Native languages and Spanish under attack

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In Oklahoma and Arizona, direct attacks are being made upon the use and teaching of American (Indian) tongues and such languages as Spanish, while lobbying is taking place to amend the United States constitution to make English the only legal language for government purposes. Some argue that this campaign is a part of the anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiment being popularized by some racist politicians, but it also reflects the century-old animosity of some Anglo-North Americans towards Native Americans and all brown-skinned peoples.

English only, and the campaign against bilingual education, represents a threat to First American people because it would seem to outlaw the official use of American Indigenous languages just at a time when many First Nations are developing written materials for use in education and in government. It is ironic that some Euro-Americans would seek to outlaw American languages. Perhaps all North Americans should instead be expected to learn at least one truly American language as a part of their citizenship, whether living in Canada, the U.S. or elsewhere. In addition, Spanish and French have a longer history than English in America, and that must gall some Anglo nationalists.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico (1848), which is part of the "supreme law of the land" and which takes precedence over any state statutes, guarantees to Spanish-speaking and Native American-speaking southwesterners "the free enjoyment of their liberty and property." Since none of the former Mexican subjects could speak English in 1848, it is a certainty their liberty included the right to speak, to teach, and to learn Spanish and American languages. After all, what can liberty mean if it does not mean the right to speak and use one's own language? Following the treaty. both California and New Mexico made Spanish a co-equal legal language with English, thus confirming the treaty (except as regards Native American language rights). Later in the century this equality was sacrificed to Anglo-American hostility.

Incidentally, we might want to carefully look at the 1803 treaty with France that surrendered the Plains region to the U.S. to see if the language rights of Native inhabitants might not have been protected, along with checking the many treaties with tribes, all of whom, I believe, assume the continued existence of American languages.

Xenophobic attitudes towards culturally different persons have often typified Anglo-North America and we have witnessed many campaigns to try to reduce the linguistic variety of the northern part of the continent to English only, including destructive (and illegal) efforts to erase from the face of the earth all American speech. The obscene and irrational animosity towards bilingualism must represent a deep-seated paranoid element in the character of many Anglo-North Americans, whether in the United States or Canada. When can one imagine a situation where it is advantageous to speak only one language?

But let's take a closer look at the English-only idea. The dialects that people speak in Britain, North America, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and so on are quite unlike the real English of 500-1200 CE. What we speak today is an international creole or pidgin language which I call Englatino because our dominant tongue is more than half Latin and Latin-French with thousands of words from American languages, Arabic, Celtic and Greek, among others. The truth is that none of us could possibly understand real English. Our dominant creole speech is a mixed language that has evolved during the past 500 to 800 years.

The great thing about Englatino is that it is one of the world's best "sponge" languages, soaking up new words and phrases constantly. But continuing to be a leader depends upon the exposure of Englatino to other tongues on a regular basis. For this reason it would be a terrible mistake to try to prevent other languages from being used in North Ameria.

Those who wish to make English the only official tongue have got to decide; do they want us to use only English speech of 1000 years ago? The so-called English of today has no single standard or official version. There are many dialects spoken in Britain and Ireland, including the famous BBC dialect, Cockney, etc. Elsewhere we have dialects such as Caribbean, Black English of the U.S., Southern U.S., New Yorkish, Bostonian, Texan, Canadian, etc. Now, when our English-only advocates tell us we must use only English, which English are they talking about?

Shouldn't we, like Switzerland, encourage communication in all of our many languages knowing that this will only strengthen Englatino as an international idiom and help prepare our citizens for important business, government, and educational careers in a multilingual world? The attack on bilingual education and on American languages is not based on rationality, but is another example of race-hate and xenophobic ethnocentrism. Let's not fall for that kind of shortsightedness again!

Jack D. Forbes, Powhatan-Delaware, is a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis and the author of Columbus and other Cannibals, Africans and Native Americans, Only Approved Indians, and other books. Visit his web page at for more information.