America’s Ethnic Diversity Spawns Language Conflicts

Her canary-yellow silk dress, white pumps and matching veiled hat said it all.

The Haitian woman’s carefully chosen outfit represented 20 years of tough labor, lonely nights and English classes where most of the students were less than half her age.

But the day Marie Edith Philistin and 67 others were sworn in as U.S. citizens in a Washington, D.C., courtroom was not for dwelling on the past.

After the ceremony, Philistin sat smiling in the reception room, holding a souvenir American flag, savoring the day she had worked for since leaving Haiti in 1972.

The 49-year-old housekeeper credits her survival in the United States to a dogged determination to learn English. The practicing and studying never ceased, Philistin said in a thick French accent, even after she twice failed the citizenship exam, which requires an elementary knowledge of English.

“Some nights I was so tired, but I at least took the book out and looked at it a while,” she said.

Language has become an increasing focus of conflict in the ethnically diverse United States of the 1990s. As new immigrants continue pouring into the United States, an emotionally charged movement has emerged to declare English the nation’s official language.

Its advocates contend that the country risks becoming divided linguistically and culturally because it doesn’t have an official language. Its opponents see it as a way of tapping into xenophobic fears and unleashing discrimination on the 7 million U.S. residents who speak English poorly or not at all.

Both sides of the official-English movement claim that their view is shared by a majority of Americans. In fact, many Americans are unaware of the issue or assume that English already is the official language. About one-third of the world’s countries have official languages.

“The reality is we have 153 languages used in this country,” said Enrique Cubillos, director of programs at U.S. English, a nonprofit organization that has been a key proponent of official-English legislation. “The community needs something to bind it together.”

Such luminaries as journalist Alistair Cooke, former Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, author Saul Bellow and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger serve on the advisory board of U.S. English. The 400,000-member group recently received the backing of 140 lawmakers.

The official-English movement’s opposition includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Education Assn. and numerous Latino-rights organizations.

An official language policy would detract from the diversity that the United States is all about, said Margarita Roque, director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “The American way is not to make everybody the same and diminish cultural contributions from different groups of people,” she said.

The 19 state laws declaring English their official language range from symbolic to stringent.

Some states, such as Colorado and Kentucky, merely declare English the state’s official language, along the lines of naming the state vegetable. Others, like Virginia and Tennessee, go as far as prohibiting multilingual ballots and restricting bilingual education programs.

Proposed federal legislation does not mandate outright restrictions. Rather, it states that the U.S. government is not required to provide documents and services in a language other than English or to obligate schools to teach standard curriculum in a language other than English.

This does not mean that the government would have to stop printing all documents in other languages, Cubillos emphasized.

“If the Department of Agriculture prints brochures about drug abuse and intends them to reach audiences who don’t speak English, then that is a service and should not be changed,” he said.

The general terms of the legislation are what worry official-English opponents, who say employers and ordinary citizens could interpret the law in their own way.

Workplace rules barring employees from speaking their native languages to one another are on the rise, said ACLU attorney Ed Chen. In California, a Latino nurse’s aide at a convalescent hospital was fired for speaking Spanish to a co-worker. In Florida, a grocery store cashier was suspended in a similar incident.

Why shouldn’t the United States protect its common language, official-English supporters ask.

Most worldwide language laws are not analogous to the U.S. movement, according to linguists. In France, for example, where Parliament in 1992 approved an official-language law, no one is worried about the French language becoming extinct, said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at Stanford University.

“The law is directed at French people who use English words. It’s symbolic” he said. “The U.S. movement doesn’t have anything to do with people saying, ‘No problema , ‘ or, ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’ ”

Nor, said Nunberg, is the United States likely to reach the bitter division that exists in Canada as a result of official bilingualism. “In the United States, there aren’t large numbers of English-speaking Hispanics insisting on learning Spanish,” he said.

But there are large numbers of Latinos and other minorities who are clamoring to learn English. Waiting lists and teacher shortages plague English-language centers across the country.

The election of Bill Clinton to the White House brought new questions to the decade-long conflict over official English. In contrast to former President George Bush, who has spoken out against an official language, Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, approved an official-English law in 1987.