Language Laws

Definition: Laws that make the use of particular languages a matter of official policy

Significance: Laws regulating language use take many forms, some of which may be characterized as varieties of censorship

The regulation of language use by law is a common feature of multiethnic societies. The most frequently encountered examples of language regulation are those establishing an official language or national language. In the eyes of ethnic groups whose languages do not garner the designation of official or national language, such laws may be seen as a censorship of an ethnic identity in favor of a melting-pot concept of national identity. Less commonly, language policies may seek not to assimilate particular ethnic groups within a national culture but to isolate such groups by depriving them of fluency in a national tongue. The apartheid educational policies of South Africa in the twentieth century illustrate the use of language policies as a tool of cultural marginalization and subordination in this latter sense.

Language Designations

Whether for the purpose of enhancing national unity or fostering national pride, numerous countries have designated one or more official languages or national languages. The distinction between an official language and a national language is not always articulated precisely. Generally, however, an official language is one in which a government conducts its business—its legislative, executive, administrative, and judicial functions. A national language is one considered an essential expression of a nation’s culture or society.

Approximately half of the constitutions of the world make provision for one or more official languages or national languages. For example, Jordan’s constitution declares Arabic to be the official language, as does Algeria’s. Switzerland’s constitution, however, designates German, French, and Italian as official languages. The national language of Malaysia is Malay, while the Republic of Seychelles designates French, English, and Creole as national languages.

The impetus behind language designations takes various forms. Official language policies—having to do generally with the language or languages in which a government conducts its various operations—typically find their justification in the asserted need for a common language to facilitate the business of government. National language debates, concentrating as they typically do on the effects of language on cultural unity, turn more frequently on the perceived cultural fragmentation of a civil society occupied by multiple ethnic and linguistic subgroups. Against the threat of such fragmentation, advocates of a national language assert the necessity of an increased cultural homogenization and view a common language as a key resource in achieving this homogenization. A quotation attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt captures the essence of this sentiment as it has found expression in the United States: “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.” Attempts to coerce cultural assimilation by discouraging ethnic languages in favor of one or more official or national languages may be labeled a form of censorship. Such attempts seek to suppress or at least partially diminish ethnic loyalty and identity for the sake of national unity.

The United States has never adopted an official language, but it has not escaped the tensions created by the presence of numerous linguistic minorities. During the late twentieth century American opposition to multiculturalism has expressed itself in an English-only movement. This movement seeks to make English the official language of the United States. It has successfully elevated English to this official position in a number of states and has sought to do so at the federal level by amending the U.S. Constitution to make English the nation’s official language. This movement has itself attracted opposition in the form of suggestions that the Constitution be amended not to elevate English to an official status but rather to guarantee the cultural and language rights of all citizens.

In contrast with the United States, Canadian language policy reflects a more deliberate form of bilingualism—embracing English and French speakers. This policy has not been without its tensions. Canada’s Official Languages Act of 1969 made English and French official languages and was enacted at least partially in an attempt to defuse separatist sentiments of the French-speaking majority of Quebec. Quebec separatists replied to this gesture, however, by attempting to make French the only official language of Quebec. A 1977 law refused to provide English-speaking immigrants with an English language education unless at least one of the immigrants’ parents had studied in one of Quebec’s English-language schools. Furthermore, in provisions later declared unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court, the 1977 law ceased publication of certain official documents in English. In spite of—or perhaps even because of—the volatile political issues raised by Quebec’s separatist elements, Canada has continued to forge bilingual language policies. Its 1982 constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms again declares English and French the nation’s official languages and provides equality of status and privileges for both English and French speakers in Canada’s government institutions.

Language Laws and Education Policy

The designation of official or national languages sometimes has consequences for a nation’s educational policy. Chad, for example, whose official language is French, mandates that public education be in that language. Similarly, the constitution of Honduras, whose official language is Spanish, specifies that the government must protect the purity of and increase learning in Spanish. The Portuguese constitution lacks this mandatory provision for education in the nation’s official language, but nevertheless the state requires to provide education in the Portuguese language and exposure to Portuguese culture to immigrant children.

