“For English, Please Press 1”

As y’all know, I’m extremely language-friendly. I love other languages, and I love learning them. I think people should be encouraged to learn more (particularly Americans, who are notoriously monolingual).

But I agree with this editorial about the multicultural situation in Maryland.

English is the national language of the US, and efforts that weaken that need to be curbed.

I understand having multilingual access for certain vital services (e.g., having translators of common immigrant languages on staff at hospitals), but cultures don’t cohere well if they don’t have a common language, so apart from truly essential services, integration into the linguistic mainstream is to be encouraged.

I’m not asking anything here of others that I wouldn’t apply to myself. If I were living in Mexico, I would consider it my duty to beef up my Spanish skills as quickly as possible and wouldn’t expect government or business to do lots of things for me in English. If I were in Germany, I’d start hitting my Pimsleur German tapes. Even if I were living in France (shudder), I’d start studying French.

If (by some bizarre circumstance) I had become a citizen of another nation and had the right to vote, I especially wouldn’t consider it incumbent on that nation to print ballots in English just to accomodate me. If I couldn’t take the trouble to learn the local language well enough to vote in it, I wouldn’t consider myself well enough educated in local affairs to cast a vote responsibly. It would be better for me to withhold my vote. If I felt a pressing need to vote, I’d start studying the local language.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

6 thoughts on ““For English, Please Press 1””

  1. Jimmy,
    I agree with what you say. But, I’m not such a huge fan of Pimsleuer. It’s very motivational given that there are no books (early on). On the ther hand, the system makes pronunciation difficult. It’s hard to hear the nuances of pronunciation unless you have words to look at.

  2. Jimmy,
    By the way, have you ever noticed that as far as multiculturalists are concerned, they could care less about the gradual dissapearance (by immigration or otherwise) of Dutch Calvinism, Italian Catholicism, etc.?

  5. Steve,
    You’ve pointed out one of the few flaws with the Pimsleur Method. They do need to include a vocabulary list so you can see the spellings of the words.
    On the other hand, one can easily compensate for this by buying a dictionary/phrasebook to accompany the Pimsleur set. That’s what I do. Dover has a line of really cheap, really useful dictionary/phrasebooks that I use to look up spellings for things in Pimsleur courses.

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