Do you think English should be our official language?

I am having a debate on my forum about this and I am opposed to it. The biggest reason is that I think it would demean our mantra of being a country of many cultures. We all know that a majority of us speak English, but we are now a global society and should be more open to other cultures. We all came from somewhere else and I think we should honor those who follow in our footsteps. Plus, if we instituted English as the official language, you would have tons more racism. You would have stupid rednecks and others all the time saying things to immigrints about how they should learn our language or get out; but then they would have backing from our government to say that. I just don't think we should do it.

Your opinons?

Everyone country needs ONE language that is common to everyone. That doesn't mean that they can't learn other languages. But there needs to be a common medium for all Americans to be able to speak to each other.

many nations have more than one official language. To adopt english as the official language now would be to give in to a reactionary ethnocentric movement.

We'll end up 3rd world hellhole, just like them!

politics, and education, they speak English.

No--it isn't the official language. It's just taught universally and makes it far easier to conduct business among an enormously diverse culture.

I absolutely OPPOSE an official language for the US. OTOH, I speak another language fluently, and I think that makes a difference.

It is definitely not needed. It is unnecessary legislation. English is very strong and is not endangered although some think so just because they see a Spanish sign or bilingual services being provided. I've written on the subject as it relates to bilingual education.

English Only Fears

is one of the least harmonious and least erotic of languages and certainly this brutish tongue afflicts the minds of those who use it.

Just listen to the words roll of the tongues of the Portugese or French

Ahh now that's beauty

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/

It's the language of the world.

practically every single airline pilot on the planet can speak English as a first or second language. Its also the to the France's chagrin replacing French as the language of diplomacy and finally its becoming the language of business.

in the world is Chinese, not English.

French is one of the top ten, along with English.

And when enough people in the US speak Spanish, or some other language...they would remove any 'English only' laws anyway.

I just said its the language of aviation and replacing French as the language of diplomacy and becoming the language of international business.

Mandarin and Cantonese.

Furthermore, if you include English as a second language, I suspect English beats them both, since you would include half a billion Indians, most of Europe, and lots more.

people in China that speak English as a second language than there are native speakers of English in the United States.

It's the language of countries primarily formed or influenced bye The US and Britain. That is most certainly not the whole world. In most places where business is done, English won't do you a bit of good.

It seems to be sort of a waste of energy.

Language can be a big part of one's cultural identity. It also seems kind of un-American to, in a de facto way, force a person to learn a common language. Historically Spanish was spoken as much or more than English in New Mexico, Texas, and California. In New Mexico many people could speak three or more languages because they lived among and traded with Native American tribes. They all got along fairly well, at least for a time.

OTOH, a common language helps bind people culturally. Unity is a pretty good thing, so I'd personally like it if we at least could all speak and understand a common language. Then speak, read, write, and put up signs in any language you want. I just can't stomach the idea of forcing it on people.

Legislating it isn't the answer. I think plenty of people who don't speak it really want to learn English. It should be encouraged, but not legislated. God forbid.

it's sexy.

I don't think we need legislation to give us an official language - or languages. I do think people who move to a country should at least attempt to learn the common language there, hence my comment on languages: I also don't think it's appropriate to pass legislation requiring everything* be bilingual English-Spanish/Mandarin/Russian/Hmong/whatever's dominant in your area. If I moved to France, I'd learn French - I wouldn't expect them to change their laws for me. (Actually I have; one of my undergrad degrees is in French language and literature. And I know that most Europeans my age speak English, and it's nice when I stumble, but I feel bad that we haven't reciprocated here with our schools.)

Anyway, flame away.

edit: by everything, I mean forcing all schools to teach everyone in multiple lanugages rather than those who have need of it, forcing businesses to only hire bilingual people and fire those who don't speak the chosen second language, etc. I am in favor of having multiple languages available, of course.

2 reasons:

1. Efficiency. It is more efficient to have everyone have one language in common. Further, product instruction, government documents, road signage, all work better in a single language.

2. We have micro communities who are isolated by delaying their adoption of a more commonly used language. By insisting on common language adoption, these micro communities may be more quickly incorporated into the whole.

Note: I don't insist this language be English. Right now English would make sense. But I'v e read that within the next 100 years Spanish may be the top runner.

selfishly speaking, I'm glad I'll be gone by then - I've tried so hard to learn Spanish and it's just impenetrable to me (hence the French studies instead). My Spanish comprehension is limited to French cognates or close cognates, numbers 1-10, 'pencil sharpener', and 'another sausage mcmuffin with egg, please'. (Before you call me racist, I worked at McDonalds off and on for 5 years. The best breakfast grill crew I ever worked with were primarily Spanish speakers and it helped them save time if you said it in Spanish.)

But, if required, I think I'd adjust in time. I'd rather learn a new language than have all our society required to support 2 or 3 languages on all documentation, etc...

