Rebroadcast: The power of American English to unite a fractured nation

This rebroadcast originally aired on February 8, 2023.

American English has many forms.

It’s evolved over 400 years to match this country’s dynamic history.

Humanities professor Ilan Stavans says that because it’s so adaptable, American English can unify our fractured nation.

Today, On Point: What if English is the last strand that holds together this fractured nation?

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring professor of humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Essayist, cultural critic and translator. Author of many books, including The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Listen to the way you and your fellow countrymen and women speak, and across this nation, you hear a veritable symphony of the English language. Here's one.

ROBIN ALVA MARCUS [Tape]: It's the language of the barbershop, the beauty shop. It's a language that you sing your praises to God in, right? And I don't know no Black person who won't know what I'm saying if I say, "Don't nobody don't know Jesus can't tell me nothing about him." They know what I've said. And they understand that there's a bunch of double negatives in there, which is a hallmark of the language.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Professor Robin Alva Marcus of George Washington University describing Black Vernacular English on a BET special.

Here's another one. This is a teenager describing his twist on the language.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN [Tape]: Pues unas veces se puede decir — yo venio de Los Angeles, yo hablo lo que se llama Spanglish. You can speak Espanol and then English at the same tiempo, you know?

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Elder Florence Paynter from Sandy Bay Ojibwe First Nation talking about language and names.

FLORENCE PAYNTER [Tape]: I speak Ojibwe and I also wanted to acknowledge my spirit name, which is Blue Thunderbird Woman, and also the clan that I belong to.

CHAKRABARTI: This is so wonderful. We could do this all day, but let's just wrap up with a few more.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN [Tape]: Hello, I have a regular Maytag washer I'd like to sell.

Me, John Belaia. And where she is it .

You can tell people from this part of Kentucky, from anywhere else in the world, I can, if you really listen to it.

How about that kishka? How about some kishka? How about that? Nice belly. Now how about some y'all? I don't understand the words you're saying.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. That last set of voices from Kentucky, Louisiana, New York and Texas, comes from the award-winning 1988 documentary American Tongues.

So we've long known that the way we talk is as diverse as who we are. And yet — that confused Texan at the New York deli aside — somehow, we still manage to understand each other. Now that's a remarkable fact. And Ilan Stavans says it's a fact that we should cling to with tenacity and pride because American English in all its forms may be the last thing that truly unites this fractious and fractured nation together.

In other words, that we achieve "e pluribus unum" through American English. It's a provocative idea, isn't it? Which Stavans lays out in a new book he's edited called The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language. He's also a professor of humanities and Latin American culture at Amherst College, and he joins us now.

Professor Stavans, welcome back to On Point.

ILAN STAVANS: It's a joy to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: I would actually love to begin with your own story of your adoption of the American English language. How old were you when you first were immersed in the language, languages of this nation?

STAVANS: I was 25, Meghna. I came from Mexico. I had grown up in a multilingual environment, in a Jewish, Yiddish speaking enclave and arriving to the United States was a shock. It was equally shocking to arrive geographically as it was to arrive linguistically, because the moment I entered a subway car in New York City, I realized that there wasn't one English language, but a multiplicity of them.

Or that the English language was devouring all sorts of sounds that were coming from different regions in the world. And that some of those sounds could be mine. I could be devoured by the English language, or I could adapt myself, figure out what this language is and try to push it and rearrange it from within. And I think that is the journey that many immigrants feel. We come to the language, welcomes us, but we also realize at some point that if we abandon our own immigrant language and we just surrender and fully immerse ourselves in English, we will give up an essential part of who we are.

And so it's a negotiation, a give and take. Either way, I feel enormously grateful to this beautiful, magnificent, polyphonic language for its openness, its embrace, its capacity to recognize that homogeneity is boring, and that there are all sorts of ways of embracing it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. In your book, though, you also explore, and we will in this conversation, the tensions, right?

That come with that heterogeneity in how we speak. But I have to say, Professor Stavans, that I just loved the story of how it was a New York subway that plunged you into American English. Because I have that experience whenever I go there. I always wonder why New Yorkers are ever on their phones while they're on the subway, because there's music going on all around you.

But you call it, you called it linguistic pollution. That's such an interesting phrase. Why?

STAVANS: Because of the deliberate negative connotation that pollution entails. And yet pollution, Meghna, is what makes languages come alive. It is the borrowing and the stealing of other languages that enables us to expand.

