ProEnglish Responds To Wall Street Journal

Ilan Stavans of The Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled “How We The People Built American English.” ProEnglish Board of Directors Secretary Richard Munro responded to the Stavans WSJ article, and here are excerpts from Richard Munro’s piece:

Stavans gives the impression that Theodore Roosevelt was an English-only monoglot when in fact Roosevelt, though an American nationalist, was a multilingual cosmopolitan thinker. Roosevelt was fluent in German and French, and could get by in Portuguese and Spanish, but Roosevelt also was aware of the dangers of a chaotic polyglot society, and for that reason he felt that English should be America’s national and official language. Roosevelt was aware of the constitutional implications of a romantic bilingualism or multilingualism that could lead to separatism, inter-ethnic violence, and civil war. 

E.D. Hirsch noted, “Multilingualism enormously increases cultural fragmentation, civil antagonism, illiteracy, and economic-technological ineffectualness.” Diane Ravitch wrote of America as “a society that is racially diverse [and] requires…a conscious effort to build shared values and ideas among its citizenry.” This should include the recognition that English is and should be our official national language.

The USA is an English-speaking nation and we should enshrine this fact nationwide in law…by making English our official national language.