When in French

by Lauren Collins

  Americans of the nineteenth century continued to accept linguistic pluralism as a fact of life. (Their tolerance notably did not extend to Native Americans, who were conscripted into English-only boarding schools, nor to slaves, whose masters forced them to speak English, while denying them the opportunity to learn to read and write.) During the Civil War, regiments such as New York’s Second Infantry recruited soldiers with German posters—“Vorwärts Marsch!”—and maintained German as their language of command. Even as nativism surged in the 1850s, with the arrival of greater numbers of Catholic immigrants, the chorus persisted. In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United States. (Even Benjamin Franklin founded a German newspaper, which failed after two issues.) One of them, Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. English speakers had to wait until the next day, when the document’s full text appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post.

  Twenty-four million foreigners came to America between 1800 and 1924. They hailed from different places than their predecessors: Italy, Russia, Greece, Hungary, Poland. In the West, the frontier was closing. In Europe, multilingual empires were giving way to monolingual nation-states, founded on the link between language and identity. As the country filled up, Americans of older standing began to cast doubt on the ability of the “new immigrants” to assimilate. In the Atlantic, a poem warned of “Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes / Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav . . . In street and alley what strange tongues are loud / Accents of menace alien to our air / Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!” In 1906 Congress passed a law precluding citizenship for any alien “who can not speak the English language.” (According to the 1910 census, this amounted to 23 percent of the foreign-born population.)

  World War I transformed bilingualism from an annoyance to a threat. As American soldiers fought Germans in the trenches, American citizens carried out a domestic purge of the “language of the enemy.” In Columbus, Ohio, music teachers pasted blank sheets of paper over the scores of “The Watch on the Rhine.” In New York, City College subtracted one point from the credit value of every course in German. Women’s clubs distributed “Watch Your Speech” pledges to schoolchildren:

  I love the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  I love my country’s LANGUAGE.

  I PROMISE:

  1.That I will not dishonor my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllables of words:

  2.That I will say a good American “yes” and “no” in place of an Indian grunt “un-hum” and “nup-um” or a foreign “ya” or “yeh” or “nope”:

  3.That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud harsh tones, by enunciating distinctly and speaking pleasantly, clearly, and sincerely:

  4.That I will try to make my country’s language beautiful for the many boys and girls of foreign nations who come to live here:

  5.That I will learn to articulate correctly one word a day for a year

  By 1918, authorities in thirty-six states had passed laws forbidding the teaching of German. In a famous speech, Teddy Roosevelt laid down English as the criterion of belonging. “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house,” he declared. In 1923 Illinois instituted American—American—as its official language. What began as subversion had become a shibboleth.

  • • •

  “I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” we three hundred girls intoned.

  “Let’s try again,” an older woman, clutching a microphone, commanded from the stage of the auditorium.

  We were rising high-school juniors, “citizens” of Tar Heel Girls State, a weeklong seminar in representative government sponsored by the women’s auxiliary of the American Legion. I had accepted the invitation under duress, having been led to believe that to decline the honor would lead to certain rejection by our great nation’s institutes of higher learning. As delegates, we were meant to emulate a municipal government—writing a charter, empaneling a school board, electing a mayor. I hadn’t ventured away from home since the humiliation of camp. As the terminus of my first foray out of self-imposed house arrest, the campus of UNC–Greensboro—and the mock city we were building within it—offered few of the enticements of Marrakesh, Florida. Name tags were mandatory. Parliamentary procedure was in effect. Housemothers ensured that residents didn’t wear gaucho pants (I was never sure if I was wearing them or not) or speak to men (if we encountered one, say, working in the cafeteria, we were supposed to ignore him).

  The proper way to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the woman explained—and the way it would be said at Tar Heel Girls State—was straight through, with no intake of breath before the divine prepositional phrase. We were to hold our elbows at a sharp ninety degrees, a sort of body-language analogue to not letting the flag touch the floor.

  “Elbows up!” she bellowed. “Don’t let them sag like chicken wings!”

  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all!” we yelled, triceps straining.

  In Meyer vs. Nebraska (1923), the Supreme Court invalidated the conviction of a Nebraska schoolteacher who had read a Bible story to a student in German, but multilingualism never recovered its vitality. Before World War I, 65 percent of high-school students studied a foreign language. By the beginning of World War II, the number had dropped to 36 percent. (In Germany, Nazis condemned the bilingualism of ethnic minorities as a cause of “mercenary relativism.” Hitler wrote that he failed to understand why the millions of Germans who were made to learn “two or three foreign languages only a fraction of which they can make use of later . . . must be tormented for nothing.”) Desperate for linguists, the military enlisted Native Americans to develop and transmit messages. In the Pacific theater, Navajo code talkers flummoxed the Japanese—rendering “submarine” as besh-lo (iron fish) and “fighter plane” as da-he-tih-hi (hummingbird)—but their contributions went unrecognized for decades.