Numerous modern constitutions are solicitous to the rights of ethnic minorities and acknowledge the interest of linguistic minorities in preserving their indigenous languages. India’s constitution of 1949, for example, secured to religious and linguistic minorities the right to establish education institutions of their choice and to provide facilities for the education of minority children in their native tongue in the primary stages of education. Often, national constitutions protect particular indigenous languages by safeguarding their place within the educational process. Thus, the 1967 constitution of Paraguay provides that the Guarani language will be safeguarded by promoting teaching in this indigenous tongue. Similarly, the constitutions of Ecuador and Peru provide for instruction in Quechua or other relevant indigenous languages in addition to Spanish in areas of Indian population.

Although bilingual education remains a matter of serious dispute in the United States, attempts to proscribe education in languages other than English have not survived constitutional challenge. In the first decades of the twentieth century, anti-German sentiments produced statutes in Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio prohibiting the teaching of the German language. The statute passed in Nebraska in 1919, which prohibited teaching subjects in any language but English and prohibited foreign language altogether for students who had not completed the eighth grade. A challenge to this law ultimately reached the Supreme Court. The purpose of the statute was to assure that English became the favored language of immigrant children by prohibiting their parents from sending them to schools in which they might be educated in their indigenous languages.

In Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the Supreme Court held that the Nebraska law violated the Constitution. The Court relied upon the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state may deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Among the liberties protected by this provision were, according to the Court, the liberty of parents to have their children receive instruction in a foreign language and of teachers to teach such a language. The Nebraska statute arbitrarily infringed on these liberties, in the view of the Supreme Court, and thus violated due process. In effect, the Court found that the state of Nebraska had no legitimate reason to adopt an English-only policy for the younger children of its residents.

In addition to Meyer v. Nebraska’s constitutional barrier against English-only language policies in the schools, a number of federal and state laws and regulations secure important rights to a bilingual education on the part of minority language children in the United States. At the federal level, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 provided grants to promote research and experimentation in bilingual education. Moreover, in 1970 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued a regulation requiring schools receiving federal aid to take affirmative steps to allow minority language students to participate in educational programs. Slightly more than a decade later, Congress elevated this regulation to the level of statute by including in its Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1982 a provision requiring schools to take such action as necessary to overcome language barriers that might prevent minority language students from having access to an equal educational opportunity. These federal provisions for bilingual education have been mirrored by numerous state laws that provide for the bilingual education of non-English-speaking students.

Language and Apartheid

Some language policies evidence a clear purpose of frustrating the communication of particular ideas. For example, the South African regime of apartheid used language policy to maintain the political supremacy of the white minority prior to the democratic revolution of the early 1990’s. In 1953 the South African National Party, committed to the policy of apartheid, enacted the Bantu Education Act. This act established the policy of educating blacks in the Homeland reserves primarily in their various African languages. Black students had rudimentary instruction in English and Afrikaans, the two official languages of South Africa. This limited instruction was intended to equip black students for the relatively unskilled employment opportunities thought appropriate to them and their limited contacts with government.

The Bantu Education Act’s more significant focus on the various indigenous languages of the black students had two important benefits for the regime of apartheid. First, it tended to relegate black students to lesser employment opportunities by denying them concentrated training in English and Afrikaans. This relegation was altogether consistent with the aims of apartheid in sustaining the supremacy of whites and continuing the subordination of blacks. Second, the focus on education in the vernacular had the effect of isolating students from various tribal backgrounds and hindering the formation of political protest across language lines. The latter effect of the Bantu Education Act, in curtailing cross-tribal protest of apartheid, had the effect of censoring such protests. It aimed to retribalize black Africans and thus frustrate the formation of black nationalist sentiments that might threaten white supremacy.

Bibliography

For a thorough collection of constitutional provisions relating to language policies, see Albert P. Blaustein and Dana Blaustein Epstein’s Resolving Language Conflicts: A Study of the World’s Constitutions (Washington, D.C.: U.S. English, 1986), published by an organization that seeks to establish the primacy of English in American life, contains little commentary concerning the various constitutional provisions but helpfully reproduces the substance of the provisions and organizes them under relevant topical headings. Bill Piatt’s ¿Only English?: Law and Language Policy in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990) discusses the historical context of and present controversy relating to the English-only movement in the United States. Apartheid and Education (Johannesburg, South Africa: Raven Press, 1984), edited by Peter Kallaway, includes information on the place of language policies in the regime of apartheid. For collections of essays treating language rights in a variety of national contexts, see Ethnic Groups and Language Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1993), edited by Sergij Vilfan, and Ethnicity in Eastern Europe: Questions of Migration, Language Rights and Education (Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 1994), edited by Sue Wright with Helen Kelly.