The Revival of Scottish Gaelic Through Education By Michael McIn ...

multilingualism as deadly: elderly Russian patients have gone untreated because of patients not being able to communicate with English-speaking doctors, a machete-wielding Somali was shot because he was unable to understand a police warning, a Hispanic driving student made a sudden turn into a tree because he misunderstood the instructions from his driving teacher.

Not only does speaking other languages cost billions of dollars and cause tragic misunderstandings in individual cases, but the allowance of any other language besides English, it is argued, will lead to the dissolution of our civil society, riots in the streets, and the tumbling down of the “empire.” In fact, Alvin Schmidt (1997), a retired professor of sociology at Illinois College, while claiming somewhat ahistorically that it was the fault of the Greek language that Rome fell (having “poured the acid of dissolution” into the empire), and pointing Cassandra-like to the specter of Canada “forcing its English speaking citizenry to accept French as a language equal to English,” warned hysterically of the “curse of Babel with its bitter fruits of national divisiveness” (p. 111). Thomas Sowell (1993), citing efforts of New Zealand Māoris to preserve their language and culture and blaming “ethnic polarization in Malaysia, murderous riots in India, and outright civil war in Sri Lanka” on language differences, lambasted bilingual programs on the grounds that they were “part of a larger program of separatism and alienation” (p. 81).

Hostility to other languages is not a new phenomenon to today's United States, but it does seem to be historically endemic to the English-speaking culture. The antipathy of such organizations as U.S. English for other languages besides English has a long pedigree and seems to have pervaded the culture of English-speaking peoples for at least several hundred years.

Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queen—the epic poem that has bedeviled and puzzled undergraduate English majors for centuries—proposed in his 1596 A View of the Present State of Ireland the “enforced Anglicization of the Irish Gael” (as cited in O’Connor, 1997, p. 5). Recognizing the link between language and culture, James VI of Scotland ordered that each Gaelic-speaking family of status in the Highlands of