Here's a remarkable thing about the Chinese and their language: They don't have a written alphabet the way we do. They rely on pictographs, a series of nuanced drawings that, when aligned in a certain way, create a word in the reader's head.

You probably knew that already. But perhaps you hadn't realized what a supremely inconvenient method this is for the purposes of transcribing a language in this modern age. Whereas those of us who have achieved a certain degree of English proficiency can communicate with 26 letters, 10 digits and a few punctuation keys, a Chinese keyboard containing all of the language's most-used symbols would be the size of a sheet of plywood. Give or take.

The typewriters weren't that large, obviously, but they were uncommonly intricate. A 1970s-era Chinese typewriter would have come with thousands of teensy metal characters, puzzling layout charts and, most crucially, a set of tweezers, used to add and remove characters from the printing tray. The advent of the personal computer means they've found a way to streamline the hardware. For the last decade or so, their computer keyboards have been about the same size as ours, because the Chinese keyboard uses Roman characters now.

But typing is still a laborious process, correlating the Roman letters with the similar Chinese pronunciation, then paging through hundreds of similar-sounding symbols, then finding the proper character, then selecting it and "writing" it onto the computer monitor.

All of that effort nets you one syllable. Even experienced computer users can't type faster than 15 or so words a minute in Chinese. Good luck with that book report.

---

The Olympics are under way, and my colleague Anya Sostek's recent story about China's efforts to scrub embarrassing English malapropisms from its street signs and billboards ("Lost In Translation: Chinglish Targeted," Aug. 1) got me to thinking about the simultaneously unifying and divisive power of language.

That China's cumbersome system of communication could be overcome in just a generation or so -- allowing the sleeping giant to take its place among the world's economic superpowers -- is remarkable. That they did this, in large part, by submitting to the irresistible force that is the English language, was unavoidable.

American English has swept the globe. You're either with us or against us, so to speak. And naturally, the Chinese were against us at first -- many opposed the advent "Pinyin" input method (the system of using the Roman phonetic alphabet to categorize their pictographic symbols). That resistance is to be expected. People are protective of their language, especially purists who worry that changes will whittle away at oral tradition and a people's sense of self-determination.

In Belgium, the French-speaking and Flemish/Dutch-speaking portions of the population dueled for decades (and conflicts are on the rise this year). Catalan, a minor romance language, was banned in Spain, as was the language of a separatist group, the Basques. Former French president Francois Mitterand once muttered: "France does not know it, but we are at war with America." Welsh was practically banned in Wales.

In the former Soviet Union, a "linguistic minority" (as Bill Bryson calls them in his book on language, "The Mother Tongue") known as the Azerbaijanis rioted for the right to have textbooks and newspapers composed in their own language. Unfortunately for them, Stalin wanted the Azerbaijanis to use the Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian tongue. Hitler, meanwhile, not to be outdone, exterminated people who spoke Esperanto, the language invented, Klingon-style, by a Jewish doctor in the 1800s.

In China, Roman characters were just the tip of the iceberg -- English is taking over the country. Estimates suggest that in China, more than 300 million (and as many as 600 million) people either speak English or are studying it -- that's more than the number of people who speak it in America.

For decades, the melding of traditional Chinese words with English -- called Chinglish -- has been ongoing. There is, say Chinese professors who wrote a study on the subject, "concern about the growing hegemony of English language and culture. China has embraced English with unparalleled fervor, and the army of English teachers unavoidably brings with it a simultaneous invasion of Western culture. They consider [it] linguistic imperialism."

As language imperialists, Americans have been quite effective. Regardless of the historical turf battles in Belgium, Spain, Wales and elsewhere, it is our English that has won the greater war.

---

For the past 1,500 years, the language we now recognize has been changing.

The Old English of Beowulf is not the English of Chaucer, Chaucer's is not the English of Shakespeare, Shakespeare's is not the English of George Washington, and Washington didn't speak exactly like we do today, owing to changes in pronunciation and spelling, not to mention the influx of American Indian and Spanish terms that we absorbed as the country pioneered westward (raccoon, maize, tobacco, canoe, rodeo, bronco, buffalo, rancher, caribou, totem, caucus, toboggan, stampede and so on).

So why do we Americans historically treat English as some static thing, which ought not be altered, tainted, added to, subtracted from, tweaked, corrupted or otherwise fussed with?

And why do so many of us insist that those who don't speak English -- which is really a grab bag of favorite words from older languages, all sewn together by Latin grammar rules -- are flagrantly inferior?

Maybe spreading, and protecting, the English word as we know it now appeals to the Christian's innate missions of evangelism and conversion. Maybe this mission appeals to the founding father in all of us: In 1753, so concerned was he about the masses of German-speaking immigrants in our own Keystone State, Benjamin Franklin worried that "they will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not, in my opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious." (The Germans, he said, were "palatine boors.")

Maybe the urge appeals to the isolationist in all of us; maybe it appeals to the racist in all of us, fearful of what's different, and of what may change, nostalgic for the way things were, protecting ourselves from those cultural insurgents.

---

Pax Americana, the relative postwar peace enforced by our military and economic might, means that the language we speak today has been spread across the world. The exportation of our language has coincided with the distribution of our movies, our rock 'n' roll albums, and lately our Internet.

