This is America, don’t speak English

According to the Book of Genesis and my delusional Christian relatives, the birth of linguistic diversity occurred after God punished hubristic humanity, speaking one language and being of one people, for building a tower in order “to make a name for (them)selves” (Gen. 11:4). In order to do this, the passage reads that God caused the people to speak more than one language (Gen. 11:7), giving birth to variation in language.

I say, let the Tower of Babel fall.

English is becoming increasingly dominant on the international scene, rendering the study of other languages unappealing to the vast majority of native English speakers.

At the same time, the study of English becomes even more important to native speakers of other languages in search of career advancement and other social or economic benefits. This has created a modern situation analogous to the Tower of Babel.

This is an error in judgement and represents a startlingly real risk to linguistic diversity, the significant loss of which would be a veritable tragedy for humanity.

There exist ways of expressing oneself in French or Arabic which are impossible to state in English and vice versa. The loss of such an ability (or the fact that so many millions of people have never even gained it) is truly sad.

While it is certainly true that the need to learn other languages to communicate with people who do not speak English is lessened by the growing prevalence of English, there nonetheless exists a number of excellent reasons to become a speaker of more than one language.  

First of all, the belief among many native English speakers that they currently gain nothing from learning other languages is a delusion. Simply because English has become such a dominant language does not mean one gains nothing from learning non-native languages.

When you study a completely different method of expression, you learn quite a lot about your own language and how you communicate, enhancing your self-understanding.

Additionally, the study of a language serves as an excellent gateway to different cultural ideas from varying regions of the world, something to which many Americans could use quite a bit more exposure.

Also, native speakers of languages other than English shouldn’t feel pressured to specifically learn English in order to advance in their careers.

Language is one of the most intimate and important aspects of any society’s culture, and when a culture’s language seems threatened by an invasion of foreign languages, that culture might (and often does) seem threatened to the society’s members.

There is nothing wrong with speaking English or even with the fact that it has become the lingua franca of the international community.

But there is something wrong when that one language has such a dominant role in global society that it pushes the role and use of other widely-spoken languages to the side.


E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu