A Stitch in Haste

A report calling for all school children in France to learn English has started a heated debate. The report, part of a review of the French education system, said English should be made compulsory. According to Le Monde, it says pupils should leave school with the language of "international communication".

The Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is said to back the proposal, but some politicians are against it.
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France's report said standards of English in schools were poor and worsening. Its conclusions have been challenged by some politicians, including one deputy from the ruling UMP party, Jacques Myard. He told Le Monde: "English is the most-spoken language today, but that won't last." He said Spanish, Chinese and Arabic were all growing in importance. "If we must make a language compulsory, it should be Arabic," he said.
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During a trip to Vietnam earlier this month, President Jacques Chirac was quoted as saying he was against a world "where we speak only one language".

(Guest-posted earlier today at Freespace.)

One of the great joys of reading blogs is not only their intellectual substance but also the fact that, usually, most are so well-written. Tim is no exception. There is so much bad English in our society that, to a grammar-anal person like me, reading something -- anything -- in true Standard Written English is always refreshing, even if I disagree with the content.

So my heart certainly went out to Veda Charrow as I read her op-ed piece in the Washington Times:

Have you ever wondered why so many reporters don't know that "criterion" is singular and "criteria" is plural? How many times have you read something like this in a magazine: "The student who brings a knife to school to peel their orange may be expelled"? How many times have you heard a newscaster saying, "The new phone bill is different than your previous bills"? Or hypercorrections like "The judge admonished the driver whom everyone knew had struck the cat"? In short, have you ever wondered why so many people who should know better make grammatical errors? Earlier in the 20th century, professional writers and educated speakers could be expected to make few, if any, grammatical errors. Newspapers and magazines were edited not only for content and length, but for grammatical correctness. This is no longer the case. Newspapers, magazines, newscasts and, of course, the Internet are rife with errors like the ones above.

I have no doubt that the reason for this profusion of grammatical errors is that most American elementary and high school students aren't taught English grammar anymore. And I'm afraid that my own discipline, linguistics, may be largely to blame.

Read the entire piece, especially if you don't like Noam Chomsky.

As for me, I'm reminded of this Churchill quote:

Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English; and then I would let the clever learn Latin as an honour and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.

Yeah, yup, whoa, killer, dude, far out, right on...

Indeed. Now if we could just get those Brits to spell "favor" and "honor" correctly...

A dispute over language at a Wendy's last Thursday comes as the latest reminder that multiculturalism has its limits. Alexandria police say the restaurant's Pakistani manager and cashier attacked a customer with a rake and a pair of hedge trimmers they grabbed from the victims landscaping truck after the man suggested they learn Spanish, in deference to their Spanish-speaking employees and customers.

The comment apparently pushed the wrong cultural buttons for the Pakistanis, said to have been deeply offended by the remark. Now, the pair face felony assault charges for using gardening tools as their reply.

It's easy to sympathize with their frustration, if not their violence. Are native Urdu speakers now expected to learn Spanish, Korean, Farsi, Vietnamese, Hindi and all the other 300 tongues now spoken in the United States just to sell burgers and fries? Couldn't this ugly scene have been avoided if everybody at the Wendy's just spoke English?

[Netflix CEO] Reed Hastings lost his seat on the state Board of Education on Wednesday when the Senate Rules Committee refused to forward his name to the full Senate for reappointment.
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Hastings, a Democrat who speaks English and Spanish, lost his bid for confirmation when the three Democrats on the panel voted against him or abstained, purportedly over bilingual education. ...Those opposed to his reappointment represented several groups supporting classroom instruction in a student's native language, a practice that has dwindled since California voters approved Proposition 227 in 1998 requiring instruction in English unless a school wins a waiver. Hastings, who opposed Prop. 227, later became an ardent supporter when test scores of English learners soared in California.

The language amendment was quietly inserted into a bill addressing the number of members that cities can appoint to boards of parks and recreation. Among mundane details about record-keeping, the amendment adds the provision that "English shall be the official language of the State of West Virginia."
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Andrew Schneider, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, said English-only laws are based on the false premise that immigrants will not learn English without government coercion.

