The story of America's social language-engineering is there to be understood and wisely redirected. It is a remarkable, and some would say heroic, story of immigrations: forced, illegal, and voluntary; of treaties, purchases, and constitutions by which Spanish-, French-, German-, and AMerindian-speakers' languages, among many others, were subsumed; of a once new and powerfully nationalist literary movement that still informs devotedly monoglottal American university departments. Most Americans, however, cannot yet tell the story, or they do not want to tell the real story, not so much because the languages are forgotten (which they are), but mainly because forgetting language difference - and hence, more critically, partly suppressing the category of "language" itself - is still the urgent component of unofficially anglophone America's understanding of itself.

- Marc Shell, in "Babel in America: Or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States