Why isn't english the official language of the United States?

[US 41]

The way I see it is that I'm an American and I shouldn't have to learn a second language.

[Big John]

I think Americans don't use English well enough to make it the official language?

We use sentence fragments, write out the names of centuries improperly, start sentences with prepositions, use question marks at the end of declarative statements, omit commas where called for...

England ought never allow us to officially appropriate their language under such circumstances.

I think we missed the irony here.

[realjd]

I would be in favor of designating an official language for governmental purposes, both state and federal. That is, for example, all government forms should be printed in English only. There should be no tax forms printed in Spanish or no "press 1 for English" instructions when you call a government office.

People should be free to use whatever language they want, but it should be understood that if you want to survive in American society, you use the dominant language.

I would never move to, say, France, and expect the government or businesses there to cater to me as an English speaker. I would learn the native language.

I personally have no issues with government forms and services being available in multiple languages. Someone who is working to learn English or even people who may be conversational in English would still be much more fluent and comfortable in their native language. Government services should be available to all tax payers regardless of their language abilities.

In the case you brought up of tax forms, don't we want people to pay accurate taxes even if English is their second language? Those forms are hard enough to figure out without throwing a language barrier in the mix.

Also, please keep in mind that there are a very large number of US Citizens (by birth - not immigrants) in Puerto Rico who don't speak any English. The federal government owes the same services to them that they do to someone from the mainland. They are our fellow Americans after all.

[Pete from Boston]

The way I see it is that I'm an American and I shouldn't have to learn a second language.

What else shouldn't you have to learn?  Science from other countries?  Non-US literature?  My high school didn't provide for negotiating the curriculum.  Maybe yours was different.

I think Americans don't use English well enough to make it the official language?

We use sentence fragments, write out the names of centuries improperly, start sentences with prepositions, use question marks at the end of declarative statements, omit commas where called for...

England ought never allow us to officially appropriate their language under such circumstances.

I think we missed the irony here.

This was in response to the previous post that included a declarative sentence "I wonder..." with a question mark.

I realize harping on grammar is somewhere between discouraged and outright banned, but it's central to the conversation here.

[realjd]

The way I see it is that I'm an American and I shouldn't have to learn a second language.

Who is forcing you to learn a new language?

[corco]

Then don't! You are free to do so.


As for language requirements, Spanish has overtaken French in most of the US just due to demand. Americans are more likely to encounter a  situation where Spanish helps than French, so we've seen that shift.

As for why language requirements exist-most folks  never learn enough to be fluent, but a year of a foreign language is good for your own brain development as you learn to think, and actually helps people become better English speakers because learning grammar in another language gives folks a better feel for why grammar is the way it is, giving them the tools to look at their English in a more technical light. Also expands vocabulary, as learning a romance language teaches some root words that expand ones knowledge of English.

[english si]

The way I see it is that I'm an American and I shouldn't have to learn a second language.

Who is forcing you to learn a new language?

The English-only zealots, I presume?

[hbelkins]

I never had any desire to learn a foreign language, and I'm grateful that such was not required either in my high school or in my college degree requirements. I had a short course in Spanish as a sixth-grader, but I don't remember why, or what class it was a part of. About all I remember from that course is "como esta usted? Muy bien."

[Avalanchez71]

Don't forget that New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas had sizable Spanish speaking populations before they became part of America in San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe, and Tucson. The Spanish language has been part of our national fabric since we chose to invade Mexico. I see oppressing the Spanish language in the southwest as similar to attempts to quash French in Quebec.

Society is more mobile today, so now we see more Spanish speakers in Ohio, but  the US has had a large Spanish speaking population since the 1850s, and state, territorial, and federal governments have used it as necessary since that time, but people in Maine wouldn't have noticed it until recently. But this isn't new.

I agree with the idea that an official language is just a government burden. If government needs to use Spanish in high Latino areas, that's fine with me. At the state level, if, say, Virginia wants to make English its official language to protect its culture, that is their prerogative. The feds have to look after the entire country though, including the southwest.

