Bilingualism in America

I normally sympathize with Juan William's comments but must disagree with his comments on NPR in early April 2007 that we Americans need to embrace bilingualism.

Just consider our Canadian neighbors. Bilingualism is written into their constitution and they embrace it whole heartedly in their government. High government office holders often switch between French and English while giving speeches.

And what does the large English speaking majority get for their attention to the sensibilities of the French speaking minority? Apparently not much. The Quebecois are constantly trying to separate from Canada! They don't want to be part of bilingual country, they want their own mono-lingual French speaking country!

And bilingualism isn't really the problem that we would face in the US. Instead, we'd face poly-lingualism. We'd have dozens of languages competing for equal position -- just like they do in India. India has over 26 major languages actively spoken -- but English is their official language.

It is one thing to celebrate our diversity -- and I do -- but it is quite another to be so diverse that we lose our own uniqueness.

There are two facts of human nature that prevent poly-lingualism from being truly workable:

1. if we cannot understand what another person is saying, we have a great difficulty feeling empathy toward that person -- at least beyond the obvious things like suffering pain, loss of a loved one, etc.
2. human beings can only learn to speak one or two languages fluently.

There are dozens if not hundreds of languages spoken around the world and the United States is blessed to have the best and brightest minds from all these cultures come to live here. But if they don't learn our common language, they will not be able to contribute and just become ghetto-ized minorities -- whose children will not grow up loving America the way their parents did -- rather these second generation Americans will end up being like second generation Muslims in European ghettos -- Jealous of the majority and clinging to one another for support and further isolating themselves from the riches all around them. And developing an innate sense of betrayal by the majority of Americans -- with its corresponded need for revenge.

Its not bi-lingualism but poly-lingualism that we have as an alternative to mono-lingualism and poly-lingualism just won't work. Since we can only learn 2 or maybe 3 languages, it makes more sense to have the immigrants all learn English.

And in another way, America is not Canada: Americans are an incredibly litigious people. In Canada, the First Nations peoples have not attempted to get their native tounges given equal footing with English or French. I'm not sure why not, but they haven't. In America, there would almost surely be a never ending serious of court challengs trying to get every group's language given equal footing in every public and workplace arena.