When my family visited the nation of Cameroon last year, it was a linguistically challenging trip. Cameroon’s main colonial language was French. Out of the six of us, I was the only one who’d ever studied French—and that was thirty years ago. Although a surprising number of French words came back to me during our two weeks there, our conversations with Cameroonians mostly depended on translators, plus lots of patience and good humor. 

During one translated conversation with a local pastor’s wife, she explained to us that most Cameroonians speak at least four languages: their mother’s tribal language, their father’s tribal language, a distinct intertribal trade language, and French. 

“Don’t your people speak many languages?” she asked us (in French). “Aren’t there different birth languages all over your land?”

We laughed at the thought. “No,” we explained, “most Americans only speak English.” And we were right: there are, of course, a great number of communities in the United States who speak other languages, but 78% of Americans speak only English. 

But then, as I let my mind drift back over the country I call home, it hit me: there were, originally, many different birth languages spoken all over our vast land. These languages belonged to the indigenous communities collectively called Native Americans, American Indians, or First Nations. The number of individual names for their sovereign tribes points at the number of different languages once spoken across North America: from the Dakota to the Navajo to the Cherokee to the Inuit, over 300 distinct people groups, each with their own language, once flourished here. 

Then came the Europeans. 

In my ancestors’ haste to fulfill what they saw as their Manifest Destiny, they sought to exterminate not only people but languages. There were massacres waged with guns and massacres waged with smallpox blankets, but there were also boarding schools where small children were beaten when they spoke a word in their mother tongue. Those efforts nearly succeeded: approximately three-quarters of the 2.7 million American Indians alive today speak only English. (Virtually none of the descendants of enslaved Africans speak their original mother tongues, either.) According to Babbel magazine, of the Native American languages that remain, most have only a handful of speakers, and without restoration will disappear entirely by the year 2050. 

I had never before reflected on the fact that Americans speak only English by design. It took a trip to a country where everyone speaks at least four languages for me to think about the fact that the many indigenous languages of my homeland had been intentionally snuffed out. 

Of course, the United States of America was not the first to attempt to build an entire society on a single language. That distinction belongs to the folks of Tower of Babel fame, way back in Genesis 11. In her book Subversive Sequels in the Bible, Jewish theologian Judy Klitsner argues that “the sin at Babel was the creation of a coercively conformist society.” Read this way, God’s institution of many languages in that story becomes not a punishment, as I had always thought, but a corrective reset. It turns out, God doesn’t want “coercively conformist” societies who force everyone to speak (and think, and act) the same. God wants many languages to flourish on the earth. 

What will it look like for the United States of America to repent of attempting to coerce conformity—linguistic and otherwise—throughout her borders? What will it look like to allow many languages—and with them, literatures and musical genres and fashions and philosophies and cultures—to flourish here once again? 

Scientists tell us that the true colors of deciduous tree leaves are the colors we see in the fall. All spring and summer, chlorophyll floods the leaf, forcing it to be green. In the fall, when the chlorophyll recedes, the tree’s “true colors” emerge. 

Here in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as colonialism’s coercive conformity is finally beginning to recede, what true colors will emerge? 

Are we willing to listen for the sound of many languages here once again?