am reading about the decline of german in america, and how there was a very large population - meaning in the millions - of german speakers in america by the early 1900s, mostly of the educated and wealthy classes, and who were highly literate and bilingual. who had, through the late 1800s and early 1900s, published widely in both english and german, who had envisioned a literary tradition that would be multilingual and cosmopolitan. who had produced works on the theory of bilateral english-german translation, producing bilingual journals and fostering german-language writing of american writers. who had debated too whether they were losing the german language through americanisation, or whether that was, on the contrary, quite an end in itself. who had thought that eventually there would be a new germany in america, like new france or new england.

and of course by the time of the first world war the antipathy towards the german community and the fear of linguistic diversity and therefore dissent (just like the singapore pledge: regardless of race, language and religion, already recognising implicitly that language can be a source of divisiveness) and teddy roosevelt insisting that america must have only one language, and "that language must be the language of the declaration of independnece." the resultant linguistic intolerance, the insistence on "language loyalties" led, by the forties, to the disintegration of german-american lingua-culture, after it had become illegal to teach german in american schools, in spite of strong appeals from the german-american community. german-americans lost their german accents and to speak exclusively english rather than german or germerican (a syntactically and lexically hybrid of english and german.)

the more material i deal with in early american multilingual literatures, the more i discover about america's early multilingual history, the more i feel as if i'm in the man in the high castle, because i'm reading a vivid alternative history that could have been, but which we can never believe in now because the external history doesn't validate it. and this is also why i'm so distressed by language policy changes in singapore, because i see these changes as mirroring the history of language change in america, and even our loss of dialects, or the way we may one day lose the creolised culture that singlish can offer - and that instead of fostering an increasingly multilingual society, we're going the way of monoglottal america, or else falling into babel.