  The launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 incited a linguistic arms race. Congress allocated funds for the expansion of foreign language programs, but the fervor was short-lived. In 1979 a presidential commission declared that “Americans’ incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous, and it is becoming worse.” According to The Tongue-Tied American, a manifesto published by Senator Paul Simon to draw attention to the “foreign-language crisis,” there were at the start of the Vietnam War fewer than five American-born experts—in universities and the State Department combined—who could speak any of the region’s languages.

  In 1981 S. I. Hayakawa, a Canadian-born senator of Japanese descent, introduced the English Language Amendment: a proposal to consecrate English, once and for all, as the country’s official language. The bill died without a vote, but its introduction marked the beginning of an era of renewed hostility to bilingualism. This time, the enemy was Spanish. In 1983 Hayakawa founded U.S. English, a lobby dedicated officially to “preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States,” and unofficially to making life miserable for immigrants of Hispanic origin. A decade after its establishment, U.S. English boasted 400,000 members and had spent $28 million persuading states to adopt its initiatives. These included forbidding 911 operators to speak in languages other than English. By 1990 seventeen states, North Carolina among them, had declared English their official language.

  Supporters of U.S. English argued that foreign languages are like flotation devices, preventing immigrants from entering American waters unassisted. In reali
ty, they buoy not only the prospects of their speakers—scientists have found that bilinguals enjoy a number of advantages, among them enhanced cognitive skills and lower rates of dementia—but also the ideals of the nation. In 1988 Arizona voters passed a referendum whose stipulations were so “overbroad,” according to the judge who voided it, as to be incompatible with the First Amendment. Had the legislation held, municipalities such as Mesa, Casa Grande, and Ajo could have been forced to change their names. In the event, Navajo Nation threatened to exercise tribal sovereignty, restoring the names of tourist attractions like Monument Valley and Window Rock to Tsébii´nidzisgai and Tségháhoodzáni.

  Linguists call America “the graveyard of languages” because of its singular ability to take in millions of immigrants and extinguish their native languages in a few generations. A study of thirty-five nations found that “in no other country . . . did the rate of the mother tongue shift toward (English) monolingualism approach the rapidity of that found in the United States.” Immigrants to America lose languages quickly; natives of America fail to acquire them. Only 18 percent of American schoolchildren are enrolled in foreign language courses, while 94 percent of European high-school students are studying English.

  Since 9/11, monolingualism has seemed undesirable, and even dangerous. In the first three years after the attacks, the FBI more than tripled the funding of its language program. Yet by 2006, of a thousand people who worked in the US Embassy in Baghdad, only six spoke fluent Arabic. Even as demand for education has increased, many school districts, battling budget cuts, have reduced their offerings. A double standard obtains: while learning a foreign language is considered prestigious, acquiring one naturally is stigmatized. We think of foreign languages as extremely hard to learn, but we’re incensed when immigrants don’t speak English perfectly.

  Americans are by no means the first people to take an exceptional stance toward their language—in the sixteenth century the Dutch scholar Johannes Goropius Becanus became convinced that the original language happened to be the one he spoke, Antwerpian Flemish. Atatürk reformed Turkish under the auspices of the “sun language theory,” which conveniently held that Turkish was the world’s primal tongue, and that, since everything that had been imported into Turkish from other languages was really Turkish to begin with, Turks didn’t have to get rid of all the foreign words they were already using. Early Irish grammarians asserted that Gaelic was superior to Latin because its parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, participle, conjunction, preposition, and interjection) mirrored the materials of the Tower of Babel (clay, water, wool, blood, wood, lime, pitch, linen, and bitumen).

  The combination of the domestic protectionism of English and its international dominance, however, makes America one of the most linguistically isolated empires the world has ever known. “It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘Merci beaucoup,’ right?” President Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008, confessing his monolingualism as a source of personal shame (even if, for electoral purposes, it was likely an asset).

  The FBI, it emerged in 2015, had been subjecting many of its newly hired linguists to an “aggressive internal surveillance program,” limiting their prospects for promotion. The criteria for inclusion in the program included foreign language fluency and ties abroad, the very skills for which they had been recruited. In the words of the film Charlie Wilson’s War, the agency apparently didn’t think it was “a good idea to have spies who speak the fucking language of the people they’re spying on.”

  In 2009 Nick George, a student at Pomona College, was detained at the Philadelphia airport as he attempted to board a flight to Los Angeles. A physics and Arabic double major, he had spent the summer studying the language in Jordan. He was flying back to California to start his senior year. At the security checkpoint, an agent asked him to empty his pockets. When he handed over a stack of flash cards, the agent called in a supervisor.

  “Do you know who did 9/11?” she asked.

