Fear of a Multilingual America? Language and National Identity in the United States

In the contemporary debate on language and national identity in the US, those who are in favor of a constitutional amendment declaring English the offi cial language of the country believe that speaking the same tongue is crucial for the political and cultural unity of the nation. Those who are against the amendment claim that dictating by law the linguistic Americanization of immigrants is incompatible with American multiculturalism. Both sides ground their ideas in the language ideology and politics of the Founders and interpret in opposing ways the absence of a statement on language in the Constitution. What Americans believed about the importance of a national language for the new nation at the turn of the eighteenth century still infl uences what Americans think now and can explain why, for example, the language divide does not simply run along party lines. Yet the Founders’ attitudes towards language were contradictory, as they combined descriptivism and prescriptivism . This article investigates writings by intellectuals and politicians who were instrumental in the nation-making process of the early American Republic, such as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster. These writings show the complexity of the ideas coalescing in the mythology of American English which formed after the American Revolution and spread in nineteenth-century United States.