Pressing one for English doesn't bother me. Our country is theoretically bound by its values. Language isn't a value, though I would love to see somebody argue that English is morally superior to Spanish.

When did we invade Mexico?  Oh didn't we purchase a portion of Mexico?  Didn't the Mexicans push the Indians out of power in the region?  People always forget that part when they say that the US stole Mexico.  Mexico stole the land from the Spanish and Indians.

[corco]

The Mexican-American War did happen, which because we won allowed us to buy a portion of Mexico, but they weren't exactly happy to sell. The Gadsden Purchase later was peaceful.

Saying Mexicans stole Mexico from the Spanish is like saying we stole America from the British.

Yes, at the end of the day we all stole from the Indians on the entire continent, which is why I compared it to Quebec. There was a long, well established culture of Spanish speakers in the region, and after we acquired it we didn't try to change that, so it is odd to come in now and try to do that. The "We speak English in America!" idea is really  fairly new.

[formulanone]

To be fair, St. Augustine, Florida was speaking Spanish for a good 180 years until a treaty with the British around 1700 or so.

Also expands vocabulary, as learning a romance language teaches some root words that expand ones knowledge of English.

I noticed this as well; two years of a foreign language was required for a high school diploma, although struggling students were given the option for a single year, if they tested poorly or in danger of dropping out. But learning Spanish opened up my vocabulary greatly, especially those with Latin roots, which was quite helpful in understanding unfamiliar English (or other Romance language) words.

Admittedly, my grammar is far from perfect. I think I'd score well on a high-school level English grammar or spelling test, but ask me to diagram a sentence or explain the meanings of stuff like subjunctive mood, past perfect tense, or stop making common "visual" typos (from/form, for example) that I frequently make, and I'd probably suck harder than a thousand collapsed stars. I think my run-on train wreck of the above sentence proves it.

[Avalanchez71]

The Mexican-American War did happen, which because we won allowed us to buy a portion of Mexico, but they weren't exactly happy to sell. The Gadsden Purchase later was peaceful.

Saying Mexicans stole Mexico from the Spanish is like saying we stole America from the British.

Yes, at the end of the day we all stole from the Indians on the entire continent, which is why I compared it to Quebec. There was a long, well established culture of Spanish speakers in the region, and after we acquired it we didn't try to change that, so it is odd to come in now and try to do that. The "We speak English in America!" idea is really  fairly new.

The war did occur because the Mexicans wanted it. 

[corco]

The Mexican-American War did happen, which because we won allowed us to buy a portion of Mexico, but they weren't exactly happy to sell. The Gadsden Purchase later was peaceful.

Saying Mexicans stole Mexico from the Spanish is like saying we stole America from the British.

Yes, at the end of the day we all stole from the Indians on the entire continent, which is why I compared it to Quebec. There was a long, well established culture of Spanish speakers in the region, and after we acquired it we didn't try to change that, so it is odd to come in now and try to do that. The "We speak English in America!" idea is really  fairly new.

The war did occur because the Mexicans wanted it. 

I don't think that's necessarily true- it is in some ways but not others.

Either way, it's irrelevant. I'm not saying the US "stole" or did not steal those portions of Mexico. What I think we both can agree we did do was acquire those portions of Mexico.

When we acquired them, we acquired a sizable Spanish speaking population that had existed for over 200 years- Santa Fe is older than Jamestown, so Santa Fe has still been part of Spain/Mexico longer than it has been part of the United States.  After these lands became part of the US, we did open those areas up to Anglo settlers, but we didn't make any efforts to make the people that had already been there speak English. New Mexico is really an interesting ball of wax- it was isolated from most of Mexico and then from the US, as the population center was pretty far north in Santa Fe. There's still a sizable chunk of old Spaniards that never interbred with the natives (as with most of Mexico) that speak a unique style of 17th century Spanish.

Texas is a bit of a different ball of wax- Spanish speakers and English speakers lived fairly side by side. I'm sure there was some tension there, but they were all Texans, and that was their loyalty. The border in that area was fairly porous anyway- plenty  of Anglo landowners lived in Mexico and spoke English too.

