English an official U.S. Language? A myth or oppression?

Official English and English-only policies are founded upon the myth that the primacy of the English language is somehow under threat. In fact, more than 94 percent of our country’s population speaks English, according to the last Census. This confirms that the problem English-only laws are designed to address simply does not exist. Moreover, English-only laws are built upon, and help to perpetuate, a baseless stereotype that immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, do not want to learn English.

In reality, Latinos, both native-born and newly-arrived immigrants, embrace English and place tremendous importance and value upon attaining English-language fluency. By wide margins, Latinos believe that learning English is essential for participation and success in American society. A recent survey by the Pew Hispanic Center found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos – 92 percent – believe that teaching English to the children of immigrants is very important, a percentage far higher than other respondents.
Indeed, Latino immigrants are learning English, and doing so as quickly as or more quickly than previous generations of immigrants. As is typical of immigrant populations in the United States, by the third generation most Latinos tend to speak only English. Latino immigrants, then, do not need official English or English-only legislation to coerce them into learning English; that desire and determination already runs deep in the Latino community.

The immigrant community embraces English because it recognizes that learning English is essential for participation and success in American society. Providing real opportunities to learn English, not allowing for discrimination, is the most effective means of fostering English proficiency and provide better opportunities but at the same time we should embrace and respect the sources of evidence for the understanding of human history.

But as "globalization" increases, so does the loss of human languages. People find it easier to conduct business and communicate with those outside their own culture if they speak more widely used languages like Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish or Russian. Children are not being educated in languages spoken by a limited number of people. As fewer people use local languages, they gradually die out.

Why It Matters

At least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages (about 50 percent) are about to be lost. Why should we care? Here are several reasons.

The enormous variety of these languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the full capabilities—and limits—of the human mind.
Each endangered language embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems in the region in which it is spoken.
These languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history.

Other Implications

Those who primarily speak one of the world’s major languages may find it hard to understand what losing one’s language can mean--and may even feel that the world would be better off if everyone spoke the same language. In fact, the requirement to speak one language is often associated with violence. Repressive governments forbid certain languages and cultural customs as a form of control. And conquered people resist assimilation by speaking their own languages and practicing their own customs.

On the positive side, one language can enrich another—for example, by providing words and concepts not available in the other language. Most languages (including English) have borrowed words of all kinds. Learning another language often brings an appreciation of other cultures and people.

The study of endangered languages also has implications for cognitive science because languages help illuminate how the brain functions and how we learn. “We want to know what the diversity of languages tells us about the ways the brain stores and communicates experience,” says Peg Barratt, division director for behavioral and cognitive sciences. “Our focus is not just on recording examples of languages that are soon to disappear, but on understanding the grammars, vocabularies and structures of these languages.”

Preserving While Documenting

Documentation is the key to preserving endangered languages. Linguists are trying to document as many as they can by describing grammars and structural features, by recording spoken language and by using computers to store this information for study by scholars. Many endangered languages are only spoken; no written texts exist. So it is important to act quickly in order to capture them before they go extinct.

To help preserve endangered languages, E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Language Data) aims to boost documentation by:

duplicating and digitizing high-quality recordings in an archival form;
emphasizing self-documenting and software-independent data;
giving linguists a toolkit to analyze and compare languages;
developing a General Ontology for Linguistic Description (GOLD) to allow interoperability of archives, and comparability of data and analysis.
In another kind of archiving, Joel Sherzer, Anthony Woodbury and Mark McFarland (University of Texas at Austin) are ensuring that Latin America's endangered languages are documented through The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA). This Web-accessible database of audio and textual data features naturally–occurring discourse such as narratives, ceremonies, speeches, songs, poems and conversation. Using their Web browsers, scholars, students and indigenous people can access the database, search and browse the contents and download files using free software.
Documentation is the right thing to do for both cultural and scientific reasons. According to NSF program director Joan Maling, we must explore as many different languages as we can to fully understand this uniquely human capacity—"Language" with a capital L. “Just as biologists can learn only from looking at many different organisms, so linguists and language scientists can learn only from studying many different human languages,” she says. “Preserving linguistic diversity through documentation is critical to the scientific study of language.”