things new or non-French. The economic system protects those already in comfortable jobs. Since the law makes it hard to fire workers, it makes it unattractive to hire them, the single biggest cause of France’s stubbornly high unemployment rate. And of course those most likely to be unemployed are immigrant-descended youth, mainly of Arab and African descent. France’s economy is not sickly any more than its culture is. But France’s unique ethos, the “republican” values that insist that anyone playing by the rules can make it, ignores a hard truth. Societal racism has made it effectively impossible for, say, a young graduate named Khaled to get the same shot at a job interview as an equally qualified but luckier young man named Pierre. But many among the French, who don’t even collect census statistics on ethnicity or race—prefer to stop their ears and insist on the equality of opportunity in France. When things get rough, the French—hardly alone in this sin—squeeze their eyes shut, insist that there is nothing wrong with the French model, and seek a scapegoat. To some extent, that scapegoat has been the “cultural invasion” of English.
France is an anxious power—and both of those words must be remembered when thinking about the country, because it is a power. It holds only one of five veto-wielding seats on the UN Security Council, is one of the world’s few nuclear states, is an undisputed leader of the European Union, and has one of the world’s largest, most sophisticated economies. Rumors of the decline of France, like those of Mark Twain’s death, have been vastly exaggerated.
The same goes for the language. France is the world’s ninth-most-spoken language. Even if, as linguists fear, half the world’s six thousand languages disappear in the next century, the vitality of French is utterly unthreatened. (Even if they keep on disappearing at a rate of half the world’s languages each century, France has a good thousand years or so left in it.) At the EU, in Brussels, English is gaining ground, but much business is still done in French, and even Britain would hesitate to send a diplomat there who did not speak French. At the United Nations in New York, there are six official languages: English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. English, of course, dominates, but one can frequently hear an official or a reporter start speaking French midmeeting—something that never happens in Chinese or Arabic. French is a well-established alternative there, as so many other places, and it is a minor rite of passage for UN diplomats to find their first opportunity to flaunt their French confidently.
That French represents cool in quarters all over the world is shown by the odd case of the organization known as the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Founded in 1970, the club was meant to tie together France’s former colonies, as well as other French-speaking countries such as Belgium and Switzerland. The organization does little, meeting only once every two years. But the fact of its existence—and its unofficial leadership by France, the anti-America in the eyes of many countries around the world—has made its membership expand in surprising directions. Francophonie doesn’t require members to have large French-speaking populations, merely affiliation to French culture. So the fifty-six members include territories where French is nearly universal (Canada/Quebec); where French is one of several main languages (Switzerland); where French is official (Senegal); and where French is common among the educated (Lebanon, Morocco). But it also includes countries with virtually no discernible link to French language or culture. Whatever “Francophonie” is, apparently it includes Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Ghana, and Egypt. Many of these countries have joined in the past twenty years, another sign that Brand France and the French language are alive and well.
French is an official language of thirty-nine countries, second in the world only to English with seventy-three, but well ahead of the next competitors, Arabic (twenty-five) and Spanish (twenty-one). Countries like Nigeria—never colonized by France—have considered making French an official language for geopolitical reasons. And as mentioned earlier, France is the world’s second second language, a lingua franca for people around the world who don’t share a first language and can’t or won’t speak English. Unlike Arabic or Spanish, it isn’t concentrated but truly global, spoken by native speakers on six continents. French is the official language of (French ex-colonies) French Guyana in South America, New Caledonia in the South Pacific, a slew of countries across Africa, and a massive province that could one day be a country, Quebec, not to mention its European heartland, where it is official in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Monaco.
In other words, the notion that France is threatened should be treated more with a light laugh than with alarm. Perhaps the best reaction was that of Anthony Steen, a Conservative member of the British Parliament, after the introduction of the Toubon Law. Steen introduced a bill authorizing traffic wardens to fine people on British streets £10 on the spot for speaking French. Steen described the situation ominously:
Mr Toubon’s Bill tears up completely the entente cordiale which was signed by Edward VII on 8 April 1904 at the end of 100 years of hostilities between the French and the English.… Every country in the European Community is proud of its status as a nation state, but the French have tipped the scales towards chauvinism.
