In the book Language Matters: A Guide to Everyday Questions about Language, Donna Jo Napoli and Vera Lee» Schoenfeld clarify their positions on whether the United States should adopt English as the official language and overhaul the education system accordingly. While clarifying their position, the authors give the different scenarios of how such an event would impact the society, the two largest groups that support such a movement and their ungrounded reasons, and last, but not least, how such a decision would influence deaf people and their community. According to the authors, “Any educational reforms affect all of us”. This paper will explain the authors’ position against setting English as the official language of the United States by going through the arguments present on either side of the controversy and concluding with an informed opinion on the subject matter. There are two specific groups within the United States, and a former individual named Alexander Graham Bell, who particularly supports the concept of adopting English as the official language of the United States, which has been coined the term the English Only Movement (EOM).
The two specific groups that support EOM are the Us. English Foundation and English First, and although both of them are supporting the cause for their own separate reasons, the major underlying effort within the EOM is to achieve an educational reform in the United States through making English the official language. According to the authors, a possible motivation behind the EOM could be patriotism, and another more likely motivation could be that there’s a collective desire to have everyone understand each other. Alexander Graham Bell was an individual who indirectly supported the idea of having English as the official language by persisting in oral schools for deaf people. Bell believed that placing deaf people in educational settings that use sign language distance the deaf community from the regular community, thereby creating communication barriers between the two social groups.
As the authors have pointed out in their book, there are flaws with the EOM‘s argument and Bell’s argument, flaws that can‘t be overlooked, and that will have a major setback for society if English did become the official language of the nation. Both arguments made by the EOM movement and by Bell are promising, but are inconsiderate of the myriad of cultures within the United States, as well as the unique social groups within every culture, such as deaf—mute people. Even if the EOM’s aim is a positive one, with hopes of having everyone understand each other, they need to come to the understanding that it’s not due to differences in language that people have miscommunication problems. Every year, the divorce rates are seen to be increasing, and one can see more and more people becoming offended from small things, and taking things personally. However, these events don’t stem from one person speaking English, and the other not.
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Rather, people go through different experiences, have their own unique cultures and background, regardless of what language they speak, and this inevitably reflects in their communication. People who speak English fail to understand each other on a daily basis Thus, if the aim of the EOM is to have everyone understand each other through everyone speaking strictly English, one can easily see that their goal will not be reached even if English was deemed the official language, As the authors have noted, making English the official language of the country would mean completing all legal proceedings, all educational lectures, and all governmental procedures, within strictly English, and this would be an outright exclusion of the myriad of different cultures the United States is home to.
Ever since the creation of the country, the United States has been a multilingual country that’s accepting of everyone’s individuality, and this is what set them apart from many other nations in the world. Making. English the official language would be an indirect violation against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when “the federal government took action to protect civil rights regardless of one’s language,” and directly against the Voting Rights Act of 2000, when President Clinton signed an executive order “directing federal agencies to improve languageaccessibility of their programs”. Therefore, establishing English as the official language would only show the government’s strength weakening as they break their promises to their citizens.
Another’s stream of support for English being the official language came indirectly from Alexander Graham Bell, who pushed for oral schools that excluded sign language in their educational programs Bell was being inconsiderate of the deaf community who cannot even imagine what a sound is, and was expecting them to completely drop what they saw as their own language, to adopt something that was nearly impossible. The oral schools Bell pushed didn‘t seek out to teach or educate deaf people, but rather almost cure them of their deafness, and find a way for them to communicate with hearing people without hearing people having to exert any effort on their part. The desire for education reform which was also a major factor of the EOM movement is an unrealistic one because it will fail to educationally reform those who come from different traditional backgrounds, who speak different languages, who have hearing disabilities, and who are all part of the United States.
