| Chapter 1: | The Dying Gael |
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As this sentiment is voiced by a Scot, albeit a fictional one, in a novel written by a Scot, it illustrates the kind of internalized racism that results in self-hatred when the victim incorporates the prejudicial beliefs of the dominant culture, and which many observers, Irvine Welsh among them, believe that Scots—Gael and non-Gael alike—have been subjected to. (The reader should note that I am using the term racism here in the general sense of the second definition of race offered by the Oxford Dictionary; that is, consisting of “a tribe, nation, etc., regarded as being of a distinct ethnic stock”) (Pearsall & Trumble, 2003, p. 1187).
Language Murder
—Edmund Spenser, as cited in O’Connor (1997, p. 14)
English has often been referred to as a “killer language” for reasons that have to do with the policies enforced by the English-speaking powers (Nettle & Romaine, 2000, p. 5), the attitudes inherent in the English-speaking culture, and the present-day pervasiveness of the English-speaking world's cultural, social, economic, and political power.
In the present-day United States, we encounter several arguments against bilingual education and even against any kind of tolerance for the multilingual society suggested by bilingualism. U.S. English (n.d.) an organization dedicated to legally installing English as the official national language of the United States, argues vehemently warns about the ills of a multilingual society. The arguments of this organization include alarm about the sheer number of languages spoken in the United States, the large percentage of people (mostly immigrant) who are not proficient in English, the economic cost of a multilingual society, which the organization estimates at more than 10 billion dollars; the difficulties faced by businesses in complying with onorous language laws; and traffic accidents caused by language confusion. Probably the most extreme, if not downright silly, argument has to do with the perception of