2005] On Linguistic Human Rights and the United States “Foreign” Language Crisis

Abstract

confuses their language, proliferating idioms so that they may not un derstand one another's speech (11.7-8). Although this fall into linguistic multitude, as confusion and misunderstanding, seems to contradict earlier passage in Genesis where sons of Japheth exist each with his own language, by their families in their nations (10.5; New Oxford An notated Bible), linguistic oneness as unity has remained a powerful aspira tion throughout ages?in work of Descartes, for instance. In fact, this oneness is regarded as a critical foundation of modern nation, such as birth of French Republic in 1789.1 Thus in influential work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that nation could not be imagined without linguistic communality (135), indeed, that nationalisms were historically 'impossible' until after appearance of popular linguistic-nationalisms (109)?a notion that Anderson cham pions as he bemoans the of human linguistic diversity (43), or what he dubs fatality of Babel (134). Only in passing does Anderson