How many new words come into the English language every year? Where do they come from? Who creates them? How do they get shaped? How do they get recognized? How is it that there are words that we used maybe 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and they have mutated in terms of meaning. Who controls that meaning?

I'm fascinated by these tensions. By the clash of cultures that exists within the language and the resistance, the resilience of the language to continue as a unity, as a cohesive force, bringing us all together, or at least giving us a semblance of unity.

CHAKRABARTI: Semblance. Okay, that's interesting.

But we're going to dive into the, you do a sort of chronological journey through different usages and views of English over the past 400 years in this country. And we will take that same journey. But I don't just want to leave your personal experience behind just yet, professor. Because I'm just wondering, on a day-to-day basis, given your own richly diverse background.

And then also your professional life now and just living on a daily basis, where you do, what's the ebb and flow of the different kinds of English you use every day?

STAVANS: On an average day, if there are such things as average days, I can switch from Spanish to Yiddish to Hebrew and then settle in English, but the Englishes that I speak depend on who I have in front. I will switch to Spanglish with my wonderful students or with my two beautiful boys. I will be more formal with my colleagues. I will taste the varieties of the language if I am engaging with older Yiddish speaking Americans or with the indigenous Americans, I live in Massachusetts.

I try to register those elements and I tried not to mimic, but to attune and maybe atone myself to the knowledge or lack of knowledge that I have with all these different populations, audiences, companions.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so I'm really appreciative that you said that professor, because of course, the beginnings of the English language in this nation is contemporaneous and was a tool of colonial conquering, right?

So let's go to the first set of writings that you have put in this book, The People's Tongue. It actually begins with a beautiful piece of writing that's difficult for me to read right now. It's chaotic, from Puritan Massachusetts. Tell me about that.

STAVANS: It is the letter that Anne Winthrop, a daughter of the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, writes to her father in 1581.

And when one attempts to read it, it is as if we were entering Middle English, as if we were opening the pages of Jeffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The spelling is unstable, erratic, the pronunciation must have been even more. And that is because the language at that time is arriving from Europe, there's an expansiveness to it, but in Europe, still in the 16th century, the first dictionaries are beginning to take shape.

And so there is no punctuation. There is no capitalization, rules that we accept today as essential. They are much more loose and it is just fascinating to see how open the language is then, and how much we critique those that don't speak standard English. Whose language, their languages are loose today, but for reasons that have to do with immigration, it is a similar looseness, but they come from different corners of the world, and they explain different aspects of how our language has come to be.

CHAKRABARTI: Anne Winthrop's letter ends. I'm going to stumble through this, because the spelling is unusual. It ends with, "Thus with my 'very,'" — ending with an E — "hearty commendations, I bid you, B-Y-D, bid you farewell, committing you to Almighty God, to whom I commend you in my daily, D-A-Y-L-Y-E prayers, as I am sure you do me."

It occurs to me, though, and I don't, it's not clear what your answer might be from the book, Professor, but at that time, late 17th century, English by no means was guaranteed to be the common tongue of this nation.

STAVANS: Certainly not. It was a settlers' language. And today we distinguish between the word settler and the word immigrant in the word exile, and the word refugee.

They all have different connotations, but they are all new arrivals, as is, say, a tourist to this country and a slave. And the fact that these settlers are arriving strong, mighty in their vision, of this new Canaan and with a conviction that this is going to be a place of freedom enables them to feel that the language will be theirs.

And as such, they ignore the many other languages that are in this territory. And it is essential that we recognize that in the conquering efforts of the American English language, there is also a cemetery, a series of silences of other languages that have succumbed in the process.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Stavans, you point out in the book something which actually slipped my attention for many years, that in the Constitution of the United States, at the Constitutional Convention the Founding Fathers chose, actively chose not to include the word official in connection to any particular language.

And looking back, that actually seems like a very interesting choice to make. What do you think?

STAVANS: It was interesting. It was incredibly controversial. It remains one of the most polemical aspects of the constitution, not only what it says, but in what language it is saying it. And the fact that very language, English, is not the one that they are acknowledging as the one that officially everybody should speak.

What does it really mean to officially endorse a language? The beauty of all this is that many of the founding fathers were very interested in the economics of the language. In order to make a cohesive, durable nation, they understood that we need a language that brings us all together. And yet they left it to us to fight for that language and not to be forced to speak that language, which I think is an absolute strike of genius.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, and it's interesting because the differing founding fathers had really varied perspectives on this, right? Because you write about how Thomas Jefferson really thought that the elasticity of the English language was part of what gave it its almost democratic power, right? It seems like he wanted to connect it very closely to the democratic experiment that was going on in the new country.