Arizona was a bit less inhabited- the part of Arizona we got in the Mexican Cession had basically nobody in it but the Navajo. When we bought Tucson with the Gadsden Purchase, though, we inherited another centuries-old, Spanish speaking city. We made no effort to try to make Tucsonans try to speak English, but we allowed Anglo settlers to come to the area, so the language was introduced slowly.

Tucson, El Paso, and most of New Mexico are probably the most bilingual areas. Nobody in Tucson who has lived there for a while complains about Spanish - Spanish is engrained in that city's history far moreso than English, and it's well accepted that there are many folks that don't speak English, and these aren't all recent immigrants either. A person can get by in Tucson just fine without English, and a good number of multigenerational families still don't speak English because there's been no reason to learn. I haven't lived in Santa Fe, but it strikes me as being very similar.

I just...folks who have this engrained notion that this is an English speaking country and we need to speak English and Spanish is the language of illegal immigrants- they should do some research, visit the southwest, and then re-consider their opinions. History shows that as long as we've had the American Southwest, we've had a ton of Spanish speakers. The Spanish language is part of America, and it has been for over 200 years now. Folks in the northeast just didn't have cause to notice it until recently.

[US 41]

Mexico started the war because they didn't really recognize Texan independence. When the US annexed Texas, Mexico said that Texas was still theirs. Then the fight was on. We probably could've taken over Mexico after that war because we won almost every battle.

[SP Cook]

IMHO,

- The "there were lots of Spanish speaking people in * before the US took it over" line is mostly historical revisionism, if used to prove the point that Spanish speaking people in the US are deserving of some sort of prividge or accomodation.  Fact is probably 98% of Spanish speaking peoplein the US today are NOT genetic decendants of those people, and various state governments, and the Treaty of Guadulupe-Hidalgo, accomodated those people anyway.

- More broadly, the neat little maps we all saw in school that showed the US acquiring various places from Spain/Mexico, the UK/Canada, France, and Russia are BS.  All political power comes from the consent of the governed.  The vast majority of people, which is to say the "Indians", in those areas had no idea they were part of any European empire.   The European cessions to the US are best viewed as similar to a Quit Claim deed.  They became part of the US de facto when the areas were later populated by people who wished to be governed by the US.  You are telling me that the Mandans were French?  Or that the Utes were Mexican?  Or the Eskimos Russian?  A silly concept.

- The US, and similar nations like Canada and Australia, from before their independence until just a few years ago, pursued a policy of encouraging rapid learning of the national language ( or one of them in Canada), as the ticket to economic and political inclusion.  A good policy.  Things like government forms in Spanish, pugunta dos, and all of that are bad policy, because the end result is one, and eventually dozens of different groups who have no way of communicating with one another.  Imagine if you, today, spoke only the language of your ancestors. 

- "Hispanic" is undefinable.   Is a Spanish person from Spain, Hispanic?  And if he is, why should he be treated any different than a recent immigrant from Poland, Vietnam, or Zambia?  Is Rich Rodriquez Hispanic?  Is some white kid from Georgia who gets a MA in Peruvian litterature?  And so what?  While one may, or may not, argue for governmental privilidge for identifable racial groups, speaking a language is not an ethnicity.

[corco]

- The "there were lots of Spanish speaking people in * before the US took it over" line is mostly historical revisionism, if used to prove the point that Spanish speaking people in the US are deserving of some sort of prividge or accomodation.  Fact is probably 98% of Spanish speaking peoplein the US today are NOT genetic decendants of those people, and various state governments, and the Treaty of Guadulupe-Hidalgo, accomodated those people anyway.