His real attitude soon became clear:
We should forget words like baguette or croissant—they are out. We would not be able to visit a café or brasserie. There would be no aperitifs or hors d’oeuvres—in fact there would be no restaurants. We should forget the table d’hôte; there is no question of the à la carte instead. There would be no left- or right-hand side of the menu and no nouvelle cuisine. Bon viveurs would be banned. One would not be able to shower one’s fiancée with bouquets, meet at a secret rendezvous, or buy her haute couture clothes. There would be great difficulties in having a ménage-à-trois. Crime passionel would be out of the question and negligée would make a liaison dangereuse a little risqué.
After another member cried out “guillotine him!” Steen’s fines-for-French measure was duly put to a vote and rejected, 149–45.
By whatever measure—countries where they are official, number of first-language speakers, number of second-language speakers, volume of written publications, or the slipperier quantity we might call simply prestige—English is the most successful language on Earth, and French is the only other with a global reach in the same league, despite the fact that other languages have more native speakers. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people as a first language than any other tongue on Earth. Hindi’s first-language speakers outnumber English’s. Will we not all one day be speaking Chinese? Should we not all maybe dust off that Hindi book, too?
Not so fast. To be sure, those Upper East Side parents in Manhattan who have looked high and low for Mandarin-speaking nannies for their children haven’t gotten a bad idea into their heads. As we saw above, bilingualism is good for our brains regardless. And speaking the difficult (for English-speakers) language of a crucial rising power is a very good idea indeed.
But the idea that since China is rising, Chinese might even come to rival English is based on false premises. The amount of Chinese is growing on the Internet, for example, because China’s billion-plus population is gradually going online. But this trend cannot, obviously, go on forever. The really relevant question is how many non-Chinese communicate in Chinese on the Internet. The number is doubtless tiny; Chinese’s dreadfully difficult orthographic system, described in the last chapter, requires years and years of study for native speakers and is harder still for nonnatives. English’s predominance, not only on the Internet but in all forms of international written media, is unchallenged.
It is in this sense alone that French is challenged: not in France, not French people’s right and ability to speak and write in their language, but French’s role as a global standard. For better or worse, English’s advantages are locked in by the fact that so many people have already learned it. To replace it would take a tremendous shift. France is healthy; English is dominant. It is most other languages that have cause for concern.
But Americans somehow worry that their language is threatened in its superpower bastion, the United States. And the French had to pass one of the world’s most restrictive language laws to protect French in France. What is going on?
The rise of immigration and globalization have hit both countries at awkward times. France’s diplomatic importance, role at the United Nations, and unquestioned leadership in the European Union mean relatively less in the face of the spectacular economic (if not yet political) rise of Asia. And though America’s dominance looks set to last a while, the challenge from China and the post–September 11 prominence of Islamic terrorism have made the giant unusually uneasy.
Once again we see that arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity. America longs for an overwhelmingly “Anglo-Protestant” model that never existed in the form in which most people imagine it. The French dominance of continental Europe and much of the world is a recent memory and a source of nostalgia. Both countries are challenged from without by globalization and from within by immigration and the struggle to create a new meaning for “American” and “French.” Their challenges are not the same—France is the prototypical “nation-state,” while America has long been peopled by recent immigrants and their children. But France and America are nonetheless more similar than they appear on the surface. That many proud Frenchmen and Americans would bristle at the comparison only makes it, to my mind, truer.
* Like all analogies, this one shouldn’t be taken too far. I am thinking of operating systems for full-scale computers, in which Windows has, at the time of this writing, over a 90 percent market share. But with the success of its iPhones and iPads, Apple’s market capitalization actually surpassed Microsoft’s in early 2010.
* A caveat to this remarkable fact is that French workers work shorter weeks and fewer weeks per year, and a smaller proportion of them are in the workforce at a given time. America’s labor market has relatively larger numbers of less productive workers working, and the long hours worked reduce the productivity of the average hour.