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We Speak English Here?
By Hank Hufnagel in the Clarion News
Bernice Gibson's column We Speak English Here in last week's paper seemed so out of place with the character of our community, I wonder if the author has only recently moved here from some far off and more terrifying place. Her proposal that we confront anyone who presumes to speak any language except English is preposterous. Her belief that "We speak English Here" is much less exasperating, but just as wrong.
According to the 2000 US Census, 28 million people in the good old U. S. of A. speak Spanish. Two million speak Chinese. There are 1.6 million French speakers and 1.4 million who use one of many dialects of German. Significant numbers of us babble away in Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Korean, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, French Creole, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, Gujarati and Armenian. You can look it up for yourself, just Google Languages of the United States.
Perhaps by "here" Ms. Gibson means our Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If so, she is still wrong. At www.wikipedia.org you can read how, for many years, German was a second unofficial language of our state. Not so surprising really, it is? Think of Amish country and you'll realize a large number of Pennsylvanians still speak Pennsylvania Dutch. They have done so since moving to Berks County in 1736. And, it isn't just German we speak. Think of the Italian, Ukrainian and Polish sections of our cities and old mining towns. Have you ever visited one of their street festivals? You may go for the strange and wonderful food, but the curious sounds of the old world tongues surely do add to the enjoyment of the day… at least for some of us.
I guess that leaves Clarion County. Do we all speak English here? We do not. I could easily take you to long-established restaurants in Clarion where you might hear Chinese, Vietnamese or Italian spoken. Until World War I, a significant fraction of Clarion County residents spoke almost nothing but German, and some northern townships were collectively referred to as Little Germany. In the old days, in some parts of the mining towns in the southern part of the county, Italian was far more likely to be heard than English.
Ms. Gibson is not the first to argue against the diversity of languages in the United States. There was a time when such voices grew loud and a vast organization sprang up to fight for True Americans everywhere… white, Protestant, English-speaking Americans. Laws were passed making it illegal to speak any language except English at church services, during telephone calls, and even in conversations on the street. Happily, those laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1923. Shortly afterward, the great movement was found to be rife with corruption and immorality, and so the KKK faded away.
What are we to make of this incident at the Aldi Supermarket? That's where this whole business started, right? A woman was speaking to her children in some outlandish tongue, and an elderly man set them straight, "We speak English here!" I wince to think of such a thing happening here. Had I been there, the old gentleman would certainly have heard a few choice words from me. How could he know anything of the situation of the people he was so quick to scold? Suppose they were tourists from far off France come to spend a week or two at lovely Cook Forest? Suppose they were recently arrived immigrants from afar, struggling with the American way of life, struggling with homesickness, loneliness and confusion? What if they were here for a funeral and staying with relatives for a few days?
The old man was wrong to say "We speak English here!" Ms. Gibson is wrong to defend his incivility. Anyone who has spent much time at all in Clarion County knows that here every stranger lifts a hand and says hello in passing. Here, we nearly all live together in peace and smiling harmony. Here, kindness is a common virtue, and so it should remain.
Old News of Clarion County