by John McWhorter

When Newt Gingrich decried bilingual education programs and bilingual government as fostering the language of the "ghetto" last week, with the ghetto language in question being Spanish, it was predictable that assorted good-thinking people would condemn Gingrich for implying that the language of Cervantes and Garcia Marquez is a ghetto patois. However, whatever one's opinion of Gingrich and his politics, there is no reason to suppose that a reasoning American person would be under any impression that Spanish itself is somehow not a "real language." Gingrich indeed could have expressed himself more gracefully, but his real mistake was his empirically unfounded notions about bilingualism in general. Gingrich's comment, of a sort that regularly whips up applause from concerned right-wing sorts, implies a particular situation: that there are parts of the United States where people are being raised in such a way that they do not really learn English, or at least, learn English so poorly that they are more comfortable in Spanish and need Spanish-language ballots to participate in an election. One senses that Gingrich's conception here is based on noticing that indeed, there are Latinos in the United States who can barely communicate in English. However, they are adults, who grew up speaking Spanish and not English. When they raise children here, yes, the children speak Spanish, but they also speak English. They could barely manage not to, given that they are immersed in an Anglophone media as well as a great many Latinos around them who do speak English, switching between it and Spanish all day every day. In other words, they are bilingual. It is a peculiarly American notion that being bilingual is something exotic and fragile, like a double-yolked egg. Being bilingual is, in fact, a norm worldwide. There are about 6000 languages in the world and only about 200 nations, each with an official language or two (or three or four in some cases). Do the math--billions of human beings do not speak just one language. One wants to ask people like Gingrich to just run snapshots of people on Earth in the news and think about how few of them we can assume speak only one tongue. Gingrich may want to know why these bilingual kids need bilingual education programs if they can just inhale English from their surroundings. The answer is that early in their lives, these kids' primary language is indeed Spanish. And research has shown, quite conclusively, that children get a leg up in early learning when taught first in their primary language. Now, it is just as indisputable that in practice, Spanish-English bilingual ed programs have tended to become stagnant boondoggles for a minor industry of bilingual ed teachers, with bearded teenagers lagging in Spanish-language classes. Gingrich is right to be put off by the postures of identity politics that have kept these kinds of programs alive. However, bilingual ed programs in other countries are quite common and work much better. They could work better here in the U.S. They would help immigrants' children to be better prepared to participate in an increasingly white collar work force. That is, they could be a force for integration, as they are in many countries worldwide. Surely Gingrich would be for that. Meanwhile, even the bearded miseducated kids speak English in their daily lives. The state of their education is such that they would likely have as much trouble with an English-language ballot on the latest Propositions as with a Spanish-language one. People born in a country, by and large, learn to speak its language, and without trying--especially when that language is the world's universal tongue, English. Think about immigrant couples' kids who you know--the parents have thick accents and make mistakes, but somehow by toddlerhood their child is speaking unaccented American. This is normal. Obvious, right? The implication would seem to be, then, that Gingrich deplores that there are first-generation immigrants in the United States who were raised in Spanish and would therefore be more comfortable reading official brochures, with the complex language they entail, in Spanish. I presume that Gingrich also shudders at the thought of the Lower East Side teeming with Jews more comfortable with Yiddish a hundred years ago, or the Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach reading their Novoe Russkoye Slovo every day instead of The New York Times. Horrors!! If what Gingrich intends by this is a coded signal to his flock that Latino immigrants need to go home, then I understand. The empirical and logical lapses would classify, I suppose, as the eggs one breaks to make an omelette, although I personally would not concur with the policy proposal in question. If this is not what he means, however, it's time for him and all of the people so aroused by the spectacle of Spanish being spoken daily in America to wake up to the simple fact that it is most Americans, comfortable only in a single tongue, who are the odd ones out as human beings go. I'm not one for reflexive calls to Celebrate Diversity just for its own sake. But in this case, maybe we could just Acknowledge Normality?