I think 98% is probably a pretty low estimate- I'd put it closer at 90%, but we're both guessing. That said, I'm not sure that matters. Tucson, El Paso, and Santa Fe have continuously had a large number of Spanish speakers, regardless of their origin, since the 1600s. While those people may not be genetically the same, I have to assume that part of the draw of those Spanish speakers to those cities is the fact that there's already a lot of Spanish speakers. There's cultural momentum there that preserves the language, and possibly does warrant some special status. Some of these folks are definitely illegal immigrants, but most aren't in these areas. The U.S. has done nothing to try to stop this, so saying out of the blue that English is now the official language would be an insult to legal immigrants who moved to a Spanish speaking city with the intent to live in America, a country that didn't used to discriminate based on language.

- More broadly, the neat little maps we all saw in school that showed the US acquiring various places from Spain/Mexico, the UK/Canada, France, and Russia are BS.  All political power comes from the consent of the governed.  The vast majority of people, which is to say the "Indians", in those areas had no idea they were part of any European empire.   The European cessions to the US are best viewed as similar to a Quit Claim deed.  They became part of the US de facto when the areas were later populated by people who wished to be governed by the US.  You are telling me that the Mandans were French?  Or that the Utes were Mexican?  Or the Eskimos Russian?  A silly concept.

This is a good point. The question, I guess, becomes "Does accepting the US as your government mean that you accept the English language?" I'm not sure that's true, especially in 1850. Certainly the US government never specifically said that this was the case.

[bandit957]

Actually, English is the official language. What language is all our laws published in? Congress and the Supreme Court do everything in English.

[1995hoo]

Actually, English is the official language. What language is all our laws published in? Congress and the Supreme Court do everything in English.

You need to learn the difference between de facto and de jure.

[freebrickproductions]

The reason why English isn't the official language of the US is because you'd have to have a bureaucracy define all of the official words, and from what I can tell, no one wants to have to deal with another bureaucracy in the government.

[Duke87]

Visiting Quebec as someone who speaks English but not French has been more than enough firmly to convince me that laws governing what language things may or may not be written in are dumb. Before you go around telling people that the language they speak is unacceptable and they need to learn yours, try being on the receiving end of such an attitude and see how you like it.

If there is demand for service in any given language, no reason why it shouldn't be made available as a legitimate business decision.

Explore the five boroughs of New York City and in addition to English and Spanish you will see signs in Chinese, Korean, Italian, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai...
I think that's actually kind of awesome and would hate to see it quashed. Gives the city a lot of character.

[Brandon]

Actually, English is the official language. What language is all our laws published in? Congress and the Supreme Court do everything in English.

Big difference between de facto (which English is in the US) and de jure (which English and Hawai'ian are in the State of Hawai'i).  There is no de jure official language for the US as a whole.  Individual states do have them.

[Pete from Boston]

Actually, English is the official language. What language is all our laws published in? Congress and the Supreme Court do everything in English.

You need to learn the difference between de facto and de jure.

Does he really, though?

If a declaration were issued tomorrow that a process would begin toward making English the official language of the United States, there would be prolonged debate as to what "official language" means in practical terms.  In our current political climate, this would take years.

If such a measure were enacted, probably very little of the multilingualism that occurs now would go away anytime soon, if at all.  Barring extreme Québec-style laws, which are probably unconstitutional here anyway, social and economic commerce that takes place in non-English languages now would likely continue unchanged, because demand would continue to dictate that they do.  That is what the market wants.

As far as government no longer printing additional forms, this cost savings will be eaten up by the cost of language enforcement.  Good morning, new layer of bureacracy. 

Home Depot or whatever will still make you press "1" for English because it is in their business interest to do so (and probably unconstitutional to prohibit), and just like now, this will cost you almost no time and effort.

There would, of course, be a proliferation of fly-by-night English-language schools, probably predatorily targeting immigrants like television-commercial lawyers and check-cashers today target the poor and unemployed. 

The difference between de jure and de facto, in other words, is an awful lot of money being spent in different places than it is now.   People are still going to communicate how they want to communicate.

