The United States has experienced heightened political conflict over language policy for the last three decades, as an ongoing disagreement between pluralists and assimilationists has engaged the attention of the media and policymakers in such a wide range of venues as radio talk shows, television debates, local school boards, PTA meetings, city councils, county governments, state legislatures, executive agencies, national political party nominating conventions, the Congress, and the Supreme Court of the United States. More specifically, this conflict has centered on three primary issues that are deeply intertwined in the minds of most of its partisans: (1) education policy for...

As Described in Chapter 1, the United States has experienced a sharp increase in conflict over language policy. The first chapter provided an overview of the issues in this conflict, but it did not go below the surface to ask what is really at stake in the politics of language. What causes language to become a political issue of such emotional intensity? What are the root sources of this type of political conflict? How have political conflicts over language been dealt with in various contexts in the contemporary world?

This chapter will not answer these questions with finality, but rather...

In Chapter 2, it was argued that language policy conflicts tend to emerge in countries where there is linguistic diversity, where ethnolinguistic contact and competition take place, and where political actors—motivated by concerns over group identity, national unity, and/or ethnolinguistic inequality—push the state to do something about these facts. In Chapter 1, we saw that a significant conflict of expectations exists among some political actors over language policy in the United States. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the extent to which the other conditions outlined in Chapter 2 exist in the United States, fanning the...

Two Aarguments have dominated the U.S. conflict over language policy in recent years. One concerns the relationships between language policy and ethnic equality, the other those between language policy, ethnic identity, and national unity. Before outlining and assessing the protagonists’ arguments in these two disputes, it is important that we examine their competing historical narratives. Indeed, one of the most divisive of issues in the present conflict over language policy in this country is how we understand the origins of both our linguistic diversity and our ethnolinguistic stratification. The two sides in the U.S. debate—pluralists and assimilationists—are as...

As Noted in Chapter 1, the argument over U.S. language policy has been conducted primarily in terms of two major public values, justice and the common good. The latter issue will be taken up in the following chapter, the former in this one. The search for justice in this debate has been focused for the most part in terms of how language policy can best promote greater equality for members of language minority groups. Although highly complex, the argument over how to answer this question takes two fundamental forms, one that is made in terms of equal rights, and another...

The Second question of primary values in the language policy debate is that of the common good, centering in this instance on the relationships among language, cultural identity, and national unity. And, while the debate over equality and language policy has most exercised the emotions of linguistic pluralists, it is the question of national unity that seems to most stimulate the adrenalin of assimilationists. This chapter, therefore, will begin with a description of the assimilationist argument in relation to language policy and national unity, followed by an exposition of the pluralist response, with each position tied to a conception of...

We are now at the point of resolution for this book. We have surveyed the principal policy issues that divide many Americans over our politics of language. Further, after placing the U.S. conflict over language in theoretical, comparative, social, and historical contexts, we have also reviewed the principal arguments made by assimilationist and pluralist partisans in the contemporary battle over U.S. language policy. These arguments have been articulated in relation to the two most fundamental value issues in this conflict: how to ensure justice (equality) for language minority group members in contemporary U.S. society, and how to ensure that U.S....

Chapter 7 argued that there are important flaws in each of the language policy alternatives for the United States. The case for an assimilationist policy is compelling only if you are willing to deny equal opportunity to language minority group members in this country. This is so because of two stubborn facts that assimilationists tend to ignore. First, assimilationists ignore the fact that our history has constituted the United States a multilingual, multicultural country not only through individual voluntary immigration, but also through violence and contested annexation. And second, most assimilationists ignore the fact that government cannot be neutral toward...