The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  There has been more than one campaign to have nigger removed from American dictionaries. Yet a dictionary that registers usage rather than policing it must include nigger. Called upon in 1936 to explain why the OED gave ‘cheat’ as one of the meanings of Jew, the Oxford University Press’s representative Kenneth Sisam wrote, ‘I should like to explain that our dictionaries aim at explaining actual usage and do not attempt to form moral judgements’.15 In 1972 a businessman from Salford brought an action against the OED’s publishers, claiming that the definition in question was defamatory. He lost the case in the High Court because he was unable to meet the law’s requirement that he show the offending words ‘referred to him personally or were capable of being understood by others as referring to him’.16 Words and disagreeable senses of words are hard to kill off, and prohibition is a form of encouragement.

  Abuse moves with the times. Call a woman a witch and you’ll cause offence, but four hundred years ago the charge would have had graver implications. Witch-hunts do in fact still happen – notable recent examples have occurred in Kenya and the Gambia – but for most people in English-speaking countries belief in witchcraft seems archaic. Insults work by attacking our points of greatest vulnerability: the things about which we feel awkward, certainly, but also the things about which we know others feel awkward. A few years ago, when a teenage boy on a train said to me, as his mother looked on blithely, ‘Fuck off, you bald cunt’, my reactions were complex: I was amused by his brazenness but also struck by the realization that, even though I was reconciled to the fact of having lost a good deal of my hair, this was how I was seen by others – not as a man, cuntish or otherwise, but as a bald man. Typically, insults give narrow names to aspects of us we would wish to be treated in a more complex fashion. They place us in categories to which we may indeed belong, but they insist on those categories at the expense of judging us more roundly. Personally, I would sooner be called a cunt than a coward or a thief, because to be called either of the latter is to be an object of focused moral disapproval. That said, someone who calls me a cunt is more likely to want to thump me.

  Coming up with an original insult demands a great surge of creativity. Swearing can be extraordinarily expressive. However, most of the time it is formulaic. For the person doing the swearing, what matters is the performance of excess; injuring the target may not be important at all. The most obvious kind of formulaic abuse consists of ritual insults – the ‘flyting’ of sixteenth-century Scottish poets, the African-American tradition of ribald trash-talk (sometimes called ‘the dozens’), the orchestral banter of teenagers just about anywhere. Insults of this kind are not true – ‘Your momma drink rainwater’, ‘You got shit for brains’ – but sting because for a moment they make us part of a piece of theatre over which we have no control.

  Obscenity invades every area of our lives, however much we do to try and repel it. Fear of the obscene is expressed in networks of vigilance such as campaigns for public morality. Legislation about obscenity persists, and calls for its extension are frequent. But the fascination of the forbidden is irresistible, and obscenity can seem the nucleus of English eloquence. The English were once labelled ‘les goddams’ by the French; since the 1960s they have been ‘les fuckoffs’, and among the many benisons of English-speaking culture is that snarling expletive, a two-word anthem for the Anglosphere.

  21

  ‘It’s English-Only here’

  The trouble with hyphens

  The basic psychology of legislating language is that it allows us to believe we can control our destiny. When language appears no longer to be something we can discipline, we suspect that wider anarchy is nigh. Politically, this connection is opportune: passing laws about language is a means of shackling the populace, and making pronouncements about it can be a quick way to mobilize patriotism and other clannish or exclusionary sentiments.

  Theodore Roosevelt was a particularly deft exponent of this. ‘We must have but one flag,’ he pronounced in 1917, and ‘We must also have but one language.’ ‘The greatness of this nation,’ he continued, ‘depends on the swift assimilation of the aliens she welcomes to her shores. Any force which attempts to retard that assimilative process is a force hostile to the highest interests of our country.’1 Roosevelt, the American President from 1901 to 1909, believed that the English language could create unity of voice and of values. His statements might lead one to imagine that English is the official language of the United States. But in fact it has no official language. The primacy of English is assumed, not legally enshrined. The United States is unusual in not having an official language. At the time of writing, this is only the case there and in the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet if you were to ask someone casually what the official language of the UK or America is, you would likely be told ‘English’.

  In Britain at present the central position of English is not aggressively contested. Britain as an English-speaking unity is not so very old, and on its way to pre-eminence English has killed off other languages such as Cornish, Manx (the Celtic vernacular of the Isle of Man) and Norn in Orkney and Shetland. Consider for a moment the effects of being asked to change the language you use. When we imagine this, we picture ourselves adjusting – perhaps none too smoothly – to different behaviours. Brian Friel’s play Translations, written in 1980, depicts this in an Irish setting. The action takes place in County Donegal in 1833: we follow a detachment of English soldiers who are part of an Ordnance Survey team anglicizing Gaelic place names, and their work illustrates the significance of names in framing people’s perceptions of the land. The belief that Gaelic is somehow responsible for Irish savagery, superstition and sententiousness dates back at least to the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII asserted that it was sufficient grounds for compelling the Irish to speak English. (When he declared himself king of Ireland in 1541, he did so first in English and then, as an afterthought, in the language of the people he was bringing under his rule.) Friel’s play dramatizes the moment when one language supplants another.