"And English-only laws do nothing constructive to increase English proficiency. They simply discriminate and punish those who have not yet learned English," Schneider said.

Incorporating Ebonics into a new school policy that targets black students, the lowest-achieving group in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, may provide students a more well-rounded curriculum, said a local sociologist.
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"Ebonics is a different language, it's not slang as many believe," Texeira said. "For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language. These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.

Stylists say the notice was put up in 2003, directed at employees as Supercuts managers allegedly barred them from speaking Spanish anywhere at work — including in the break room or other places outside the earshot of customers.

Supercuts says there is no such ban.
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The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which joined in the lawsuit, argues that such a ban is a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits employment discrimination based on national origin.

Zach Rubio, a 16-year-old high school junior, was sent home from the Endeavor Alternative School on Nov. 28 for talking in Spanish at lunch and later in the day. Principal Jennifer Watts sent him home and suspended him through the following day.

District officials said Watts told the boy's father the suspension was a direct result of his speaking Spanish. Superintendent of Schools Bobby Allen reversed the suspension within hours of learning about it from the father, the district said.
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[Rubio] speaks perfect, unaccented English and is also fluent in Spanish.

A state judge could rule soon on whether Alabama must give driver's license exams only in English or can test potential motorists in 12 other languages as it has since 1998.
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Alabama voters in 1990 approved a state constitutional amendment making English the official language. The state then stopped giving driver's exams in many languages.

In 1996, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the state on behalf of non-English-speaking residents. The civil rights groups won a series of decisions in federal courts. The state won the case before the Supreme Court but decided to offer driver's license exams in many languages.

"If they don't have time to learn English, then they won't have a license, and that could lead to unlicensed driving, which is probably a more significant safety problem than not knowing road signs."

The plans, which represent an expansion of some programs and the start of a few others, aim to involve children in foreign-language courses as early as kindergarten while increasing opportunities for college and graduate school instruction. They also would draw more linguists into government service and establish a national corps of language reservists available to the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence community and other agencies in times of heightened need.

Bush portrayed the enhancement of foreign-language skills as a way of enlarging U.S. capacity to spread democracy. "You can't convince people unless you can talk to them," he said.

He described learning somebody else's language as a "kind gesture" showing care for another culture. It would be a way to combat the notion that the United States is bullying in imposing its concept of freedom, he said.

"When Americans learn to speak a language, learn to speak Arabic, those in the Arabic region will say, 'Gosh, America's interested in us. They care enough to learn how we speak,' " Bush said.

For a 16-year-old, Iris Padilla's resume looks pretty good: Not only is she already a senior close to completing all the credits needed to graduate from Richmond High, she's president of a Latin American culture club and is active in political and religious clubs at school. Next year, Iris wants to go to college and study psychology.

But Richmond High might not let her graduate this spring.
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Iris is one of 73,270 California high school seniors in the same pickle — unable to fulfill a new state law requiring students to pass a test of basic English, math and algebra to graduate. That's 1 in 5 members of the state's Class of 2006, says the state Department of Education.
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"I need a diploma," said Iris [in Spanish]... "I want it. I deserve it. I've been going to school and studying. I want to have a profession."

Officials are now having to lay off some of the bosses who manage [Oregon] firefighting crews because the bosses are not bilingual. Many of the newer hires in Oregon only speak Spanish.

"What we do know is 85 percent of the crew makeup is of Hispanic descent," said Jim Walker, with the Oregon Department of Forestry.

The state said all bosses must speak the same language of their crew on the fire lines for safety reasons. They want to make sure that the leader of the crews can quickly communicate during an emergency if the fire turns or if there is another problem on the fire lines.
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So why couldn't the state require that these crew members speak English? The state doesn't have a clear answer.

The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favor of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users' commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.

The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, notorious as shrewd businessmen, must have been pragmatists; like their modern analogues, they would have focused on the practical utility of a means of communication, and chosen a language accordingly.

There was no tradition to preserve Phoenician or Punic texts, and so they perished with the papyrus on which they had been written.