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Linguistics exists in its own little world. It has its own jargon, humour and general culture. Right now, the SIL people are taking suggestions for this year's T-shirt design. The proposals from the students generally consist of numerous inside jokes that are outright hilarious to us but wouldn't make sense to you.

Linguistic topics of course will boil over into our normal conversation. The dinner table seems to be the normal place for the discussion of such. I struck up a conversation with the women who I sat with at dinner this evening. Somehow or another, the topic steered to Spain under Franco and his language policy.

Let me fast forward to today. In America, there are a number of people fed up with people immigrating to the United States and then not speaking English. They start going on tirades to have English made the official language, forbid other languages from being spoken in schools and only providing services in English. The main reason for their argument is that if this nation cannot speak only one language, it cannot remain united.

That's a load of crap! Look at Switzerland. They have four official languages there, and there's no national disunity there. Of course, you go to a place like Spain, and language is what divides the country. It's interesting to note that in Spain, there actually was a time when Franco tried to enforce a single language policy. It kind of spawned this thing called the ETA. If you know anything about the ETA, well… they kill people. Even thirty years after Franco died, the ETA is still killing people.

National unity really has nothing to do with the language spoken in a country. Unity can be achieved with diversity just as well as with conformity. In other instances conformity and diversity can breed disunity as well. I'll go ahead and stand on the side of diversity. I kind of like being me, so I might come in handy to be able to say that I said that when someone says that I can't be me.