Just imagine every bit of paper being 3 times as long. What a waste.

which does not mean people could not speak other languages in many contexts. But, just as we have one economic currency -- the dollar, we should have one linguistic currency -- English for business, legal and social discourse in our society. It is one of the most important things that makes us one country. Some of my ancestors came from Holland. They spoke Dutch among themselves for generations, but they learned English and spoke it outside their Dutch community. Learning English dis not end the use of the Dutch language in the family. Speaking Dutch did not end until people started marrying outside the Dutch community. Speaking a common language outside the family would not destroy diversity.

It is very distressing to me to see so many want ads, especially for social service jobs for which I am otherwise extremely well qualified, that state "Spanish preferred." I read Spanish and can understand it if it is not spoken too fast, but I will never be able to speak it well enough to compete for jobs against native speakers. That fact eliminates most jobs of that kind for me. The ads might as well say no Anglos over 50 need apply, because very few people in my generation learned to speak Spanish.

I lived in several non-English speaking countries when I was younger and had to learn the languages. I did not speak as well as native speakers, but I learned enough to communicate. This is an English-speaking country. There is no excuse for people coming to this country and not bothering to learn English. They don't have to speak fluently, but they need to understand and be able to communicate to some extent in the common language.

is to deal with recent immigrants. You can't expect someone who just moved here with very little educational background back home to suddenly start speaking English just by crossing the border. Immigrants do want to learn English, but funding for ESL has shrunk, and there are huge waiting lists for the classes that are available.

I've tutored immigrants. Have you? Their motivation is strong, so they learn English much faster than my American students learned Japanese.

"Not bothering" to learn English is rarely that. They may be working too many hours to survive, they may be untalented as language learners, they may be on a waiting list for ESL classes. You don't know.

Some people can just "pick up" a foreign language. Most people cannot, and if they do, they pick up an extremely broken form. Believe me, I've taught a lot of AFS students who returned from Japan. They learned by total immersion, but in most cases, they spoke a pidgin form of the language: "I go school," that sort of thing. Learning by total immersion works fairly well before puberty, but after puberty, most people need formal instruction, and our Republicanites are cutting funding for ESL on the one hand and bitching about immigrants not learning English on the other.

If you were to move to Japan, you would find that every government agency and every business that dealt with foreigners would have someone on site who spoke English. Increasingly, they are hiring people who speak Chinese, Korean, and other Asian languages, due to the influx of legal and illegal workers in the past ten to fifteen years.

and am not eligible for social service jobs in my field -- law, only because I do not speak Spanish. That's not fair. In Los Angeles, I meet many, many immigrants who don't bother to learn English. It has reached scandalous proportions.

We need a common language, and since English is the one most commonly spoken, now, it should be English. It could change in the future, but we all need to be able to communicate with one another. But... Our schools should have emersion programs in different languages so that every child learns to speak at least two languages.

I can't go to a foreign country and expect the people there to change their common language for me. There are so many people here for whom English is a second language. Why should we discriminate against the Italians by all learning Greek?

The school at the end of my street has all its signs written in seven different languages. Is has to have translators for all of those languages when the parents want to talk to a teacher. Only one of those languages (besides English) is European. None of them is Itallian or Greek.

Edited for clarity

language is going to be the one that gets you a job or makes you money so you can support yourself, no matter what the laws are.

the state language. We also have French and Creole. The arguments to me on both sides is just dumb. A person can spend their entire life in Florida and not hear Englsih. And another can do that and not hear Spanish. Waste of tax payer money.

walla walla bing bang
hoopa koopa dee
sally wally foo foo
batee jakee weeeeeeeeeee!!!!

James Dobson should head our official church.

The Bushes should be our official family.

Rush Limbaugh should be our official radio commentator.

Fox News should be our official information agency.

Chevron/Texaco/BP/Shell/Exxon/Mobil should be our official gasoline.

McDonalds should be our official food.
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E Pluribus Unum, baby.

But as somebody obsessed with immigration history, I think establishing an official language, especially English, would be a bad move with nativist implications.

And, on a blatantly selfish note, I grew up in New York, and I love/loved hearing dozens of different languages on my way to school. I think an official language would certainly undermine the vibrancy of the cultural fabric throughout the U.S.

Having an official language does not mean people are prohibited from speaking other languages.

It doesn't mean others are forbidden.

For any message the government wants to get out, it will always be printed in a language people understand.

For any message the government wants to hear, it'll provide translators.

Businesses will pay people who can communicate to anyone who has green.

What does being official get anybody?

Those of you who say "yes because we should all be able to understand each other" -- well, we already do. There are very few in this country who don't at least understand English. And that's good. But what would be gained if it became official? Immigrants and tourists would lose their rights to a translator at airports and courts?

That said, I love apple pie, naturellement.

