By Rich Lowry
Sunday, November 10, 2019
I wouldn’t have thought the importance of the English
language in America would be controversial, but our era is full of surprises.
When I was on Morning
Joe the other day talking about my book, The Case for Nationalism, the Washington
Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked, in a skeptical tone, if we should be
protecting the status of the English language in our culture?
My emphasis on English was also a bee in the bonnet of
Charles King, the book’s reviewer at Foreign
Affairs, who said I make “the strangest arguments, which collapse upon the
slightest interrogation.” He includes in this category my statement that
English is a “pillar of our national identity.”
He further says, accusingly, that one of the things I
can’t imagine America without is a dominant role for the English language. In
his view, a genuinely inclusive nationalism has to jettison “the idea that
liberty is somehow less American if you call it la libertad.”
I never suggested, as you might expect, that saying the
word “liberty” in a foreign language somehow negates the value of liberty or
makes liberty less American, which would be absurd (I’ll return to all the
other preposterous things in the King review at another time). I do, though,
spend a lot of time discussing the importance of a common language as a source
of social cohesion. Why?
Because our sense of community obviously depends heavily
on it. Where a common language is present, it creates a cultural glue; where it
isn’t, there are usually deep-seated divisions.
Nice, pleasant Canada has been nearly torn apart in
recent decades by the presence of a French-speaking province, Quebec, in an
English-speaking country. Equally nice, pleasant Belgium is perennially riven
between its French-speaking and Dutch-speaking regions. Spain has been buffeted
by an independence movement in Catalonia, where, despite the best efforts of
the Spanish central government over the centuries, Catalan is still spoken by
much of the population.
On the other hand, the cleavage of Charlemagne’s empire
in the 843 Treaty of Verdun between German- and Romance-speaking parts,
corresponding roughly to Germany (in all its various forms over the centuries)
and France, has endured for more than a millennium.
People have long cared about the status of their language.
As early as the fifteenth century, proto-Protestant Hussite rebels agitated in
the Holy Roman Empire for more Czech officeholders and greater recognition of
their own tongue. The revolt was both religious and national, against an
emperor deemed “a great and brutal enemy of the Czech kingdom and language.”
Years after the Hussite rebellion had ended, dissidents still accused the pope
of seeking “to destroy, wipe out, and utterly suppress the Czech language.”
Language runs very deep. Benedict Anderson writes of how
each language “looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past.” This is why
languages “appear rooted beyond almost anything else in contemporary societies.
At the same time, nothing connects us affectively to the dead more than language.”
The weight of the words “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” for
instance, “derives only in part from their solemn meaning; it comes also from
an as-it-were ancestral ‘Englishness.’”
Indeed, the spark for nationalist movements has often
been historians, writers, lexicographers, and folklorists who celebrated and
promoted vernacular languages and excavated a glorious literary past. The
German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, who famously collected folk-tales,
nodded to the primacy of language with its logo “In the beginning was the
word.” Poets came to exemplify the national traditions and aspirations of their
countries: The Irish had W. B. Yeats, the Poles had Adam Mickiewicz, the
Zionists had Haim Bialik, and so on.
This was true as well of composers (Franz Liszt for the
Hungarians, Frédéric Chopin for the Poles, Antonín Dvořák for the Czechs),
painters (Jacques-Louis David for the French, Henry Fuseli for the Swiss,
Viktor Vasnetsov for the Russians), and novelists of great historical epics
such as Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy. The spectacle of opera provided a
particularly powerful tableau for national themes.
In short, language occupies an outsized space in the
cultural life of nations, and the role of English here in the United States is
no different.
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