Oklahoma passed an English-only bill the other week to make English the only language for state business.
In perusing the internets on this topic, I ran across some comments here that were filled with the kinds of remarks you often hear on the topic of immigrants from the past compared with the present, and their ability and desire to learn English.
To wit:
Is the English language so much harder to learn today than it was 70 years ago when the many thousands of European immigrants came to the United States? In those days, people wanted to become Americans. It appears that many immigrants want to keep their culture and language, but are interested only in what America can do for them.
My parents were immigrants, and no one gave them assistance and they learned English.
My grandparents immigrated from Greece/Italy; were proud to learn ENGLISH.
Ah yes, the good old days, when all immigrants immediately assimilated and forgot they even ever spoke their native tongues.
I'm reading Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. It's a really interesting compendium of facts about our language and where our words came from.
There is an extended passage about immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Guess what? That nostalgia is a bunch of baloney.
At the turn of the [20th] century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only...
John Russell Bartlett noted that it was possible to cross Oneida County, New York, and hear nothing but Welsh. Probably the most famous of these enclaves - certainly the most enduring - was that of the Amish who settled primarily in and around Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania and spoke a dialect that came to be known, misleadingly, as Pennsylvania Dutch...
Throughout the last century, and often into this one, it was easy to find isolated speech communities throughout much of America: Norwegians in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Swedes in Nebraska, Germans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and many others. It was natural to suppose that the existence of these linguistic pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional tongues, rather as in Europe, or at the very least result in widely divergent dialects of English, each heavily influenced by its prevailing immigrant group. But of course nothing of the sort happened.
He goes on to explain that despite the many pockets of other languages that immigrants around the country had, their children became assimilated and often did not speak the language of their parents, just as children of immigrants do today.
So despite the claims of the tea-party types claim that immigrants in the past [read: white immigrants] learned English the second they landed, in fact things were not that different for the immigrants of the past than those today.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling our eminent historians like Glenn Beck probably aren't listening.