STAVANS: Jefferson was a polymath, a renaissance man, who was interested in so many aspects of human knowledge. And of course, language was one of them.

And he understood that elasticity, that malleability of the English language could be a metaphor itself of the elasticity and malleability of the American people. That if we had, and continue to have a variety of ways of speaking the language, and we find common ground to understand each other, that would be the spark that would push the nation forward, that tension within the language.

And he wrote letters, he wrote philological documents where he explored how the language and the various other languages that he spoke could have a future by retaining that kind of economy within it.

CHAKRABARTI: But you also point out that right there at the founding of the country, between Jefferson and John Adams, his close friend and sometimes rival, we see these two very different perspectives of what language can symbolize and how it can be used.

Because Adams, in a sense, advocated English as a form of, to put it bluntly, cultural and social control, if I can put it that way. Because you include a letter that he wrote in there in the anthology, a letter that he wrote that's advocating for an American language academy, which we don't have. And in the letter, he says, John Adams writes, "It is not to be disputed that the form of government has an influence upon language. And language in its turn, influences not only the form of government, but the temper, the sentiments and the manners of the people."

STAVANS: Beautiful. I think that language is character and John Adams understood that. In very eloquent terms, in 1780, MacNaghy proposed that we create an academy of the English language the way the French have, the Académie Française, and the way that the Spanish have, la Real Académia Española, it's astonishing that the most popular and the most powerful language in the entire world, American English, doesn't have an institution that legislates what is accepted and what is rejected, the way the vast majority of standardized languages do.

Having that academy. And I believe, there has been an ongoing debate. Should we have an academy the equivalent of those — Académie Française, Real Academia Española — with learned men and women, that legislate how we should use the language. And the answer so far, and I hope forever, is that we don't have that entity. That it is left to us to decide what is right and what is wrong, in the classrooms, in the kitchen, on the streets, in libraries, that we change the terms, because we don't want anybody to tell us Americans how to speak, we want to decide how we speak and in what way we use our language to convey our messages.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Stavans, I would posit that if we did have such an academy, half its members would be listeners of public radio. (LAUGHS)

STAVANS: And the other half would try to bring down public radio.

CHAKRABARTI: Because the number of emails and letters I still get from people who want to quibble with how I say things is, it's delightful. Let me put it that way.

STAVANS: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: So to that person who writes to me regularly and notes that sometimes when I read on the air, I say "fur" instead of "for," my apologies. But I also stand by what Professor Stavans said, in my deep Americanness, it's just who I am.

STAVANS: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: But the languages in which you described that have these longstanding academies they also, the counterargument or the argument against them is that they, in a sense, produce a kind of ossification of the language, right? And you have an excerpt from the writings of Tocqueville, from his famous book, Democracy in America, from 1835, where he says societies that are essentially not vibrant, or dead, in fact.

That that lack of vitality is mirrored in their languages. Because he talks about aristocracies, and he says: "In aristocracies, language must naturally partake of that state of repose in which everything remains. Few new words are coined, because few new things are made. And even if new things were made, they would be designated by known words. Whose meaning has been determined by tradition."

And of course, in America, he saw the exact opposite.

STAVANS: Yes. And this is thanks to a tourist or a traveler from France that came here initially to study our penal system, and then decided to write an entire book on how the Americans have reshaped the environment and are looking to create a society that in his view would be one that would set the tone in the future.

It was left to an outsider to teach us that we are doing something with a language that he himself in French was not able to do. I love the word that you use, Meghna, ossification. There are indeed many fossils in a language, words that we no longer use, but the creativity, the inventiveness, the fact that we believe in this entrepreneurial spirit, that we create things. And because we create things, we need to find words to describe them.

The founding fathers would not know what an airplane is, what a microchip is, what so many words that we use for technology and for science, because that is pushing us forward. But we need a new vocabulary to describe it. And that is also the English language.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you know what's interesting to me? And correct me if I'm wrong, because those words that you mentioned, some of them, when they emerge from American English, become the words that the rest of the world uses.

I'm not sure in Spanish, is there a different word for microchip? Maybe there is.

STAVANS: Absolutely. These are words that begin very often in the English language, because this is the location where many of these inventions take place, and then they are borrowed by other languages, very often. Just pronounced in the same way. Microchip in Spanish, and this is a statement of how the English language also produces words for other languages, and why academies, like the Académie Française, will regularly legislate and say, "We have to defend ourselves against the invasiveness of colonial American English because it is destroying our language."

