It's International Mother Language Day, and once again the U.S. House of Representatives is considering legislation to make English the official language of the United States. Supporters of the measure say that English forms the glue that keeps America together. They deplore the dollars wasted translating English into other languages. And they fear a horde of illegal aliens adamantly refusing to acquire the most powerful language on earth.
I would like to offer a modest alternative: don’t make English official, ban it instead.
Opponents of official English remind us that without legislation, more than ninety-four percent of the residents of this country speak the national language. No country with an official language even comes close. Plus, today’s non-English-speaking immigrants are picking up English faster than earlier generations of immigrants did.
Introducing an official English bill in Congress is an exercise in futility: one has been introduced every session for a couple of decades, but when crunch time comes, these bills don’t pass. That's because members of Congress are afraid of alienating too many voters in their districts. Plus, requiring English could make people want to avoid it, like homework, or paying taxes.
Banning English may sound radical, but it’s nothing new: proposals to ban English first surfaced after the American Revolution. Anti-British sentiment was so strong in the new United States that a few tea party patriots wanted to get rid of English altogether. They suggested replacing English with Hebrew, the language of the garden of Eden. French was another candidate to replace English, because it was thought at the time, and especially by the French, to be the language of pure reason. Then there was Greek, the language o the world’s first democracy, so long as you weren't a woman, a slave, or a non-Athenian. It’s not clear how serious any of these proposals were, though Roger Sherman of Connecticut supposedly remarked that it would be better to keep English for ourselves and make the British speak Greek.
Even though the British are now our allies, there is still a benefit to banning English. A common language can cause strife and misunderstanding. Look at Ireland and Northern Ireland, the two Koreas, or the Union and the Confederacy. Not to mention the average family, whose members share a common tongue but don’t always get along so well. Banning English would prevent that kind of divisiveness in America today.
Also, if we banned English, we wouldn’t have to worry about whose English to make official: the English of England or America? of Washington or Brooklyn? of Benedict Cumberbatch or Sarah Palin?
Another reason to ban English: it’s hardly even English anymore. English started its decline in 1066, when illegal French immigrants swam ashore at Hastings demanding bilingual schools and wanting us to adopt the metric system. Since then English has become a polyglot conglomeration of French, Latin, Italian, Scandinavian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Celtic, Yiddish and Chinese, with an occasional smiley face thrown in.
The French have banned English, so we should too. After all, they have reason on their side.
We should ban English because it has become a world language. Remember what happened to all the other world languages: Latin, Greek, Proto-Indo-European? One day they’re on everybody’s tongue; the next, they’re dead. Banning English would save us that inevitable disappointment.
Although we shouldn’t ban English without designating a replacement for it, there is no obvious candidate. The French blew their chance when they sold Louisiana. It doesn’t look like the Russians are going to take over this country any time soon — they’re having enough trouble holding on to Russia. German, the largest minority language in the U. S. until recently, lost much of its appeal after two world wars. Chinese is too hard to write, especially if you’re not Chinese. There’s always Esperanto, a language made up over a hundred years ago to bring about world peace. We’re still waiting for that. And if you took Spanish in high school you can see that it’s not easy to get large numbers of people to speak another language fluently.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what replacement language we pick, just so long as we ban English instead of making it official. Prohibiting English will do for the language what Prohibition did for liquor. Those who already use it will continue to do so, and those who don’t will want to try out what has been forbidden. This negative psychology works with children. It works with speed limits. It even worked in the Garden of Eden.
-----
For the whole story on gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, click to order your copy of my new book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond ‘he’ and ‘she.’
