Strangely enough, in the most powerful English-speaking country, the USA, it is the speakers of the dominant language, English, who have recently become fearful for the future of their language. In the USA, hundreds of native-American languages have mostly died out or been reduced to unimportance by the spread of English throughout American history, however, immigrants have been pouring into the USA from all over the world bringing with them their own languages. At various times, huge numbers of speakers of German, Italian, Hungarian, Russia, Chinese, Vietnamese, and a hundred other languages, have settled in America. These immigrant languages have sometimes survived for several generations in particular communities. More often, however, the children of these immigrants have rapidly switched to English, in the process know to Americans as the ‘melting pot’. But in the last couple of decades, millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants have flooded into the USA from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and all over Latin America. Today, sizeable areas of New York, Florida, and the American southwest are mainly Spanish-speaking, and Spanish is often the first language in educational, medical and political fields.
Faced with such a dramatic rise in the influence of Spanish, many English-speaking Americans have reacted defensively. Several states have passed laws declaring English to be their official language, and there is growing pressure on the government to do the same for the whole country. To date, the USA, curiously perhaps, has had no official language because it had never previously occurred to anyone to doubt the primary position of English.
Is there any real need for such laws? Personally, I doubt it. First, the position of English, not just in the USA bus also in the world, seems to be unquestionable for the near future: English is everywhere ― the language of business, of technology, of communications, of science, and of popular culture. Second, if I’m wrong, and Spanish is going to take the place of English in the USA, I can’t see that passing laws against it will have any effect: we might as well pass laws against inflation, or against dying of disease. Finally, so what if English does lose out to Spanish? Spanish is a rich and expressive language, and, like Latin and French before it, English cannot hope to be the world’s premier language forever.
