In reality, Miami has been a bilingual city for a long time. The Miami
Herald is printed every day in both English and Spanish. Automatic
teller machines here offer both languages. And whether you’re at the
airport ... or on the streets, you constantly hear English and Spanish.
But after the Mariel boatlift of 1980 brought thousands of Cubans
here, voters overwhelmingly passed a law prohibiting the use of any
language in official county business except English. For example, if
you want to testify at a commission hearing, question your water bill,
or make a formal complaint, it must be in English.
(ABC Evening News, May 14, 1993)While most of the public debate around language has to do with a
deceptively simple question (which language?) the underlying conflict is
far more complex and interesting. When immigrants become bilingual (as
happened, for example, in the case of the German immigrant population,
something that would have irritated Benjamin Franklin, no doubt), the
question is no longer which language, but which English or more
specifically in this chapter, which accent and ultimately, which race,
ethnicity, religion, worldview.
Who has a foreign accent?
The Census Bureau estimates that in 2008 there were 37.5 million foreign-
born residents in the U.S., but significantly more – about 54.5 million –
who spoke a language other than English at home – an increase of a
whopping 140.3 percent since 1980.^4 This does not mean, of course, that
all 55.5 million speak English with an L2 accent; in fact, there is no
reliable way to estimate how many people are vulnerable to this kind of
discrimination.
One thing can be said with certainty: millions of people resident in the
U.S. are not native speakers of English. Many speak a language other than
English in their homes, neighborhoods, personal lives and sometimes also
in their work. As discussed in Chapter 2, any individual who takes on the
task of learning a second or third language in adulthood will have some
degree of L2 accent, the degree of which is not readily predictable and will
not correlate, over all, to education, intelligence or motivation. We do