‘We have room for but one language here’: Language and national identity in the US at the turn of the 20th century

The purpose of this paper is to offer a tentative historiography of the emergence of one language ideology, that of English as the one and only language of American national identity. I will examine the appearance and growth of this ideology from the 18th to the 20th century, ending with the post-World War I period when three discourses, that of Americanization, that of Anglicization, and that of Anglo-Saxonization, came together suggesting to newly arriving European immigrants that in order to become loyal Americans they should absorb Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions and speak only English. I will also argue that while the linguistic assimilation of European immigrants eventually became a part of the American national identity narrative, the enforced nature of this assimilation was conveniently ‘written out’ of the story. As a result, children and grandchildren of European immigrants came to see language maintenance and loss as private issues, disconnected from larger sociopolitical contexts.