Free When in French by Lauren Collins

wear gaucho pants (I was never sure if I was wearing them or not) or speak to men (if we encountered one, say, working in the cafeteria, we were supposed to ignore him).
    The proper way to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the woman explained—and the way it would be said at Tar Heel Girls State—was straight through, with no intake of breath before the divine prepositional phrase. We were to hold our elbows at a sharp ninety degrees, a sort of body-language analogue to not letting the flag touch the floor.
    â€œElbows up!” she bellowed. “Don’t let them sag like chicken wings!”
    â€œI pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands
one nation under God
indivisible with liberty and justice for all!” we yelled, triceps straining.
    In
Meyer vs. Nebraska
(1923), the Supreme Court invalidated the conviction of a Nebraska schoolteacher who had read a Bible story to a student in German, but multilingualism never recovered its vitality. Before World War I, 65 percent of high-school students studied a foreign language. By the beginning of World War II, the number had dropped to 36 percent. (In Germany, Nazis condemned the bilingualism of ethnic minorities as a cause of “mercenary relativism.” Hitler wrote that he failed to understand why the millions of Germans who were made to learn “two or three foreign languages only afraction of which they can make use of later . . . must be tormented for nothing.”) Desperate for linguists, the military enlisted Native Americans to develop and transmit messages. In the Pacific theater, Navajo code talkers flummoxed the Japanese—rendering “submarine” as
besh-lo
(iron fish) and “fighter plane” as
da-he-tih-hi
(hummingbird)—but their contributions went unrecognized for decades.
    The launch of
Sputnik
1
in 1957 incited a linguistic arms race. Congress allocated funds for the expansion of foreign language programs, but the fervor was short-lived. In 1979 a presidential commission declared that “Americans’ incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous, and it is becoming worse.” According to
The Tongue-Tied American
, a manifesto published by Senator Paul Simon to draw attention to the “foreign-language crisis,” there were at the start of the Vietnam War fewer than five American-born experts—in universities and the State Department combined—who could speak any of the region’s languages.
    In 1981 S. I. Hayakawa, a Canadian-born senator of Japanese descent, introduced the English Language Amendment: a proposal to consecrate English, once and for all, as the country’s official language. The bill died without a vote, but its introduction marked the beginning of an era of renewed hostility to bilingualism. This time, the enemy was Spanish. In 1983 Hayakawa founded U.S. English, a lobby dedicated officially to “preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States,” and unofficially to making life miserable for immigrants of Hispanic origin. A decade after its establishment, U.S. English boasted 400,000 members and had spent $28 million persuading states to adopt its initiatives. These included forbidding 911 operators to speak in languagesother than English. By 1990 seventeen states, North Carolina among them, had declared English their official language.
    Supporters of U.S. English argued that foreign languages are like flotation devices, preventing immigrants from entering American waters unassisted. In reality, they buoy not only the prospects of their speakers—scientists have found that bilinguals enjoy a number of advantages, among them enhanced cognitive skills and lower rates of dementia—but also the ideals of the nation. In 1988 Arizona voters passed a referendum whose stipulations were so “overbroad,” according to the judge who voided it, as to