Conservatives Are Afraid Of People Speaking Other Languages

1969- somehow we wound up as guests at a wedding, somewhere in Morocco. I'm the nerd with the big stoned smile and the embroidery on my pants cuffs

So there I was-- 1969, Hippie Trail, headed for India in my VW van. We were in eastern Turkey getting read to cross the border into Iran the next day. We were: me, the only American on board, a French guy, two Danes and a German. There was another van going in the other direction parked with us, driven by an Australian and he had another Aussie with him as well as a couple of Japanese kids, a Flemish-speaking Belgian and a guy from Chile. Getting ready for crossing a border meant smoking up all the dope everyone had; no dope allowed at border crossings. So we sat around getting stoned and exchanging stories about what was ahead and behind.

I was really high when I suddenly realized how lucky I was. The Danish girl and the Japanese girl were having a side conversation near me and it was in English. Everyone was talking English. That was the language of the road. It was the common language of travelers. I spent a couple of years in Asia and I could get along with English almost everywhere. In Afghanistan I wound up way off the beaten path in a tiny "village" (2 compounds) in the Hindu Kush. No one spoke English. They didn't even speak Farsi (Persian) or Dari (the local Afghan version of Farsi). No one had ever experienced electricity or had heard of the United States. Since I was on horseback with a broken ankle and snowed in for the winter, I was forced to learn Pashtun. But... otherwise, English worked everywhere.

A few years later I was working at the Kosmos, Amsterdam's mediation center. It was a city-subsidized international youth center and there were people from all over the world, as staff and as clients. But English was the "official" language of the Kosmos. Many of the Dutch staffers were not happy about that, bit everyone knew that's the way it had to be. Outside of work they refused to respond to English and would only speak Dutch. These were my closest friends. They forced me to learn Dutch. The only one who would talk English with me was Evelyne, a French-Dutch artist, but she preferred Dutch too. It was good for me, although... right around the time Nixon was being impeached I woke up one morning and realized I had been dreaming in Dutch, not English. I didn't like that. I started thinking about moving back to the U.S. at that point, which I eventually did.

But while I was living overseas I realized that the only people uncomfortable with hearing foreign languages were Americans. Canadians weren't. Nor were Brits or Aussies or South Africans. Just Americans. When you're stoned you get sensitive to that kind of thing and can recognize it. I came to understand that Americans are so unused to hearing foreign languages that they-- or more accurately some of them-- get paranoid and assume that the people speaking another language are saying something nasty about them-- anything from, "Oh, what a asshole" to "Let's cut him up in a thousand pieces and dump the pieces all over Herat in a pattern."

You sometimes can detect that kind of paranoia here in the states when people are speaking Spanish. Some people just bristle. According to Pew Research, those people are conservatives. That's who who gets up tight and paranoid about a foreign language. I knew that instinctively but it was interesting to see it as part of their study.

About three-in-ten Americans say it would bother them to hear people speak a language other than English in public

Most Americans (70%) say they would not be particularly bothered if they heard people speak a language other than English in a public place, including 47% who say they would not be bothered at all. Still, a sizable share (29%) says this would bother them at least some.

Roughly a third of whites (34%) and about a quarter of blacks (24%) and Asians (24%) say they would be bothered if they heard people speak a language other than English in public; a smaller share of Hispanics (14%) say the same. About two-thirds of Hispanics (68%) say this wouldn’t bother them at all, compared with half or fewer whites (41%), blacks (48%) and Asians (50%). Foreign-born Hispanics are more likely than those born in the U.S. to say they would not be bothered at all if they heard someone speak a language other than English in public (76% vs. 61%).

Among whites, reactions vary considerably by age, education and political orientation. Younger whites and those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are less likely than their older and less educated counterparts to say they would be bothered by hearing a language other than English in a public place.

Views are even more divided along partisan lines. About six-in-ten white Democrats (58%)-- vs. 26% of white Republicans-- say this wouldn’t bother them at all.

The part of this that I keep mulling over is that 47% of white Republicans said it would bother them "some" or "a lot" to "hear people speak a language other than English in a public place." Interestingly Pew found that only 18% of white Democrats would be bothered. What does that tell you about the people attracted to the two parties?