¿Habla Español?

This week CNN profiled a small town in Texas, called El Cenizo, on the border with Mexico, where the Mayor has declared Spanish as one of the official languages of the town. What that means is that council meetings can be held in Spanish and official government communication can be dispersed in Spanish. This report sent the conservative US blogosphere into a tizzy, with racist epithets flying around and the Alamo being revisted all over again. This, in spite of the fact that the town had undergone significant improvement because of increased public participation in town hall meetings and such, mainly due to the breakdown of the language barrier.

As the campaign for the 2008 US Presidential elections gathers speed, the rhetoric about immigration, one of the key issues this time, is getting more and more heated. One of the sub-debates in that conversation is about English as the official language of the United States.

Strange as it may sound, the United States does not have an ‘official’ language, i.e. a constitutionally mandated language for official government business. Perhaps the country’s founding fathers didn’t see it coming, perhaps they thought it wasn’t that important an issue, but the fact is that today the United States is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic society, with Hispanics making up the largest single non-English-speaking block. Roughly 15% of the US population today speaks Spanish.

And therein lies the rub. In many states high school children are offered Spanish as a second language. Almost any call to a interactive telephone service has the mandatory “For English, press 1. For Spanish…”. Most non-governmental paper-work is available in bi-lingual format, and even ballot papers in some constituencies are bi-lingual. All this has conservatives frothing at the mouth. Many commentators have likened it to a cultural invasion, with some extreme ones calling it the end of the United States as it is known today! While many arguments in favor of English are rooted in very logical and practical reasons, such as the need to know English to succeed professionally since it is the language of the economy, many others are based on prejudice and border on the xenophobic. Among general English speaking Americans, it is more of linguistic chauvanism than anything else. More than the difficulty of learning a new language, it seems to be a belief that it is illogical to have more than one language spoken in a country. Television talking heads recoil with mock horror at the prospect of multi-lingual government communication, such as application forms or driving tests.

This irrational fear among Americans of having a second language in the public realm, or God-forbid, having to actually ‘learn’ another language, is mildly amusing to most Indians. In my entire life I don’t think I have ever come across an Indian who spoke just one language. Even with my negligible aptitude for languages, I can manage three with a splattering of a fourth!

For a country where the local language changes every 400 to 500 km, all this is perhaps not surprising. But what truly stands out is the number of languages ‘officially’ sanctioned by the Government of India. Besides the two official languages of Hindi and English for Parliamentary proceedings, judiciary and administration, there are two ‘classical’ languages, Tamil and Sanskrit. 22 languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu). The government is obliged to take steps for the development of these languages. A candidate appearing for an exam can opt to answer the paper in any of these languages. Then there are the official languages at the state level, many of which are not even listed in the Eighth Schedule, such as Khasi and Garo (in Meghalaya), or Mizo, or Koborok (in Tripura). [info from Wikipedia]
There are 1652 known languages spoken in India, with 24 of these being spoken by more than a million people.
Add to this the fact that English is spoken as a second language by 20 – 25 million Indians. Certainly boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

It’s a pity that the average American is not exposed to such statistics. It would have certainly put a lot of things in perspective. But then this isn’t a nation which likes to take its cues from external sources. And language surely isn’t the only example.

With their Presidential elections just round the corner, and a history of controversy about electronic voting, now is as good a time as any to point out this little comparison, or a more technical take here.

~ by Shubho on June 29, 2007.