And we can find synonyms that they are coming from within and don't reflect that outside colonization, so to speak.

CHAKRABARTI: Of course, the irony of that is profound, right? Because the French defending themselves against the colonizing force of a language is something. But it was that same language, though, the spread of American English, that was the sharp edge of the culturally annihilating force that took place in this country, right?

Cause you talk about those tensions throughout the whole book. And you introduce us to a very interesting person, Samuel Pocahont, who was one of the first indigenous writers in this country to make an argument against American English. And he did so in 1893. Can you tell us more about that?

STAVANS: Yes. This is the beginning of a whole debate connected with the indigenous population. Pokégon is reacting to a genocidal attempt to not only erase the indigenous population, but erase the vestiges, the sounds of those populations. And there's the famous, "Save the man, kill the Indian."

And he goes against this grain and says, "There are beautiful aspects of the indigenous languages that we need to rescue." And in fact, if you travel across America today, you will hear them from the names of our states to the names of mountains and rivers and valleys, they are everywhere.

They have been adapted or rearranged into the English language with English spelling, but they live, they continue to exist within who we are. And that is a statement of the tension that exists between the colonial spirit of English and American English within this country and abroad.

And the forces that have been silenced within us that struggle to emerge and to make a statement. Here we are. We are not going to be erased. We're not going to be censored. The word that is very popular today. We will endure. So a language is many things, including this, including a museum. It's a memory book. It's a cemetery, it's a factory machine.

It is an engine of success is, it is business, and it is also poetry. It is all those things in one.

CHAKRABARTI: Now you include, speaking of how language can really become immortal in and of itself in American history, you include Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in this anthology, and I think it's one of the few pieces from a president that's in the entire book.

So why this one in particular?

STAVANS: There are maybe three or four pieces by presidents, including a series of tweets from President Trump against CNN, a statement of how he viewed the media as fake news, the Gettysburg Address in particular is, to me, one of the most eloquent and lasting texts about this nation. And about how the English language can convey both the pain and the hope of where this nation goes after a terrible tragedy.

It is in 1863 that Lincoln delivers this address in Gettysburg, and just a few words, really not even 500, and yet those words have a consistency, a texture, that are, that become a lesson of what a political leader can do with brevity. With eloquence, and with absolute mastery of the English language. And they will resonate, not only among his contemporaries, but forever and ever shaping us into the future.

This is how the language can be used as a leader to propel us as a nation.

CHAKRABARTI: You know what leapt out at me as I read through the book — again, it's called The People's Tongue — Professor Stavans, is when I got to your inclusion of Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel lecture. It's a fantastic lecture from top to bottom, I have to say.

Of course, she's an absolute genius with language. But she, too, in her Nobel lecture actually points to the Gettysburg Address in a portion of it, for really, for quite a beautiful reason, I'm just going to read a little bit of what she wrote. She says, "His simple words are exhilarating in their life sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600,000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war, refusing to monumentalize disdaining the final word, the precise summing up, his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns."

It is the deference that moves her, "The recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all, nor should it. Language can never pin down slavery, genocide, war, nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do."

CHAKRABARTI: What do you think of that?

STAVANS: Could you imagine Lincoln sitting in Stockholm listening to Toni Morrison deliver those lines?

Oh, what a dialogue across time and across space. What eloquence, what capacity to see a descendant, many generations later, of the slaves that had joined the armies to make this nation who we are, capable of using the language to produce masterpieces like Beloved, and then in just, I don't know, eternal language, to be able to talk back at Lincoln with reference, with equanimity, with gratitude. Just as in the future, somebody's going to read that noble lecture by Toni Morrison and do the same thing.

Because language enables us to do that, to talk across time, to communicate with our ancestors and with those that will come after us. We are only vessels that pass on the words, and we have a big responsibility in doing that. We are capable of looking at the past within our language and propel that language into the future.

CHAKRABARTI: And I have to say, it makes me smile that when I see the text of Toni Morrison's speech on the computer in front of me, that word uncapturability. Which she utters, has that little red jagged line underneath it because the computer thinks it's wrong. But it's not.

STAVANS: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: When we come back, I want to talk with you more, Professor Stavans, a little bit more about the darker side of the debates, the fights over what constitutes American English.