From one whose met many immigrants and ex-patriats, there's a fairly standard rule...if you want to make it in this country, speaking English is the key. It's not because you want to, or have to (I met people who lived in Chicago for 50 years and speak Polish exclusively...they've never had a need to speak English), but if you wanna make money (and that's the incentive for most immigrants), English opens the doors. Without knowing the language your job and earning opportunities are far less.

I've also noticed second generation almost always speak or use English as their prime language. Many speak their native tongue in the home or in social situations but English when in the "other world".

The founders debated a national language and almost opted for Hebrew. They did the right thing to allow difference voices and diversity to determine this country's fate.

I empathize with those who think making English the "official" language could damage our image as a multicultural nation. However there is a problem that is getting worse as years go by, and that is the problem of more and more foreign individuals expecting native born American English speakers to learn whatever their native language is so communication can happen. Forms, signs and instructions have to be multilingual, multilingual employees have to be present because people choose not to learn English, etc.

Where will it end?

We don't need no stinkin' official language.

but by the way, Spanish is a lot easier to spell.

The spelling of English could be reformed so that everything would be spelled phonetically.

Spanish, or Chinese. The US transcends language.

We are whatever we want to make of ourselves, and declaring an "official language" 220 years into this nation's history is unnecessarily limiting.

people need to communicate. Being able speak the same language keeps some minor problems from festering.

Most Americans have never studied a foreign language, and if you live in an area with lots of immigrants from anywhere, you'll know that the second generation prefers English and sometimes cannot put together a coherent sentence in their parents' language.

This is true even of Latinos. One day while living in a small town in Oregon, I walked past a house that had three brown-skinned children playing in the front yard. They were speaking English to one another, so my first thought was that they had moved into town from the nearby Indian reservation. But then a woman came to the front door and told the children in Spanish to come inside.

The college where I taught had students with Spanish surnames who signed up for beginning Spanish, and who, according to the instructors, really needed to start at the beginning, because they understood a bit of the language but couldn't speak it.

I saw the same phenomenon among Koreans and Vietnamese as I frequented family-owned ethnic restaurants in Portland. The parents sometimes spoke only a few words of English, but the children spoke English without an accent and sometimes answered in English when their parents spoke to them in Korean or Vietnamese.

American culture, such as it is, exerts a powerful pull. I've never heard of a second-generation immigrant refusing to learn English. They may prefer to speak Spanish or some other language in the company of their own ethnic group, but what's the harm in that?

Having public information available in multiple languages is a practical matter in any country with a lot of recent immigrants. If you know that immigrants are going to be riding the bus, it's simply a practical matter to have bus guides written in the languages of the largest immigrant groups. If you're in an area prone to earthquakes or tornados, it's better to have safety info in multiple languages than to have immigrants clueless about how to handle these situations.

Even Japan recognizes this. They have long had all sorts of practical information available in English for North American and European residents, but recently they have started publishing info and putting up signs in Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese (due to all the Japanese-Brazilians who have come looking for work) in communities where these groups are numerous.

I think that much of the impetus for "official English" comes from Americans who are insecure about their own monolingualism and feel threatened by people saying things they can't understand. The fact is that we as a nation are remarkably monolingual in English for being a country of immigrants. The social pressure to discard one's heritage language is extreme.

By the way, 100 years ago, bilingual education throughout American would have meant not education for Spanish speakers, but education for German speakers. There were bilingual English/German public school programs in major cities. Sixty years ago, Fiorello LaGuardia won election as mayor of New York because he could campaign in Italian and Yiddish. How often do you find a native-born American who is monolingual in German, Italian, or Yiddish?

The "official English" crowd acts as if English is under threat. What a crock.

I used to think that English should be our only language in high school. but I've grown up since then. We need to be more educated and aware of other languages and cultures. We have the largest mix of people but not of languages? We should always be in a renaissance(sp?) right now, and it pisses me off that states with the lowest English literacy rates are the states that want to pass these exlusive English laws.

It's a given that the main language of the U.S. is English. It's hard to learn a new language when you come here but people try anyway. It's far easier for a child immigrant to pick up the language as his or her own than for an adult. Also, most first generation children of immigrants pick up English as their own. There is no threat to the English language. None. I think its pointless to make it the official language. It serves no purpose.

We have always been a nation of immigrants. The first generation may never speak English well, but the children will. More of the first generation would like to learn English, but (as already pointed out) ESL classes are few & sometimes expensive.

English is a powerful international language & is in no danger. It's pathetic that so few in this country learn another language.

Education in at least one language besides English should begin in first grade at the latest and continue through high school. We need to join the rest of the "developed" world and be at least bilingually fluent. Spanish and French should be the minimum options, due to our geographic neighbors. Language education in the U.S. is a disgrace.

What if part of having an official language was to provide resources for all to learn the language? I very strongly believe that if we do have a national language that we must provide resources to ANY citizen to enable them to learn the language.