All of which means that English is likely to be preserved in more or less its current state for years to come. Shakespeare spoke it differently than Clark Gable, but a 1930s Clark Gable film can be understood by Tom Hanks, and next century's big movie star (Shia Leboeuf IV?) will likely be able to understand every word that came out of Tom Hanks' mouth, and so on.

After more than a millennium of progress, English is simultaneously at a relative evolutionary standstill and the height of its worldwide dominance. Never before has our language -- or any language -- been spoken by so many, so uniformly, and we mostly have America to thank.

And yet, we worry.

We've always worried, from the beginning, before America could even reasonably be called a nation-state. Ben Franklin worried in the 1700s. When another, bigger flood of immigrants, beginning in the 1840s, overwhelmed our cities with Italians, Irish and Russians, there were renewed fears that immigrants, especially Russians and eastern Europeans, would refuse to learn the language, or would affect it beyond recognition with their own vocabulary, according to Bill Bryson:

"It was natural to suppose that the existence of these linguistic pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional tongues, rather as in Europe, or at the very least result in widely divergent dialects of English. But of course, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the very opposite was the case."

And it continues to be the case, to an accelerated degree -- research on the subject suggests that Hispanic immigrants learn English even faster now than their European brethren did at the turn of the 20th century, mastering English and dropping their native tongue by generation three. Why is that?

Mass media have been one of the governing forces behind the relative homogeny of today's English language. Societal pressures mean pockets of people who speak German or Spanish for more than a generation will be cultural outsiders.

And here's another reason: America is the most transient country in the history of the world. From the Oregon Trail to the riverboat, the railroad to the interstate highway system, the California gold rush to commercial aviation, we've been moving back and forth, south and north, across this country for more than a century. For a people to be so mobile, for a free-market economy to have interchangeable parts, a single, dominant language was vital.

America was, and remains, a land of opportunity, but less opportunity can be found if you don't speak English.

---

So English isn't going anywhere, and it certainly isn't about to be displaced by Spanish, no matter how many Latinos come over the border, legally or otherwise. Then why all the talk about needing an "official" English language for cities, states, even the country as a whole?

Some modern-day purveyors of this movement say there are fiscal considerations at work here: Think of the cost of forcing the county election bureau to print ballots in both English and Spanish. Others want us to believe we ought to use the legislative pulpit in order to make a symbolic statement in opposition of illegal immigration. One town councilor in Pahrump, Nev., said making English "official" was necessary to honor "all our servicemen and women who died for our country." Still others say nothing less than our American sovereignty is at stake.

On a certain level, it feels right. Why shouldn't America's "official" language be English? If Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have named English as the official language, why not us?

English needs no legal protection, obviously, but there would be no controversy about it if English had been the country's official language since 1787. The controversy can be found, of course, in the timing and targets of the campaign.

The campaign comes in cycles. While the roots can be traced to the 1960s, the movement formally began in 1981: Samuel I. Hayakawa, a senator from California and former English professor, first proposed his "English Language Amendment" to the Constitution, writes James Crawford in his book "Language Loyalties." Even back then, there was suspicion of the Latino infidel, with the late William F. Buckley Jr. protesting the "militant Spanish-speaking minority."

Hayakawa's national campaign died, but is resurrected every so often. Oddly enough, this seems to happen in federal election years.

The chances of a national "official language" dimmed when Democrats took over Congress two years ago, but around the country, states and cities are still floating the idea: Sen. Barack Obama kicked the hornets nest when he suggested, foolishly, that "parents need to make sure your child can speak Spanish." Missouri will vote this fall on an amendment to the constitution requiring English for "all official proceedings." State senates in Ohio and Oklahoma are debating "official language" laws.

In Nashville, Tenn., supporters of an "English-only" initiative ("all official government communications and publications shall be published only in English. No person shall have a right to government services in any other language") are trying to press the issue on the Nov. 4 ballot, even as the city's schools can't keep up with the demand for classes teaching English as a second language.

People want to learn English, but without the wide availability of formal instruction, it takes years -- just like it does to master French, Spanish or Arabic.

---

Or Mandarin. If a country of a billion people, host to these Summer Games, can be overrun so thoroughly by the English language, why couldn't the same happen here? If China could succumb to English, why might not American bow to Spanish someday?

Because that train has left the station. Many in Japan want English to be taught in each of the country's primary schools. India wrote its constitution in English; its citizens, you may have heard, have made a cottage industry of learning the English language, then becoming maddening telemarketers and tech-support personnel.

English is the language of commerce, academia, diplomacy, international aviation, computer engineering, Hollywood movies, Motown records and everything else. English, brought here by Britain then flung back across the oceans by Americans, is the world's global language, and our nation's greatest export.

It's a victory for us, and yet it's a victory for nations everywhere. Our language is as much a melting pot as is our country. The foundation of English is build upon the grammar rules of Latin, bolstered by a vocabulary from the Celts, the French, the Romans, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Dutch, the American Indians. It's 1,500 years of history at work.

The innate inclination to preserve and convert is natural. But America's isolationist tendencies can be overcome by our just-as-innate generosity of spirit. It's what drew the immigrants here in the first place. It's the reason your grandparents, or your great-grandparents, or some group of ancestors before them was able to arrive in this country without knowing a lick of English.

Their hard work and pioneering, their ingenuity and military heroism, means English has circled, and encircled, the world.

Let's honor all of them by moving on, together.

---