And then circle back to the idea of despite those, is it a thing that still unifies us? That's what we'll do when we come back. This is On Point.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: We have touched on the fact that while there's quite a rosy view of what the different versions of American English mean, and the fact that they're linguistically cohabitating with each other, at the same time, it's that same English language that has been used to culturally annihilate people, right?

If you take away a people's language, you take away their core identity. For indigenous people in this country, for enslaved people in this country. The list is long, a graveyard, as you called it. And also when we think of the constant influx of immigrants who both enrich American English, and make it their own as well, that has come with increased, with incredible tension for centuries.

I didn't know that back even before, let's see, what, in the early 20th century, right? There were efforts by, to make English, the national, or at least a state language, or even Teddy Roosevelt wanted some such thing. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

STAVANS: The tension has been strong because of that constant influx of outsiders, of immigrants.

It's a significant fact that upon arriving to Ellis Island, the first thing, supposedly immigrants or future immigrants see, is that sonnet engraved in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus that includes the line, "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses." These are rejects, this is the refuse of the other nations that have been coming here.

And yet it is in English that sonnet receives those newcomers, a language many of them not yet know, but the hope is that eventually they will embrace it. That tension between how fast an immigrant will learn the language, how dangerous it might be, that they don't learn the language fast enough, generates all sorts of polemics, controversies within the country.

And in the book, there is an ongoing debate between those that believe that bilingual education is a catastrophe, that we need to convince immigrants to surrender their immigrant language and embrace fully and without any hesitation the English language, because it's the only way for them to become fully American.

And a more subtle embracing benign and contemporary view that you don't have to give up your language, you can tame it, that immigrant language, in the process of becoming a full English language speaker. And there are the two sides in each state, in each a county, in each town, that will advocate for one side or the other. And this tension, this debate goes on, and one could say, when is it going to stop?

And the fact is that it's the very tension that keeps us Democratic, the debate of how we do it. And the fact that the debate is in English, in and of itself.

CHAKRABARTI: It's so interesting to me. Because for example, you point out that in 1918, in Iowa, then Governor William Harding, because of anti-German sentiment, First World War, forbade people in the state to use any other language than English, even over the phone.

But the flip side then comes with your observation that in 1982, there was an attempt in Washington to make English the United States official language. And that attempt comes from a Japanese descended California Senator, Samuel Hayakawa, who talked about the fact that because we are full of people from all parts of the world, having learned one language, and ultimately having learned to get along with each other, to create institutions of a multiracial, multicultural, democratic society.

That is why he thought English should be the official language of the United States. You would think that would have some traction in Washington, but you point out that his efforts never succeeded.

STAVANS: They never succeeded, and yet it is significant and emblematic that a grandchild, a child, an immigrant themselves can be the ones that say, "I'm the last one coming to this country. Close the door. Switch the language. We have to be fully American." And sometimes the native born, the full-fledged English language speaker will advocate for more plurality, for a polyphonic way of speaking the language. Life is surprising and so is the language. You never know what to expect.

Sometimes within one's life, you can be in one end of the debate and then switch to another one. In any case, what is beautiful about all this is that we can debate, we can battle all this, we can continue to engage in what it means to be an American in this language that brings in words from other cultures, individuals that are speaking those other cultures.

And in the end, it is very often that the immigrants end up being incredibly proud of having learned the language. And want to pass it on to their children and are the vessels for that continuity. It is those immigrants, that pride that pushes the language into the next generation.

CHAKRABARTI: It is so remarkable to me that Americans and the English language here are both incredibly elastic, but also exclusive. Simultaneously, right? Because another view of this comes from a piece that you included from Gloria Anzaldúa, who, in 1987, she wrote this, and it's just really beautifully articulated. She said, "Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity. I am my language," she wrote.

And then she says, "Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex Mex, and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself."

STAVANS: It couldn't be said better. I am my language. It's the way I dress up. It's the way I smile.

It's the way I look at the world. It is that pride in the recognition that language is not static. Gloria Anzaldúa had to come to Chicano Spanish, to Chicano Spanglish after a big internal debate, after a big societal debate about the meaning of that Chicano Spanglish in Texas in order to become an advocate.

We don't all of a sudden out of the blue become who we are. It is Darwinian. It's a process. It's an evolution. We speak a language today that offers replicas or statements of who we were before, and announcements of who we will be.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Stavans, you write about how, in the introduction, you say, if there is a lesson to be learned from history, it is that American English thrives through contradictions.