I believe that I understand at least some of the dangers of a national lanuage with respect to disenfranchising portions of the population.

However, does that mean we should ignore the importance of having a common means of communication between citizens of our country? There is an essential need in society for a common method of communication.

I also agree with other posters who have pointed out that you can have more than one national language.

Perhaps that's part of the middle ground. Once certian langauges reach a certian percentage of fluent speakers in the US it is up for national lanaguage status?

Canada works with both English and French

I think there are public saftey aspects to this issue as well. I'm throwing out a pure theortical here, but if you have someone who cannot read english who got a license to drive an 18 wheeler; isn't there some concern about the public? What about a bus driver who can't speak or read English?

I dont' know the answer to this one. But I think you can't discount the need for a common means of communication within a society.

Yes, it should be. This is not to denigrate any other language, but there can only be one official language, and it should be that which is spoken by most of the citizens.

What's wrong with the current situation?

French and English, all government materials and signs seem to have to be prepared in both languages.

Cheers.

Can you tell me how many english-speakers are there in canada, and how many french-speakers. without this information, we can't form a valid opinion, n'est ce pas?

'Tír gan Teanga, Tír gan Anam' - a country without a language is a country without a soul!

That will put 'most everybody at the same disadvantage. I was raised speaking English, studied a bit of German, a bit of Latin & quite a bit of Spanish. But my first attempts at learning Irish have me stymied.

However, JRR Tolkien admitted in his Letters that Old Irish & Modern Irish were too hard for him. So I don't feel so bad.

this will certainly level the playing field. Even for the majority of Irish immigrants!

to really be able to get a job, communicate with other people, to read your newspaper, listen to the daily news, you must understand and speak the predominate language of the Country you are living in. That applies, not only to the US, but everywhere. My son accepted a job in Sicily. The first thing I told him was that he will have to learn Intalian! I don't understand why anyone has a problem with that. If I decided to move to Mexico, I KNOW I would have to learn Spanish!

...I don't see how you can expect immigrants to learn English when they get here. Most immigrants are trying to find a better life full of opportunity not waste there money on English tutors...and English is a pretty difficult language to learn.

He learned Italian by being there! Think about it. You HAVE to learn the money system just to be able to buy groceries or even go to a restaurant and figure out if you're getting the correct change. You learn a lot almost by osmosis. Most of us know the work Ciao. It's because we've heard it often enough and relate to it. He's been there 3 1/2 years now. He's still not a great Italian orator, but he knows enough to communicate what he needs to. A fellow I worked with really surprised me when he told me his monther had brought him to the US from Germany when he was 12. He didn't know ONE work of English! His mother put him in school, and although the kids were pretty nice to him, he learned most of his English through comic books. Yu've got the pictures that depict the throughts and actions, and he said they were the biggest help. To speak to him today, you'd never guess he wasn't born somewhere in the US. He has no accent at all, but still remembers how to speak very fluent German.

It can be don, and fairly easy, as long as you have the will to learn.

...that your son probably didn't go to Italy for the same reason immigrants come to the United States. I know a lot of people that have come to the United States from Mexico and they don't have time to learn English any more than they can pick up in every day life, they have to WORK. So, it would appear that we actually agree that you can learn a language just by living in and area where it is spoken. However, these people that I have met, and worked with, couldn't speak fluent English. They had picked up enough words and phrases to get by. So, I still don't believe that we should have English and the official language.

What I'd like to see is making learning another language a requirement for HS graduation.

But I know at least half the states have English as their official language already.

to deal with before trying to legislate English as our official language.

The official language of my country doesn't have much of an effect on the troops and Iraqi civilians being killed. Or the fact that millions of Americans live uninsured and in rushing poverty. I could go on forever, but the fact is, I really don't care all that much. Not at all, really.

Of course, this brings to mind the Texas legislator who was ranting about this very issue in the state senate. He was waving a bible about , and shouted " If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"
I love that story. It really happened, too.

absolutely

It's easier to learn and the Hispanic population will soon be a majority.

Of course, I do think it should be the official language. I say that as a person who speaks three languages and is in a bicultural marriage. I don't think people should be required to speak English at all times, or that we should stop offering publications in multiple languages for newcomers, but I do believe that It would be good to make English the official language, simply because it is spoken by the most people, and it should be more about encouraging people to learn the language (and even giving free lessons) rather than forbidding the use of other languages.

A common language is crucial for communication between various ethnic and national groups, and if we are to have Spanish-speakers, for example, up to speed on PROGRESSIVE issues, we need them to be fluent in English, or they will rely on right-wing Univision for their news. Think about THAT...

and that's my opinion.

btw didn't we fight two wars with the english, hell at least we never went to war with france, so why not french?

We can honor other cultures and still have our official language English just like it's always been.