Sarah Catherine Moore. Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education. Editor: Josué M González. Volume 1, Sage Publications, 2008.
In the context of U.S. bilingual education, language restrictionism is defined as systematic efforts to stop a linguistic or ethnic group of people from speaking, learning, or maintaining their native or home language. In the United States, language restrictionism has been justified under the banner of promoting national unity, ensuring the homogeneity of the citizenry, or as a means of “Americanizing” immigrants or native peoples. Learning and using the English language is usually considered the defining characteristic of “Americanism.”
Many scholars agree that a restrictive period of language policy lasted from the 1880s through the 1960s. James Crawford, in his book Educating English Learners, provides what may be the most comprehensive overview of the history of language restriction-ism in the United States, as expressed in attitudes and policies restricting bilingual education. This entry draws from his work and that of others who have looked into this peculiarly American idea.
Although the founding fathers never selected an official language for the new nation, restricting the use of languages in public places, especially in schooling, is documented as early as the mid-17th century. Benjamin Franklin was perhaps the most notable personality who promoted language restrictionism. He opened an English-only parochial school for native German-speaking children in the 1750s. When parents realized that the school’s emphasis was imposing a language shift away from German, they removed their children and withdrew political support for Franklin. In 1780, John Adams also proposed opening an English-only school, but his request was ignored by the Continental Congress, probably because the support of German-speaking colonists was vital to the nation-building effort that lay ahead.
Terrence Wiley, in a book chapter titled “Accessing Language Rights in Education,” provides a history of educational language policy in the United States. In it, he identifies the groups against whom language restrictionism has been aimed historically: immigrants, including refugees, enslaved peoples, and indigenous peoples. He and others have argued that language restrictions targeting minority populations are directly and indirectly associated with social, political, economic, and educational policy debates. Further, presumed social hostility against certain populations resonates in the degree of restrictiveness against a language and the impact of restrictions on that population.
Enslaved Peoples
Often language restrictionism results in the emergence of new or altered languages as speakers resist restrictions on their native languages, chiefly the inability to study the conventional form of their languages in school. Language restrictionism, on the one hand, and powerlessness on the other are part of the explanation for how plantation owners exerted dominance over large slave populations in places where African slaves outnumbered Whites. Linguists such as John Baugh have presented the theory that African American Vernacular English (AAVE, sometimes called “Black English” or Ebonics) emerged because (a) slaves from different language backgrounds were forced to find means of communication, and (b) educational apartheid in the United States denied access to English language and literacy development for African Americans. In the case of language restrictionism aimed at African American slaves, compulsory ignorance laws barred access to literacy until 1865. Compulsory ignorance refers to the practice whereby slaves were prevented from speaking their own tongues, but also prevented from learning English. In some slaveholding states, Whites were punished if they were found teaching slaves to read and write. Even after the last laws against compulsory ignorance were voided in 1918, however, equal access to education for African Americans was not provided. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine that further restricted access to schooling and to the language of schooling for 50 years, until it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Baugh and others have documented anecdotal recollections that point to the gate-keeping structures that limit access to native speakers.
Indigenous Peoples
Evidence of attempts by White Americans to restrict the use of indigenous languages appears as early as 1674, as noted by Richard Bailey in his book chapter “American English: Its Origins and History.” He reports the Superintendent of the Indians in Massachusetts writing a proposal to stop attempts at teaching indigenous literacy and replacing them with how to speak, read, and write English. Beyond this early example, little documentation of language restriction exists until much later. In 1819, the Civilization Fund Act was passed to advance English education and practical skills for Native Americans, including English and Anglo values, thus restricting the maintenance of indigenous language and culture.
By the mid-19th century, language restrictionism expanded in scope tremendously and was aimed at “civilizing” Native Americans. Directly after his election as president in 1830, Andrew Jackson pushed a law through Congress called the Indian Removal Act, which required indigenous peoples to move west of the Mississippi River. This occurred largely through coercion and force. The best-known result of the Removal Act is the historical event referred to as the Trail of Tears. Cherokees who refused to leave their land were forced westward by U.S. troops; en route, nearly 4,000 died of cold, hunger, and disease. Once resettled, tribes instituted bilingual and Cherokee medium of instruction schools, resulting in the spread of native language and literacy (an oral language, it was assigned a syllabic writing system by Sequoyah and adopted by the Cherokee nation in 1821). Ultimately, the Cherokee achieved 90% literacy levels among their people, far beyond that of White Americans of the time. One governmental response was an attack on indigenous peoples’ language and culture. Crawford notes that in 1868 the Indian Peace Commission stated, “In the difference of language to-day lies two thirds of our trouble … Schools should be established, which children should be required to attend; their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted” (p. 48). To enforce this concept, off-reservation boarding schools were created where Native American children were forcibly Anglicized and Americanized. In 1877, Congress began appropriating funding for Native American schooling, appropriating $20,000 the first year. Restricting indigenous language use was a key objective in the new program initiatives. The superintendent of Indian Schools announced in 1887 that a native’s “inability to speak another language than his own renders his companionship with civilized man impossible,” and J. D. C. Atkins, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, lauded English in arguing, “This language, which is good enough for a White man and a Black man, ought to be good enough for the red man” (p. 51). In his book Language Loyalties, Crawford refers to the following excerpt taken from Atkins’s annual report on Indian Affairs:
The object of greatest solicitude should be to break down the prejudices of tribe among the Indians; to blot the boundary lines which divide them into distinct nations, and fuse them into one homogeneous mass. Uniformity of language will do this—nothing else will. (p. 48)
In response to these calls, a “No Indian” rule was instated at boarding schools in 1890, meaning students were never permitted to speak their native languages—all communication was to be in English. In implementing this policy, most schools punished children for speaking native languages. Adult Navajos have reported having been assigned chores, having hands slapped with rulers, and mouths washed out with soap for disobeying the English-only rules while in dormitory living spaces. Among the most successful boarding schools at teaching English was Carlisle Academy in Pennsylvania, where some teachers claimed students could attain oralcy and literacy in English as quickly as in 6 to 9 weeks. Indian boarding schools exist today in a different light, as settings for students to revitalize native language and culture, but the older model of boarding schools lasted through the mid-20th century along with language restrictionism.
