Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order making English the official language of the United States.
The president has a low opinion of other languages. Last year he told CPAC, “We have languages coming into our country. . . they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
Given Trump’s commitment to “America First”—which led him to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America—it’s surprising that he didn’t rename English as American.
That’s what America-firsters tried to do in 1923. Riding a wave of anti-British sentiment stoked by the English suppression of Irish independence, Rep. Washington Jay McCormick, of Montana, a Harvard graduate with a law degree from Columbia, introduced legislation in Congress to re-brand English as American.
HR 14136 never made it to a vote, but that same year, Illinois approved SB15, making American that state’s official language because “the languages of other countries bear the names of the countries to which they belong.” But Illinoisans ignored the new law. Schools still taught English, not American, using English grammar books and English dictionaries, and everyone in the state still called the language “English” in blatant violation of the law. It wasn’t till 1969 that Illinois quietly changed the name of its official language back to English, and all those English speakers who had lived through decades of linguistic prohibition became legal once again.
Supporters of official English say that English forms the glue that keeps America together. But speaking a common language didn’t stop the American colonies from declaring their independence from England. Nor did speaking English keep the North and South together in 1861. Plenty of countries today are divided by a common language: the two Irelands and the two Koreas are two obvious examples.
Then there’s the “When in Rome . . .” argument: anyone coming to the U.S. should speak “our” language. But Rome has always been multilingual, and today Italians speak about thirty different languages and dialects (not counting the languages of immigrants and tourists).
The English-only crowd insists that official English will pressure immigrants to learn the language. But over ninety-one percent of U.S. residents already speak the majority 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. Making English official might actually reverse that trend. It sends the message, “Speak English or go back where you came from.” Even if where you came from is Montpelier or Des Moines or La Jolla.
So I would like to offer a modest proposal. Don’t make English official, ban it instead.
Proposals to ban English first surfaced just after the American Revolution. Anti-British sentiment was so strong in the new United States that a few patriots suggested replacing English with Hebrew, presumed to be the language of the Garden of Eden. Or French, which is, as the French will tell you, the language of pure reason. Or Greek, the language of the world’s first democracy, if you were free, male, and 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.
Another reason to ban English: it’s hardly even English anymore. English started its decline with the incident at Hastings in 1066, when undocumented French speakers crossed the Channel in small boats. Since then English has become a conglomeration of French, Latin, Italian, Scandinavian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Celtic, Yiddish and Chinese, not to mention all those smiley faces.
The French have banned English, so we should too. After all, they have reason on their side.
We should ban English because it’s a world language. Remember what happened to all the other world languages: Latin, Greek, Indo-European? One day they’re on everybody’s tongue; the next day they’re dead. Banning English now would save us that inevitable disappointment.
We shouldn’t ban English without designating a successor, but what to choose? The French blew their chance when they sold Louisiana. There’s Russian, a favorite of the president. German, the largest minority language in the U. S. until recently, lost much of its prestige after two world wars. There’s already a prohibitive tariff on Chinese. Esperanto, a language made up 150 years ago, was supposed to bring about world peace. We’re still waiting for that.
In the end, though, so long as we ban English we won’t need a replacement. 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’s forbidden. This negative psychology works with children, sometimes. It works with speed limits, though it’s not supposed to. It even worked in the Garden of Eden.
Detail from Washington Jay McCormick’s bill to make the American language “the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America.” 67 H.R. 14136. 1923.