[J N Winkler]

I voted No.  I don't really have much to add to the arguments above, except a few points:

*  Designating a language as official for cultural preservation reasons makes the most sense when the language is endangered through continuing shrinkage of the pool of native speakers.  This is the case with minority languages like Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Romansh, etc.  When the language being given this official status is already the dominant language, discrimination has to be suspected as part of the motivation.  In Québec the situation is not simple since, although French was the mother language of the majority when Bill 22 was passed (1974), English was the language of business and there was a long-standing tradition of French-Canadians being locked out of the power structures in their own province.

*  Suppose we made English the official language of the US (ignoring issues related to accents, dialects, the British/American divide, etc.).  What would that mean exactly?  We could have a government office charged with the responsibility of compiling an official dictionary and grammar of the English language, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case (there is no direct equivalent of the Academie française in Wales, for example, although there is a Welsh Language Board whose function is to promote the use of Welsh).  We could get rid of the Voting Rights Act requirement to provide election materials in minority languages when speakers of those languages comprise 10% or more of the population (a requirement that resulted in Arizona and Alaska becoming the only preclearance states outside the old Confederacy before the Supreme Court did away with preclearance), but that wouldn't necessarily have to happen.  If you support English as a (federal) official language for the US, then exactly what do you want the concomitant policies to be?

*  Notwithstanding English not being de jure an official US language at the federal level, isn't fluency in English tested as part of the naturalization process?  If a would-be citizen chooses to naturalize in a US jurisdiction where English is the minority language (like Puerto Rico), what happens then?

[Laura]

A point most people forget: it usually takes until the second generation of American born children for a "native" language to disappear culturally from an immigrant family. For instance: when my great grandparents came here from Italy (generation zero), they spoke no English. They learned enough to get by, but mostly associated with other Italian Americans and lived in the Little Italy neighborhood of Baltimore. They had children, including my grandfather (first generation American), who knew Italian to communicate with his family but learned English in school and spoke English in most areas of his life. He was raised in America and wanted to fit into mainstream culture. He had an Italian first name but went by an American nickname (which he legally added to his name as an adult). Sure, he lived in Maryland, which has lots of Catholics, but his family was from Southern Italy, so they were "different" and the "wrong type of European" so they were on the lower end of the white totem pole. By the time my dad was born (generation 2) and was raised entirely in English. All of the native Italians were getting old and died when my father was young. My dad learned some Italian words, but nowhere near enough to speak or read fluently. Anything remotely Italian now culturally in our family is family tradition, which is a hybrid of Italian-American ideals and a far cry from native Italy.

My point: unless entirely secluded from the general population for multiple generations, most immigrant families will eventually speak English. The exception would be if you lived in a region of the country where a huge chunk of the population still speaks that language, which at this point has historically been happening for centuries.


iPhone

[realjd]

A point most people forget: it usually takes until the second generation of American born children for a "native" language to disappear culturally from an immigrant family. For instance: when my great grandparents came here from Italy (generation zero), they spoke no English. They learned enough to get by, but mostly associated with other Italian Americans and lived in the Little Italy neighborhood of Baltimore. They had children, including my grandfather (first generation American), who knew Italian to communicate with his family but learned English in school and spoke English in most areas of his life. He was raised in America and wanted to fit into mainstream culture. He had an Italian first name but went by an American nickname (which he legally added to his name as an adult). Sure, he lived in Maryland, which has lots of Catholics, but his family was from Southern Italy, so they were "different" and the "wrong type of European" so they were on the lower end of the white totem pole. By the time my dad was born (generation 2) and was raised entirely in English. All of the native Italians were getting old and died when my father was young. My dad learned some Italian words, but nowhere near enough to speak or read fluently. Anything remotely Italian now culturally in our family is family tradition, which is a hybrid of Italian-American ideals and a far cry from native Italy.

My point: unless entirely secluded from the general population for multiple generations, most immigrant families will eventually speak English. The exception would be if you lived in a region of the country where a huge chunk of the population still speaks that language, which at this point has historically been happening for centuries.

Miami is a good example of this. The older Cuban population still has a number of folks who don't speak English but their kids and especially their grandkids are all bilingual. Spanish is definitely the primary language down there and I don't see that changing but I've rarely, if ever, run into a true language barrier.