  There are areas of Britain where people still use languages that were present before the arrival roughly 1,500 years ago of the Germanic settlers whose dialects became English. But while the central role of English has not been achieved without bloodshed and resentment, it is a largely uncontroversial fact, historically ingrained. Of the languages spoken in Britain today, Welsh has the most ancient roots. It now coexists in Wales with English, but its position was once precarious. Wales was incorporated into England by a series of parliamentary measures between 1535 and 1543, completing a process that had begun when Edward I invaded in 1282. The decline of Welsh began with the seizure of the English Crown by the part-Welsh Henry VII in 1485, and accelerated in the sixteenth century as English became the language of education and administration in Wales. Nevertheless, Welsh has held on, buoyed by cultural traditions such as the eisteddfod and male-voice choirs, and the Welsh Language Acts of 1967 and 1993 provided the Welsh and English languages with equal status in Wales. The resurgence of Welsh has not been painless – I can remember as a child seeing the English place names obliterated from road signs in Wales, and I understood that this was a symptom of a resentment that could sometimes be more violently expressed.

  In Scotland, English arrived earlier; there were English-speaking settlers as far back as the sixth century. However, English became the de facto public language only in 1707 when the Act of Union joined Scotland to England and Wales. Even then, other languages were common. Scottish Gaelic, which had once been the language of most Scots, continued to hold sway in the Highlands and the Western Isles until late in the eighteenth century. The Scots language, which descended from Northumbrian Old English, had been used for official records – with some interference from English – until 1603, when James I (who was James VI of Scotland) succeeded Queen Elizabeth. In the eighteenth century a Scottish variant of standard English became the prestige form of speech, and Scots be
came ‘essentially a curiosity, albeit sometimes a fashionable one’.2 It is now not officially recognized, although in late 2009 the Scottish parliament unveiled a Scots version of its website, while Scottish Gaelic has recently enjoyed a degree of official recognition that may well increase.

  In Ireland, as Friel’s play Translations suggests, the situation is rather different. Ireland is not part of Britain, although in my experience some otherwise knowledgeable people seem to consider this an eccentric statement. The details of Irish history are too complex to digest here. The first English-speakers to settle there arrived in the twelfth century, but it was only in the seventeenth century that Irish resistance to English plantation gave way. By the following century, the use of Gaelic was ‘a marker of rural, Catholic poverty’ whereas English was associated with ‘Protestantism, ownership, and the towns’, although some towns ‘had a sizeable Gaelic-speaking working class until well into the nineteenth century’. Gaelic was to a large degree abandoned in the nineteenth century, but from the 1890s it was promoted as a minority language.3 For present purposes, it is enough to say that Gaelic has in Ireland an appreciable symbolic value; that there is a distinct Irish English with its own grammatical features, vowel sounds, stresses and vocabulary; that Irish English exists in several different forms; and that, these facts notwithstanding, English is spoken by very nearly everyone in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

  By contrast, in America, where the English language has been present for a much shorter time and the volume of immigration has been much greater, the issue of English’s precedence is alive and is becoming incendiary. With characteristic foresight H. G. Wells wrote in 1903, ‘In the United States there is less sense of urgency about modern languages, but sooner or later the American may wake up to the need of Spanish in his educational schemes.’4

  The US Bilingual Education Act of 1968, twice amended to be more specific, made provision for students with limited ability in English to receive education that catered to their extra needs. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation in schools and the workplace, also provided for non-English-speaking students’ language needs. But observation of events in Canada caused anxiety about where this might lead. During the 1960s militants in Quebec attempted to establish a breakaway French-speaking nation. In 1970 the Front de Libération du Québec, which had for seven years struggled to assert its hostility to what it identified as Anglo-Saxon imperialism, kidnapped the province’s labour minister Pierre Laporte and strangled him to death when the Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, would not give in to their ransom demands. The Canadian parliament voted by an overwhelming majority to invoke the War Measures Act of 1914, which had never been used in time of peace. Events in Quebec were apparently symptomatic of a new wave of guerrilla action; the linguistic desperadoes, inspired by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, were turning to terrorism to advance their philosophy of ‘Small is beautiful’.5 In the wake of the period’s riots and acts of terrorism, French was recognized as the official language of Quebec in 1974; its position was cemented by the so-called Loi 101 of 1977, which among other things guaranteed the rights of all people in Quebec to conduct their business activities in French, be served and informed in French in their capacity as consumers, and be taught in French. Many Americans fretted about something similar happening in their own country, but with Spanish rather than French the ascendant language.

