Oh brother. Andre is going to write something philosophical.

(The Language connection to identity)
I need to define identity for myself before I start.

"Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" (Luke 6:45)

"He who is ignorant of other languages is ignorant of his own." --Goethe
America does not want to learn Spanish. That is a searing fact in this present day culture.Despite what boons could come from learning a language that is a-first-language to 332 million people around the world (English is first to 322 million), many citizens do not want to learn Spanish or have it taught to children for fear that English will bumped down to second language in the coming generation. The country's fear rings of xenophobia and seems to not change if the language being offered was French, Portuguese, or Russian. Americans, for the most part, don't like change (despite what an Obama poster might try to explicitly sell you) They would much rather not worry about their way of life being altered in a way that appears to be a slippery slope.
Cherokee was America's main language at one point in time, or one of many along with Chickasaw, Choctaw, Apache, and Navajo. If France won the French and Indian War, we would certainly have been speaking French at the new millennium. History was such fickle mistress. English was a luck of the draw when you look back and see that the right king was in place to pursue North American colonies even after the first attempt yielded nothing but death and famine in what is now South Carolina. How else would we have learned English? It is not an easy language. Would everyone spontaneously decide one year, one decade, that we should change all our books and speech because English is a way past cool language that would make us complete as a people? Doubt it.


"The language of friendship is not words but meanings." --Henry David Thoreau