Geoff Nunberg
Xerox PARC
Over the past 15 years, the "English-only" movement has become a central issue in American political life. Eighteen states have adopted official language measures and legislation is pending in thirteen more; in 1996 the House of Representatives approved a law that bars the federal government from providing services in languages other than English, which will probably be voted on in the Senate in the current term. Some polls show over 80 percent of Americans favoring making English the official language.
Proponents of these measures argue that they are necessary to counter the "drift toward official multilingualism." They claim that there are more than 30 million Americans who do not speak English and warn that government bilingual programs encourage people to believe that they can function without learning English, a situation that could lead to the sorts of civil divisions that have torn apart nations like Canada, Belgium, and Sri Lanka. In this talk, however, I'll argue that these claims are wildly overstated and implausible. Official English measures are both unnecessary and themselves divisive -- a bad cure for an imaginary disease -- which is why the movement has been overwhelmingly opposed not just by ethnic and civil-rights organizations, but by the American linguistics community.
Geoffrey Nunberg is a Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a consulting professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is also the usage editor of the American Heritage Dictionary and a regular commentator on the NPR program "Fresh Air." He has been actively involved in questions of language policy since 1986.