I see legal problems looming, for the proposal also declares that, "no one has a right, entitlement or claim to have the government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services or provide materials in any language other than English."
The Miranda warning will be said English, customs officials will question people in English, no language interepreters allowed in the courts and the deaf will be out in the cold, since American Sign Language is not the same as spoken English.
Senate Votes to Set English as National Language
WASHINGTON, May 18 — The Senate voted on Thursday to designate English as the national language. In a charged debate, Republican backers of the proposal, which was added to the Senate's immigration measure on a 63-to-34 vote, said that it was equivalent to establishing a formal national anthem or motto and that it would simply affirm the pre-eminence of English without overturning laws or rules on bilingualism.
(…)
It is not clear, though, that the measure will be included in any final bill after negotiations with the House. Shortly after the Inhofe amendment was approved, the Senate also approved a weaker, less-binding alternative declaring English the "common and unifying" language of the nation, on a 58-to-39 vote. The question of which version survives would be decided in negotiations with the House.
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Under the Inhofe proposal, the federal government is directed to "preserve and enhance the role of English as the national language of the United States of America." It does not go as far as proposals to designate English the nation's official language, which would require all government publications and business to be in English.
Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 1523 Joined: June 28, 2003 Location: United States
RE: English as the US national language
I can't speak for the rest, but I think the Deaf would be safe under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which stipulates that "reasonable accomodations" must be made.
I cannot say I would be in favor of going 100% English, no interpreters allowed, etc. etc., but I would support requiring at least a basic level of English competence from prospective immigrants, or maybe those below a certain age (let's give Grandma a break!) -- although I recently translated an article for a web site in Taiwan about a grandmother in her 80s who has recently learned English on her own -- just in the past 5 years or so -- to a really good level. You go, Granny!
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: English as the US national language
An article from 1997. I wonder whether anything has changed in the US since then as far as the final paragraphs are concerend. Meanwhile, here is an excerpt with some historical background:
SHOULD ENGLISH BE THE LAW? by Robert D. King
....Language and nationalism were not always so intimately intertwined. Never in the heyday of rule by sovereign was it a condition of employment that the King be able to speak the language of his subjects. George I spoke no English and spent much of his time away from England, attempting to use the power of his kingship to shore up his German possessions. In the Middle Ages nationalism was not even part of the picture: one owed loyalty to a lord, a prince, a ruler, a family, a tribe, a church, a piece of land, but not to a nation and least of all to a nation as a language unit. The capital city of the Austrian Hapsburg empire was Vienna, its ruler a monarch with effective control of peoples of the most varied and incompatible ethnicities, and languages, throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The official language, and the lingua franca as well, was German. While it stood--and it stood for hundreds of years--the empire was an anachronistic relic of what for most of human history had been the normal relationship between country and language: none.
The marriage of language and nationalism goes back at least to Romanticism and specifically to Rousseau, who argued in his ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES that language must develop before politics is possible and that language originally distinguished nations from one another. A little-remembered aim of the French Revolution--itself the legacy of Rousseau--was to impose a national language on France, where regional languages such as Provencal, Breton, and Basque were still strong competitors against standard French, the French of the Ile de France. As late as 1789, when the Revolution began, half the population of the south of France, which spoke Provencal, did not understand French. A century earlier the playwright Racine said that he had had to resort to Spanish and Italian to make himself understood in the southern French town of Uzes. After the Revolution nationhood itself became aligned with language. ...
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
RE: English as the US national language
US study concludes immigration does not threaten English language
Many U.S. citizens are wrongly concerned that Latino immigrants will force America to speak Spanish, possibly even creating a bilingual country.According to an academic study published on Wednesday, these fears are entirely unfounded.
A report in the Population and Development Review found that, far from threatening the dominance of English, most Latin American immigrants to the United States lose their ability to speak Spanish over the course of a few generations.By the third generation, most descendants of immigrants are "linguistically dead" in their mother tongue.This applies statistically to nearly all immigrant categories, not just Hispanic.
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