Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English

Abstract

According to Mary Louise Pratt, a common misconception regarding the American public's view of language is that the U.S. is hostile to multilingual ism. Instead, Pratt says, Americans are ambivalent about the multiple lan guages spoken on the street, at work, in the schoolyard, and in the homes where 25 percent of the population speak a language other than English. The poli tics of language in the U.S. are a tug-of-war between English monolingualism (which, as Pratt notes, gives the U.S. the well-earned nickname of cemeterio de lenguas, z language cemetery [111]) and the linguistic reality that the U.S. is now, as it has always been, a multilingual society. The ambivalence that Pratt so acutely identifies has its own specific histories in lived experience and linguistic memory. My task here is to look for the roots of this ambivalence in the formation of U.S. English in the late colonial and early national period, roughly 1750 to 1850, just as the American colonists were breaking away from England and, in the matrix of the new nation, establishing the relationship of English to other languages. The design of this essay is first to trace the postcolonial politics of language in the United States. Then I suggest how the linguistic memory that emerges from decolonization and nation building continues, often in unsuspected ways, to influence the language policy of the modern U.S. university and U.S. college composition.