by The U.S. Army

This national language policy, because it encourages more U.S. citizens to learn multiple languages, provides an important counterbalance to the Official English legislation that Senator James Inhofe introduced during the 2006 congressional debates on immigration reform and that his fellow senators approved by a 63-34 vote (Inhofe Natl.). Senator Ihofe’s English Language Amendment targets immigrants in particular, demanding that they learn English as a means to prevent them from “importing dangerous, deadly philosophies that go against our American ideals” (“Inhofe Statement”). Although President Bush and other federal officials might share the same belief that all people living in the United States need to learn Links Of London Charms English, they have also sought to encourage—and to fund programs that enable—all U.S. citizens to learn multiple languages. Even as the national security language policy promotes multilingualism, however, English scholars need to examine this policy closely to understand the ideas about language, identity, and public participation that guide its vision for language arts education.

The policy’s almost exclusive focus on the military and intelligence communities’ “critical” language needs reinforces a belief that English is the language for U.S. civic life whereas non-English languages are “foreign” and are needed only for speaking and writing in international contexts. As John Trimbur argues, such a perspective results from “a ritualized forgetting that the United States was then, as it is now, a multilingual society”. In this way, the policy effectively reinscribes a belief in an English-Only U.S. public sphere. Trimbur instead proposes a vision of U.S. society in which multiple languages “circulatfe as means of participating in public life”. This vision of people using multiple languages in both professional and civic life should guide English scholars as they attempt to redirect the aim of this emerging national language policy. By defining the nation’s language crisis in terms of “foreign” languages and overseas concerns, President Bush, DoD officials, and congressional leaders have potentially dissuaded schools and colleges from developing programs to serve the communities where they are located. Mary Louise Pratt provides an example that illustrates this point in her 2004 essay “Building a New Public Idea about Language”: Within its own borders the United States needs professionals and service people of all kinds who can operate in locally spoken languages. A few months ago, for example, two southern California primary school teachers told me of their frustration when a flagship Japanese program was set up in their school district, while an acute need for Tagalog speaking nurses, doctors, lawyers Links Of London Earrings teachers, social workers, even tax preparers went unmet. There was no pipeline to track local Tagalog speakers into these professions and enable them to develop their Tagalog.

Pratt’s words illustrate the fact that a national language policy conceived solely on international concerns may keep the citizenry safe from enemies, but it will also ignore inequalities that face linguistic minority communities within U.S. borders. The national language policy debate needs to include a broader range of voices to redirect the policy’s aim toward improving domestic well being in a variety of ways, particularly for those people who, because they speak seemingly “foreign” languages, are situated outside the national imagination in most debates about effective public policy.

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