Immigrants
The most obvious and persistent efforts toward language restrictionism in the United States have been the promotion of a single language for immigrants. This was among the purposes of Noah Webster’s dictionary. Webster intended to craft a language that reflected American culture and values and distinguished American English from British English. As noted by its publisher in 1806, Webster’s was “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language,” the only truly American dictionary of its time. It was the first to document uniquely American words. Often, he changed the spelling of words so that they would reflect a distinctly American usage.
Although Webster’s work may reflect early and well-meaning civic contributions to the society, often language restrictionism itself is covert, or hidden, by claims of promoting a unifying national language—English—over the languages of smaller groups that are deemed less important. Language restriction can also be overt, however, as was the case when in 1812, Thomas Jefferson considered an English-only law following the acquisition of lands from the Louisiana Purchase and Louisiana’s entry into the Union. He ultimately conceded to the French-speaking majority because of near-rebellion from New Orleans residents. As noted by Crawford, from 1790 to 1830, fewer immigrants to the United States resulted in the weakening of languages other than English, until a great wave of immigrants from Germany arrived, causing German and German-English bilingual schools to gain strongholds in certain areas of the country. Bilingual schooling in German-English and other languages was widely accepted until the 1880s, when a second wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, and Italy) spread, causing renewed anti-immigrant sentiment across the country. These “new immigrants” were from a variety of different countries and their linguistic, ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds were less familiar to Americans than were those of their predecessors from Northern Europe (Germany, England, Scandinavia, and Ireland).
In 1889, English-only schooling laws aimed at German Catholics were passed in Illinois (Edward Law) and Wisconsin (Bennett Law). Although both were repealed in 1893, these legislative efforts reflect resistance against and distrust of languages other than English. Several years later, in 1906, Congress passed a law requiring English proficiency for naturalization.
Attempts at assimilating these new immigrants by defining or redefining American identity partly as English speakers meant promoting the idea that immigrants’ native language use should occur only in the home. According to historian Ezri Atzmon, the Bureau of Naturalization of the Immigration and Naturalization Service adopted the goal of implementing English language and citizenship classes for immigrants across the country between 1914 and 1920. In 1916, the agency invited more than 200,000 naturalization applicants to join such classes. This sort of “social support” reflected a move away from the acceptance and integration of the languages and cultures brought by immigrants to the United States and a new emphasis on “Americanization” through the imposition of English.
After the United States entered World War I in 1917, the move for Americanizing “the other” gained even more momentum as xenophobia set in, particularly against the substantial number of German immigrants who had arrived in the United States in earlier decades. As noted by Bernard Spolsky, a massive reaction against anything resembling Germany took hold, especially regarding language, an obvious marker. Thirty states passed laws requiring nonnative English speakers to attend English language classes, and 34 states passed English-only schooling laws. According to Aneta Pavlenko, a Nebraska Congressman’s words illustrate popularly held notions of anti-immigrant and anti-immigrant’s language, “If these people are Americans, let them speak our language. If they don’t know it, let them learn it. If they don’t like it, let them move” (p. 178). Restrictions against the use of German were widespread, and those heard speaking German were perceived as unpatriotic and as suspect. Wiley notes that in Jefferson County, Nebraska, local council members ordered telephone operators to cut off those who publicly spoke German over open lines. Movie theaters were closed, bans on German music ensued, German Americans were encouraged to cancel subscriptions to materials printed in German, and ultimately instruction in foreign languages was deemed un-American. Pavlenko identifies two discourses that were adopted in pursuit of language restrictionism: (1) the positive cognitive and linguistic influences of learning English, and (2) devaluing multilingualism, foreign-language teaching, and native-language maintenance among immigrant populations. In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt, addressing the American Defense Society, called for restrictions on languages other than English, stating, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is the loyalty to the American people.” Americanization efforts, largely manifested as language restrictionism in the form of antibilingual education and antiforeign-language instruction continued through the 1920s, and in 1924, the National Origins Act identified quotas based on immigrants’ national origins, which reduced incoming immigration until the 1960s.
Despite this period of restrictiveness, there were advocates for German Americans and supporters of rights to native language use and maintenance. These attitudes, although shared by far fewer Americans, are evident in such cases as Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923, which overturned an earlier case that prohibited German-language instruction, and Farrington v. Tokushige in 1927, in which the Supreme Court ordered that a ban on heritage language instruction in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese offered outside of public schooling was unconstitutional. The restrictions on language of this period were eventually overturned in policies that grew out of the civil rights movements of the 1960s but have since been reinstated, evidenced, for example, by English-only medium of instruction laws enacted in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts. This last wave of restrictionism has been specifically aimed against bilingual education and is the greatest single policy threat at the moment. As of this writing, there has been no move to reverse them.