  “Osama bin Laden,” George answered.

  She asked him if he knew what language Osama bin Laden spoke.

  “Arabic.”

  “So do you see why these cards are suspicious?”

  • • •

  OUR EDUCATION PERPETUATED the presumption of immobility, the map dot as lodestar. We took Spanish because it was theoretically useful in speaking to immigrants, which we never considered becoming.

  One profesora’s pedagogical method consisted of sitting on a stool and announcing that she would be willing to field any questions. The room would often remain silent. This was an interrogation no one wanted to conduct. It was said that the profesora herself planted the tiny notes that proliferated, like fungi, in the crevices of the classroom’s desks. Unfolded, they reportedly read, in English, “Ask Señora if she’s pregnant.”

  Another profesora had been a fixture at the school since many of my friends’ parents were students. During the summer she could be seen on the porch of her house, which overlooked the beach’s main drag, surveilling the action from a rocker. Each Monday she began class in the same manner.

  “¿Qué hicieron el fin de semana?” she would ask.

  “Había una fiesta,” somebody would reply.

  “Qué interessssante,” she would purr, clapping her hands, delighting in her success in extracting the weekend scoop under the guise of practicing the imperfect versus the preterite.

  “¿Y qué pasó a la fiesta?”

  “Josh beso’d Deanna.”

  “¿Es verdad?”

  The fin-de-semana scuttlebutt would degenerate into a doubly substandard Spanglish and stretch until Friday. Atrocious pronunciation, accidental and deliberate, was indulged and even considered cute, especially for boys, especially for boy athletes, as foreign languages were thought to be a vaguely effeminate business. Failing to assimilate them was almost a form of good citizenship. We said “sacapuntas” a lot. We averaged a tense a year.

  At Christmas the señora assigned us a holiday-themed art project, accompanied by an original composition. An array of half-baked handicrafts accumulated on her windowsill: ice-cream-cone Christmas trees, ragweed wreaths, droopy-faced elves fashioned out of bleach jugs.

  The Friday before school let out for the holidays, a senior named Jon—an avid sailor, with rimless glasses and a grizzled ponytail—showed up carrying a lumpy brown papier-mâché figure. With paws and a stripe on its back, it appeared to be some sort of rodent. (We later learned that it had originally been an art-class prairie dog, repurposed for the occasion.) On the top of its misshapen head, Jon had placed a miniature Santa hat.

  Jon took his place in front of the class, clearing his throat. In a sonorous voice, he began to read:

  EL CASTOR DE NAVIDAD

  Sentado, sonriendo, girando

  Yo soy caliente y mojado.

  Necesito el madero

  Que Santa trae por la chimenea.

  THE CHRISTMAS BEAVER

  Sitting, smiling, gyrating

  I am hot and wet.

  I need the wood

  That Santa brings down the chimney.

  “¡Qué poema!” the señora cheered, breaking into rapturous applause. “¡Muy bueno!”

  • • •

  WHEN THE TIME CAME to think about college, I decided to apply to Princeton. It was an impulse: I liked the photograph on the front of the brochure, of a bicycle propped attitudinally against some arches. I knew that it would please my grandmother, who lived nearby. (She was less excited by the link to John Zurn, who had matriculated there in 1942—his tenure was interrupted by the war—than she was by the lingering scent of Brooke Shields.) New Jersey, to me, might as well have been New Zealand. But reluctant as I was to leave home, I didn’t want to follow many of my friends to college in North
Carolina, where the hometown social lattice tessellated into a permanently inescapable statewide grid.

  “I’m thinking of applying to Princeton,” I told the guidance counselor. “Do you think I have a chance of getting in?”

  “I’d say fifty-fifty.”

  “Okay?”

  “Nobody’s ever applied there. The best I can say is you might get in, you might not.”

  In mid-December I received an acceptance letter. That weekend we went to a Christmas party at the house of some family friends.

  A man, the father of one of my classmates, approached, clutching a sweating Miller Lite wrapped in a shredded green paper napkin.

  “Hear you’re going to Princeton,” he said.

  I nodded, mentally preparing a humble reply to the congratulations that I imagined were forthcoming.

  “Well, no matter what you do,” he said, taking a swig, “don’t get a Yankee accent.”

  Whatever horrors awaited, no one would have guessed that I would become an American living in Switzerland with a Frenchman I’d met in England. It was the longest of shots that I’d marry in a registry hall, under a portrait of the Queen, or that the grandparents of my children would be socialist nudists. I would be old enough to vote before I rode a train. My first passport, acquired when I was nineteen, reveals a tadpole-browed provincial in a lavender polo shirt and a red nylon anorak, newly acquired for the fall season from L.L. Bean. I’m jowly, grinning, with clothesline lips that will never properly nurture rounded vowels. I resemble a petite blond John McCain.

  Three