  In 1981 Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, a Republican Senator who was a critic of bilingual education, introduced a bill to amend the US Constitution to declare English the nation’s official language. Hayakawa had been a university professor of English, and had written a great deal about language. He was a whimsical, elusive figure, yet also a stubborn one. The bill foundered, but following his retirement two years later Hayakawa helped set up US English, a lobby ‘In Defense of Our Common Language’. Its advisory board included Walter Cronkite and Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the mooted English Language Amendment has not yet succeeded, individual states have made their own declarations of the primacy of English. The first to do so was Louisiana as long ago as 1812; the move was made in the hope that it would gain the state admission to the Union. But following Hayakawa’s revival of the issues, the 1980s and ’90s witnessed a flurry of similar declarations, as well as the emergence of other lobbying organizations. At present twenty-eight states have made English official. These moves are seen by their advocates as reaffirmations of patriotic feeling, and by their opponents as insulting and coercive repressions of America’s many cultural minorities.

  The lobby for conformity has tended to prevail over the promoters of diversity. In 1998, for instance, 70 per cent of voters in Alaska approved an initiative to make English the official language of their state.6 Attitudes in other states are not significantly more moderate. The notion of making provision for other languages commonly triggers anti-immigrant sentiment and expressions of economic insecurity. There are obvious incentives for immigrants to learn English, which suggests that legislation to make the status of English official might really be superfluous. But support for an ‘English-Only’ policy is robust. Implicit in this is the belief that there is such a thing as an ‘American identity’, to which people who live in America must subscribe. The notion that a range of identities might happily coexist is shunned. Monolingualism has many costs – economic, educational, cognitive – but is supported in the name of national security, political stability, the preservation of a collective morality and harmony between different ethnic groups, as if it is inevitable that people wishing to use languages other than English will practise terrorism, sedition, depravity and racist hatred. No matter that within diversity there can be a fundamental unity. No matter that America was born in a spirit of inclusiveness and has at no point in recorded history been truly monoglot.

  As the English-Only movement has gathered momentum, opposition has crystallized. Organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund have put forward a case for language rights to prevent members of minorities being disenfranchised. MALDEF’s website explains that it ‘recognizes that learning English is critical to participating in, contributing to, and succeeding in American society’, but believes that ‘English-only and Official English laws do nothing constructive to advance the important goal of English proficiency. Laws that interfere with or undermine the government’s ability to communicate quickly and effectively are simply bad public policy.’7

  The greatest American linguistic controversy of the last century centred on this issue of linguistic diversity. It began in Oakland, a city in California of about 400,000 people, a few miles east of San Francisco. A port with a history of shipbuilding, it was once recognized mainly as the birthplace of the cocktail known as a Mai Tai and for its baseball team, the Oakland Athletics. But in December 1996 this ethnically diverse community became newsworthy for a different reason: the Oakland School Board passed a resolution that African-American students be instructed in their ‘primary language’ – to wit, Ebonics, which was described as having its origins in ‘West and Niger-Congo African language’. Most Americans had never heard of Ebonics. The issues were familiar to those who had followed a story almost twenty years before, in which the parents of students at an elementary school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sued the local School Board for failing to teach them to read. Teachers had wrongly identified the students, who were used to speaking a non-standard form of English at home, as having learning difficulties. (As so often, non-standard was thought to be the same as substandard.) But whereas the talk then had been about Black English, now there was a crisply affirmative name for this language. That name had been coined by Robert L. Williams, a professor at Washington University in St Louis, in 1973.

  The Oakland School Board’s decision fuelled a nationwide argument. Plenty of loud and poorly informed commentators decried the idea of institutional support for what they saw not as a language, nor as a dialect, but simply as a corrupt and base type of English. In t
he New York Times Brent Staples sniped at the cabal of ‘academic theorists, lushly paid consultants and textbook writers all poised to spread the gospel’, a creed which meant that ‘time that should be spent on reading and algebra gets spent giving high fives and chattering away in street language’.8 The Board’s plans met with so much hostility that they had to be shelved.

  Ebonics is now usually referred to by the name African-American Vernacular English – most scholars consider it a form of English showing African influence, and thus a dialect, rather than a separate language – and the debate continues. Apologists argue that black students will achieve higher levels of literacy and proficiency in standard English if their own vernacular is recognized; critics dismiss this as a grotesque manifestation of ‘affirmative action’. Explicit in this debate are anxieties about race and educational justice; implicit in it are feelings of shame and resentment about the past humiliation and enslavement of black Americans. There persists what one scholar in the field identifies as ‘a dominant culture which describes African-American speech as bad, uneducated, unintelligible, etc., while wantonly imitating and celebrating its wit, creative vitality, and resilience’.9 It is worth emphasizing that the most stinging scorn for African-American mass culture is often expressed by middle-class African Americans.

  The English language’s position in America is not under threat. It benefits America to have citizens who are proficient in languages besides English. Furthermore, from my British vantage point, it seems that the unity of America is grounded not in a shared language, but in shared ideals. The success of America has had a great deal to do with its pluralism and the mobility of its populace. Nevertheless, to say these things is to invite furious contradiction. The confrontation over language policy in America looks sure to become more fierce. Its resolution, or indeed the failure to resolve it, will indicate what kind of country twenty-first-century America is set to be.