The 21st century seems to be pushing the nation's polarization and fragmentation to extremes. And I was wondering if, is that not totally apparent in how language is used in the nation today when it comes to politics?

STAVANS: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Because we have a nation now where there's ample polling and demographic evidence that shows that many Americans feel more fealty to their political party than they might even to their neighborhoods or their houses of worship.

And we can see ways of political points of view being encapsulated in how people talk.

I mean imagine the battles over the phrases CRT or the different uses of pronouns that are going on right now.

STAVANS: I think that political parties can become silos. They isolate, they ghettoize us from the rest of society.

I'm very worried the way many other Americans are today about the fate of this country, the moment that we happen to be in, both as participants and as witnesses, and the fact that very often we can sit at a dinner table and not have much to say to those that are our relatives or our friends because of their ideological views.

And in the end, it is the fact that in English, we are finding a thread of communication, but even that English is fractured. When it comes to Latinos, for instance, the word Latino will not be used by many Republicans. They are Hispanics. The gender pronouns that you were talking about is also very significant.

And it's a fact that within those silos, within those political bastions, we choose our own lexicon, and that lexicon is a way to affiliate ourselves with those that are akin to our world view, but also to defy and to reject those that are not, and that is incredibly dangerous.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. There's so many examples we could go through, but let's stick with pronouns for a second, because the alternative uses of pronouns has been thoroughly weaponized, I would say, and by various perspectives here, right?

There's one perspective that says there should be no different uses of pronouns because that means advancing an agenda. But then there's another perspective that says if you don't use the pronouns that I prefer, or that if you accidentally use different pronouns, then you are embracing hate.

There's no room for that elasticity, that dynamism that unifying force, that you spend the entire book talking about.

STAVANS: And then there's another dimension, the exclamation mark. Americans have become infatuated with exclamation marks. It is a country of ecstasy. And we use the exclamation mark often in social media, but even that, recently, depending on the generation will become alienating.

You are using too many exclamation marks. You don't really respect the language or I can use them as freely and as openly as I want. Just an exclamation mark. There's a lot in the language that can balkanize us, that can divide us, and there's a lot in the language that ultimately will bring us together.

The question is, can we find it?

CHAKRABARTI: So make the argument to me though, that you make it in the book, elaborate on it, because you say that it feels that American English, is the thing that's going to keep us together, even as our viewpoints diverge ever farther from each other.

STAVANS: The argument is simple and straightforward, Meghna. This is our language. We inherited it from those that fought to make this country where it is. And it is ours, in that it includes opposing views. We cannot cancel those that have opposing views. We have to recognize those views and recognize the vocabulary that they use.

We might be uncomfortable with others using our language, but the tension that exists in that discomfort is what has propelled this country forward. At a time when America seems to be absolutely divided, to the point that it is close to a civil war, or maybe that it's creating alternative views of what national futures we could have.

It is that common language that can bring us together at a dinner table, on the street, in the kitchen, and it has to recognize our differences. Those differences have made us stronger, and will continue to do so, just at the level of words. That's where we can begin.

CHAKRABARTI: I don't wish to be the constant bearer of bad news, Professor Stavans, but I have to ask, history is also full of nations that nevertheless descended into civil war, let alone this one, while still speaking a common language. Are we putting too much weight, too much pressure, too much hope in the fact that we can still talk to each other?

STAVANS: I'm an optimist, but also a practical man, Meghna. And I don't know what the future is.

I'm not in the business of prophecy. I do recognize that nations and empires have an expiration date, and that they are present, doesn't have an obligation to be also their future. But I also know that those nations that understand their past are capable of foreseeing where they might go.

And that is something that we can do at all levels, particularly with language. Are we close to a civil war? Is this country too big? Does it have the capacity to retain the elasticity and continue into the future? At the very least, by using our language, we will be able to explore this together.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we have about a minute or so left. Tell me, what do you want people to know about how they listen? How we listen to each other? What should we be listening for? What should we allow our ears to hear?

STAVANS: What I want people to engage in, and people already do, is not only in what others are telling us and what we're telling others, but in the music that we engage in when we speak, and where that music comes from.

Language is character, is individual character, is collective character. Language is history, too, and language is also a bet into who we want to be in the future. When we're listening to somebody who doesn't speak exactly like us, it's easy to demonize them, to think that they are less worthy than us. But in the end, we come from that background.

We come from others that didn't have the language that we have today. And if we can see the versions, the iterations of the past in those words, in that music, I think we're going to be more sensitive, compassionate, and humble.