Linguistic Affiliation

There is no official national language. If English is its unofficial first language, Spanish is its unofficial second language. The United States ranks fifth in the world in the number of Spanish speakers.

Standard English is the language Americans are expected to speak. Within the social hierarchy of American English dialects, Standard English can be described as the exemplar of acceptable for correct usage based on the model of cultural, economic, and political leaders. There is no clear-cut definition of what Standard English is, and it is often defined by what it is not. For example, it often is contrasted with the type of English spoken by black Americans (African-American Vernacular English).

Standard English grammar and pronunciation are taught by English teachers in public schools. Like "whiteness," this implies a neutral, normative and nonethnic position. However, most Americans do not speak Standard English; instead, they speak a range of class, ethnic, and regional variants.

Spoken English includes many dialects that have been influenced by Native Americans, immigrants, and slaves. These languages include not only Dutch, German, and Scandinavian, Asian, and African languages, but less widely spoken languages such as Basque, Yiddish, and Greek. Thus, spoken English reflects the nation's immigration and history.

As linguistic diversity has increased, and particularly as Spanish has become more widely spoken, language has become an important aspect of the debate over the meaning or nature of American culture. Linguistic and cultural diversity is accepted in states such as New York and Illinois, where Spanish bilingual education is mandated in the public schools. In California, however, where tensions between Anglos and Mexican immigrants run high, bilingual education has been abolished in the public school systems. State laws prohibit even bilingual personnel from using Spanish with Spanish-speaking patients in hospitals or with students in schools.

Bilingual education is not new. In the nineteenth century, Germans outnumbered all other immigrant groups except for all the people from the British Isles combined. With the exception of Spanish speakers in the Southwest, at no other time has foreign language been so widely spoken. German-only newspapers and German and bilingual public schools were found throughout the Midwest and Oregon and Colorado and elsewhere from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I, when anti-German sentiment resulted in the elimination of German instruction in public schools.

Other languages used in the press and in public schools included Yiddish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Thus, proponents of English only, who claim that bilingual education should not be provided to Spanish-speaking immigrants because earlier immigrants did not have this advantage, overlook the fact that those immigrants often were schooled in their native languages.

Education was important in spreading English as a standard language. Public schools played a major role; by 1870, every state in the country had committed itself to compulsory education. The percentage of foreign-born persons who were unable to speak English peaked 31 percent in 1910, by 1920 had decreased to 15 percent, and by 1930 had fallen less than 9 percent. Among Native Americans, English was enforced by the establishment by the Bureau of Indian Affairs of compulsory boarding schools for school-age children. Contemporary Native American speech patterns can be traced to that experience.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11