Words About Words: The Danger of Trump's White Supremacist English-Only Campaign

English is a great language. It is versatile, adaptable, and has a lot of fun words like fissure, dildo, and spam. While English is today’s dominant language in the United States, that wasn’t always true. Prior to the European colonization of the Americas, there were over a thousand indigenous languages spoken north of the US/Mexico border (currently there are approximate 260 indigenous language being used and an additional 100+ that are nearly extinct).

In the first hundred years of colonization, along with indigenous languages, English shared America with Spanish, French, Russian, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Gaelic, Welsh, and more. Kidnapped Africans sold into slavery and shipped to America spoke dozens of different languages, including various forms of Creole and Tutnese, a secret language created by slaves to talk among themselves. Many of these languages and dialects, English included, contributed to what we call Ebonics.

African slaves and freemen were not the only people fusing their native languages with English. The French in Louisiana developed their own type of Creole. The Spanish mixed their language with English, predating Spanglish by a century. And when speakers of more than one language didn’t mash them together, they code-shifted. Visit any of America’s Chinatowns, Latin Quarters, or Little (name an ethnicity) and you will hear people shifting from English to another language and back again in the same sentence, something that has been happening for more than a hundred years.

All of these languages, all of this cross pollination, all the types of people living in America, from everywhere on the globe has made American English an exciting and diverse language with a wonderfully rich vocabulary (in linguistics, what’s barrowed is called a loanword). The Dutch gave us buoy, cookie, and booze. Italians slipped us parmesan, pizza, and prima donna. Arabs contributed algebra and alcohol. From Hindi we get jungle, pajamas, and loot. Malay gave us ketchup, while Urdu loaned us chintz. Norwegian brought us slaughter, berserk, and gun. Yiddish: klutz, pastrami, and shmuck. Portuguese: albino, tempura, and emu. And from a wealth of African languages, we are blessed with banana, bongo, banjo, cola, jazz, zombie, jumbo, gumbo, and the, ever popular, goober.

American English would be a very boring language without the gifting, pillaging, and borrowing from other languages, a process that is still happening every day.

And then there is slang, one of language’s best inventions. Scorned by traditionalist, condemned by conservatives, slang is the vibrant language of the people. It comes from backrooms, bars, brothels, jails, factories, offices, sporting greens, crime scenes, docks, and the street. Slang is vibrant and exciting, much more fun than the “Queen’s English” and the tight-ass jive that they teach us in school. Do you really want to live in a world without shit, piss, fuck, scumbag, or hey you?

English is much, much more than a single, uniform language and the United States is much more than English. One of my favorite books of 2024 is Language City by Ross Perlin, a director of the Endangered Language Alliance. In his book, Perlin follows six New York City residents who speak some of the world’s most endangered languages. A rundown, from the New York Times review of his book:

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy.

More languages, languages that we’ve never heard of and that we may never hear until their words enter our vocabulary, a process that keeps English alive, that is if these languages aren’t further marginalized or suppressed.

In Language City, Perlin warns that anti-immigration sentiment and reactionary politics are at war with every language other than English. White supremacists like Donald Trump are working hard to make the United States an “English only” country. While they will probably be as successful as Governor Pete Wilson was in his 1980s’ crusade to rid California of Spanish, damage will be done. Fear will drive “unwelcome” languages underground and some families will stop passing their first, second, or even third languages to the next generations.

In San Francisco, a lot of our corner stores are owned by Palestinian immigrants, people who came to America knowing one or maybe two languages. Once here, they learned more languages, by choice, not by having their native language banned and being forced to speak English only. In most corner stores, you hear the person behind the counter conversing in Arabic, English, and Spanish, sometimes in the same conversation. Some know a bit of Mandarin or Cantonese. Those who came over from Lebanon or Syria often know some French as well. I met one guy standing behind a counter who knew eight languages. Donald Trump knows one, and it is a stretch to say he’s mastered it. This guy knows eight, while most corner store owners and clerks know three. You tell me who is more prepared for the modern business world: My Palestinian corner store guy who immigrated to the U.S. and can sling Arabic, English, and Spanish (with a side of Chinese) or the bigot who currently lives in the White House, has crashed more businesses than nearly anyone alive, and who struggles to piece together a nonsense-free sentence of clear English?

We’ve got a lot to fight for right now and that includes the richness of America’s languages, including English. We lose our heritage as a multi-lingual country and we might as well limit our diet to eel pie and bangers and mash. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to live in a country where there’s no pizza, bagels, or brie – all wonderful foods and equally as good words.