Language and assimilation

The BBC reports comments by Ruth Kelly:

The amount of official material being translated by bodies such as councils should be cut to encourage immigrants to learn English, Ruth Kelly has said. The communities secretary said there were cases - such as in a casualty ward - where translation was necessary.

But, she told the BBC's Politics Show, translation had been "used too frequently and without thought". Ms Kelly said that learning and using the English language was "key" to helping migrants to integrate.

Mrs Kelly's remarks have drawn criticism, however:

Former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, disagreed with Ms Kelly.

He said: "If you do not provide that material for them to be aware of what's happening in the society or issues of particular help, they will remain sort of isolated.

"They will not really get the benefit, nor will they be able to contribute in a positive way."

Mrs Kelly is exactly right on this, while, as you would expect from past form, Sir Iqbal Sacranie is talking nonsense. It's worth saying why. (It's also worth noting in passing that Sir Iqbal is, by his standards, being responsible and moderate in merely being nonsensical. As Salman Rushdie wrote in The Times in 2005: "If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.")

Here are two propositions about foreign languages. First, the monolingualism of British public life - the fact that fluency in a foreign language is rare even among the educated - is a weakness in our culture and our understanding of the world. Secondly, the fact that we have - unlike, say, Belgium or Canada - a single national language, notwithstanding the persistence of Welsh and Gaelic in parts of the UK, is a civic asset. These views are distinct and entirely compatible; I hold them both strongly.

On the first point, I yield to Agnès Poirier, writing in The Guardian a few months ago in response to a particularly obtuse argument about language study:

[T]o invoke the redundancy of foreign language study is like shooting oneself in the foot. As everybody who is sound of mind knows, learning the languages of others improves your knowledge and use of your own. Others hold a mirror in which you can at last see yourself and understand who you are.

On the eve of the fall of the Roman empire, there must have been many in Rome who thought that Latin ruled the world and that there was no need to learn what the people on the outside thought and how they lived. To brand foreign language study snobbish and useless is to open the way to one's own decadence.

Decadence is a strong word but apt. I gave a slightly pathetic example recently where The Guardian itself published a column purporting to be about French politics. Its author managed to get wrong the central "fact" of his argument by the simple expedient of not being able to read French and therefore knowing less about his chosen subject (the new French foreign minister) than every reader of Le Monde, which had covered it properly three days earlier. I have never come across a comparable case, even allowing for the difference between news copy and freelance comment, in a French or German newspaper's coverage of British politics. And trivial though the example be, it recalls a judgement that I think of quite often by the language authority David Crystal in his English as a Global Language, 1997 (pp. 139-40):

In 500 years' time, will it be the case that everyone will automatically be introduced to English as soon as they are born...? If this is part of a rich multilingual experience for our future newborns, this can only be a good thing. If it is by then the only language left to be learned, it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster the planet has ever known.

The insouciance - not just the ignorance - with which we British approach foreign languages is already an intellectual disaster. The impoverishment of our national life is immense.

On the second point, I am entirely with Ruth Kelly. The term multiculturalism carries a political stigma (deservedly so, considering how the concept is now used), but the presence of numerous national and linguistic groups in British society is a strength. I have had the good fortune to spend most of my life in highly cosmopolitan cities. I grew up in Leicester, and after graduating I lived for many years in Stockwell in south London. It was fascinating and often moving, in both places, to find the strength of linguistic ties in the home life of friends for whom - or for whose parents - English was not a first or even necessarily a familiar language. Those group attachments are, however, secondary to a common British citizenship whose individual members have equal rights under law. Forging a common citizenship almost requires, and is certainly eased by, having a single, official language. Charles Krauthammer wrote an excellent column in Time last year on the equivalent American debate:

History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with a linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it "racist."

I speak three languages. My late father spoke nine. When he became a naturalized American in midcentury, it never occurred to him to demand of his new and beneficent land that whenever its government had business with him--tax forms, court proceedings, ballot boxes--that it should be required to communicate in French, his best language, rather than English, his last and relatively weakest.

English is the U.S.'s national and common language. But that may change over time unless we change our assimilation norms. Making English the official language is the first step toward establishing those norms. "Official" means the language of the government and its institutions. "Official" makes clear our expectations of acculturation. "Official" means that every citizen, upon entering America's most sacred political space, the voting booth, should minimally be able to identify the words President and Vice President and county commissioner and judge. The immigrant, of course, has the right to speak whatever he wants. But he must understand that when he comes to the U.S., swears allegiance and accepts its bounty, he undertakes to join its civic culture. In English.

Exactly. If you want an indication that Ruth Kelly is right and moderate in her hope that councils will cut the amount of translated material, consider - of course - the debased multiculturalism practised by Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Authority. On the Mayor's web site, you'll find a helpful page outlining his role - in German. If there is a single person (other than the translator, whom I don't blame for accepting the commission) anywhere in London who benefits from this I should be astonished. It is a waste of public funds in the service of puerile gesture politics, and it should stop.