The less important English becomes in America, the less American it becomes as well.
On Tuesday, Democrat Ismail Mohamed was elected as an Ohio state representative. The Somali immigrant prioritized support from the large Somali population in his district, which is home to the second largest one in America. His victory speech was entirely given in Somali, not English.
Mohamed campaigned for his election on Somali state news in Somali as well. Like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who was recently under fire for similar comments in Somali, he claimed that one of his primary goals as an official is to lobby for Somali interests.
The United States is gradually becoming a nation where its original language is less understood and valued. Massive numbers of illegal immigrants have been flooding in who do not have to learn English before entry.
They will have to learn it now if they want to have successful livelihoods here. However, that may not be necessary in the coming decades. The United States is already the second-largest Spanish-speaking country and is predicted to have one-third of its population speaking Spanish by 2050. Sixty-three percent of Hispanics in the U.S. speak a hybrid of English and Spanish called “Spanglish.”
There is a major problem with any language replacing English in America: English is vital to the American identity. Every language has etymological differences that can never be perfectly translated into most other languages. Concepts developed in certain languages are not easily understood in others.
The Andalusian philosopher Averroes was famous for writing about Aristotle’s works and translating his ideas from koine Greek into his native Arabic into the European lingua franca of Latin. However, according to “Beyond Mimesis: Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ in the Medieval Mediterranean” by Karla Marlette, he could not properly translate Indo-European concepts like “tragedy” and “comedy” into his own Semitic language since the Arabic world had no etymological understanding of either. He tried his best to insert similar Arabic words instead. These writings eventually had to be corrected by Latin scholars.
This is why theologians always study and refer back to the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the Bible. When the word “wisdom” is used in the New Testament, it is derived from the Greek word “sophia.” However, it does not mean the kind of wisdom we think of as intellectual mastery. It instead refers to a higher skill at living, particularly by taking guidance from God.
Even something as simple as a greeting can be nearly impossible to accurately translate. The Japanese phrase “yoroshiku onegaishimasu” is notoriously difficult for English speakers to understand. A rough translation would look something like “at first please know about me,” which does not make much sense contextually. In application, at the end of a self-introduction, it more so implies that the speaker is asking politely for the other party’s respect and placing themself in their care.
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America was founded in a distinctly English tradition using hundreds of years of development from within the English language and historical context. The economics of Adam Smith, the politics of John Locke, and the conservatism of Edmund Burke are some of the key English influences on the founding of the United States.
Without English as its official and primary language, America will lose the most important tool used to understand itself and the beneficial social and political ideas it has developed and created for the rest of the world.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner winter fellow.
