—Continued M A P P I N G L I F E N A T I O N W I D E FIGURE 12-1 Percentage of People Who Speak a Language Other Than KS MT AZ NM OK MN Percentage of People 14.9–22.0 9.1–13.6 WA a society. Little respect was granted to immigrants’ cultural traditions; a young person would often be teased about his or her “funny” name, accent, or style of dress. Recent decades have seen challenges to this pattern of forced obedience to the dominant ideology. Beginning in the 1960s, active movements for Black pride and ethnic pride insisted that people regard the traditions of all racial and ethnic subcultures as legitimate and important. Conflict theorists explain this development as a case of subordinated language minorities seeking opportunities for self- expression. Partly as a result of these challenges, people began to view bilingualism as an asset. It seemed to provide a sensitive way of assisting millions of non-English-speaking people in the United States to learn English in order to function more effectively within the society. The perspective of conflict theory also helps us to understand some of the attacks on bilingual programs. Many of them stem from an ethnocentric point of view, which holds that any deviation from the majority is bad. This attitude tends to be expressed by those who wish to stamp out foreign influence wherever it occurs, especially in our schools. It does 72 Culture not take into account that success in bilingual education may actually have beneficial results, such as decreasing the number of high school dropouts and increasing the number of Hispanics in colleges and universities. Initiating Policy Bilingualism has policy implications largely in two areas: efforts to maintain language purity and programs to enhance bilingual education. Nations vary dramatically in their tolerance for a variety of languages. China continues to tighten its cultural control over Tibet by extending instruction of Mandarin, a Chinese dialect, from high school into the elementary schools there, which will now be bilingual along with Tibetan. In contrast, nearby Singapore establishes English as the medium of instruction but PA NJ MA RI allows students to take their mother tongue as a second language, be it Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. One bilingual hot spot is Québec, the French-speaking province of Canada. The Québécois, as they are known, represent 83 percent of the province’s population, but only 25 percent of Canada’s total population. A law implemented in 1978 mandated education in French for all Québec’s children except those whose parents or siblings had learned English elsewhere in Canada. While special laws like this one have advanced French in the province, dissatisfied Québécois have tried to form their own separate country. In 1995, the people of Québec indicated their preference of remaining united with Canada by only the narrowest of margins (50.5 percent). Language and language-related cultural areas both unify and divide this nation of 33 million people ( The Economist 2005b; R. Schaefer 2014). Policymakers in the United States have been somewhat ambivalent in dealing with the issue of bilingualism. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provided for bilingual, bicultural education. In the 1970s, the federal government took an active role in establishing 22.7– 43.8 6.6–8.7 2.3–6.4 AK HI TX NV UT CA CO ND SD NE WY ID OR WI IA IL MI IN OH MO KY WV VA TN NC AR MS AL FL LA GA SC NY DE MD DC CT VT ME NH English at Home, by State Note: Data drawn from the 2011 American Community Survey of people five years and over. National average was 20.8 percent. Source: C. Ryan 2013.
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