Free When in French by Lauren Collins Page A

be incompatible with the First Amendment. Had the legislation held, municipalities such as Mesa, Casa Grande, and Ajo could have been forced to change their names. In the event, Navajo Nation threatened to exercise tribal sovereignty, restoring the names of tourist attractions like Monument Valley and Window Rock to Tsébii´nidzisgai and Tségháhoodzáni.
    Linguists call America “the graveyard of languages” because of its singular ability to take in millions of immigrants and extinguish their native languages in a few generations. A study of thirty-five nations found that “in no other country . . . did the rate of the mother tongue shift toward (English) monolingualism approach the rapidity of that found in the United States.” Immigrants to America lose languages quickly; natives of America fail to acquire them. Only 18 percent of American schoolchildren are enrolled in foreign language courses, while 94 percent of European high-school students are studying English.
    Since 9/11, monolingualism has seemed undesirable, and even dangerous. In the first three years after the attacks, the FBI more than tripled the funding of its language program.Yet by 2006, of a thousand people who worked in the US Embassy in Baghdad, only six spoke fluent Arabic. Even as demand for education has increased, many school districts, battling budget cuts, have reduced their offerings. A double standard obtains: while learning a foreign language is considered prestigious, acquiring one naturally is stigmatized. We think of foreign languages as extremely hard to learn, but we’re incensed when immigrants don’t speak English perfectly.
    Americans are by no means the first people to take an exceptional stance toward their language—in the sixteenth century the Dutch scholar Johannes Goropius Becanus became convinced that the original language happened to be the one he spoke, Antwerpian Flemish. Atatürk reformed Turkish under the auspices of the “sun language theory,” which conveniently held that Turkish was the world’s primal tongue, and that, since everything that had been imported into Turkish from other languages was really Turkish to begin with, Turks didn’t have to get rid of all the foreign words they were already using. Early Irish grammarians asserted that Gaelic was superior to Latin because its parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, participle, conjunction, preposition, and interjection) mirrored the materials of the Tower of Babel (clay, water, wool, blood, wood, lime, pitch, linen, and bitumen).
    The combination of the domestic protectionism of English and its international dominance, however, makes America one of the most linguistically isolated empires the world has ever known. “It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘Merci beaucoup,’ right?” President Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008, confessing his monolingualism as a sourceof personal shame (even if, for electoral purposes, it was likely an asset).
    The FBI, it emerged in 2015, had been subjecting many of its newly hired linguists to an “aggressive internal surveillance program,” limiting their prospects for promotion. The criteria for inclusion in the program included foreign language fluency and ties abroad, the very skills for which they had been recruited. In the words of the film
Charlie
Wilson’s War
, the agency apparently didn’t think it was “a good idea to have spies who speak the fucking language of the people they’re spying on.”
    In 2009 Nick George, a student at Pomona College, was detained at the Philadelphia airport as he attempted to board a flight to Los Angeles. A physics and Arabic double major, he had spent the summer studying the language in Jordan. He was flying back to California to