Some of the states’ “English is our language” are worded so that if the government wanted, it could choose to deny any kind of bilingualism (to other than ASL users, because that’s covered by the ADA). It would mean no drivers’ license test forms in other languages, no people at the state house answering the phone in Spanish, or anything else. So far, I don’t know a state that has done so, but California did once have a proposition (IIRC) to eliminate bilingual education, which failed.
I was thinking more of the the Federal government superceding state laws or amendments that made states “English only,” in recognition of the fact that English is not the only language widely used here.
I meant in the metro area proper. We just moved here a couple of years ago from Bloomington. There are all kinds of languages spoken in B-ton, and it a city of polyglots, but there is no really large secondary minority. Everyone there speaks English.
We live on the West side. We are not in Speedway, but near enough to swear at traffic a lot on race day, and I run into someone who does not speak English, or doesn’t speak it very well, almost every day. It was enough to nudge me to learn Spanish. There must be a place here you can draw a circle around that is very heavy in Spanish speakers. My son’s elementary school has Spanish as a “special,” along with gym, art, and music. I don’t think anybody expects him to actually learn Spanish just from the twice-a-week “let’s sing songs, and name some household items”; I think it’s just meant to foster enough interest that he won’t avoid Spanish-speaking families on the playground, or something, and if he has enough interaction, he’d learn Spanish naturally.
There was a spate of those kind of laws in the 90’s. They were largely defanged by the courts, since having a gov’t that can’t talk to non-English speakers defacto deprives them of several Constitutional rights.
So again, your OP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Gov’t services are made available to non-English speakers to the extent that its practicable, schools already offer language courses, etc. The “English is our language” laws are kind of distasteful, but they’re also largely symbolic, and to the extent that they’re bad symbols, the logical course would just be to repeal them rather than establish two official languages instead (which amongst other issues, would just leave out non-Spanish immigrants in the same way).
I am left to conclude that there is some minority really, really serious about pressing voter ID laws… but in a multitude of governmentally-sanctioned languages. Thus solving two non-problems with one philosopher’s stone.
There is no need for bilingualism in the United States as I don’t see any reason why the Hispanic population of the United State will not assimilate into the general Anglophone “melting pot” just like their German, Italian, and Slavic predecessors. If anything, we should be doing more to promote the American national culture and make English the official language of the Republic in order to further facilitate assimilation.
I think one of the big differences is that The Spanish speaking parts of the U.S. have been Spanish speaking from before they were politically integrated into the U.S. California is and has been Spanish speaking for hundreds of years.
I think there’s in fact not much pressure to adopt English in the USA. Over here, there aren’t large communities of people speaking a foreign language. Or maybe it’s a result of a very large part of the immigrants having the same language (again, over here, the largest immigrant community, north-African “Arabs”, typically came already fluent in French because it was still taught to everybody at home. Two immigrants, even from the same country, say a Kabyl and an Arab, were more likely to have French as a common language. Very different.)
But I have the random feeling that this community has reached a “critical mass” long ago and won’t assimilate as Germans, Italians, etc… did. And that the USA is already bilingual de facto, and from the birth figures I see, will only become moreso.
The US as a whole doesn’t even recognize English as a national language, despite it being the de facto national tongue. You expect it to recognize Spanish?
I don’t think that’s true. Its pretty rare to see a second generation immigrant that doesn’t speak English. This survey says 90% speak English “very well”, and presumably even more have at least decent proficiency. Even for people that live in largely Spanish speaking communities in the US, the advantages to speaking English is large enough that its rare to find someone who was raised here not speak the language. And if the large majority of the children of non-English speakers speak English, it seems pretty doubtful the US is going to feature a permanent non-English speaking demographic.
(plus, I think people tend to over-estimate the speed at which past immigrant populations to the US adopted English. The previous wave of immigration around the turn of the century also featured large ethnic enclaves of non-English speakers, and also generated a lot of concern that they weren’t assimilating. And yet they to ended up having English speaking children and thus never generating permanent non-English speaking demos).
Not to mention that even if second-generation immigrants speak the ancestral language, it doesn’t by any means follow that they are fully bilingual or speak it well, and it certainly doesn’t mean they are fully bilingual in reading, writing, and speaking. Heck, my officemate is 25 years old and was born in Mexico, and when I hear him speaking Spanish on the phone I pick out mistakes in nearly every sentence, not to mention the words he says in English because he doesn’t know the Spanish word - and we’re not talking about obscure words. He’s an intelligent guy, but he simply has no formal education in Spanish at all. Not that it’s his fault - he’s been in the U.S. since he was a toddler, and I doubt either of his parents had much formal education in Spanish, either.
When my practice group last tried to hire a bilingual paralegal, we got hundreds of resumes, but of the several dozen people we interviewed, only a couple could pass our written Spanish test - which was writing a simple one-paragraph letter in basic everyday Spanish (not involving legal terminology). Dude, if it takes you an hour to write a letter and it still has a dozen basic grammar and spelling mistakes in it, you are not bilingual! And this is in a huge major metro area with hundreds of thousands of Hispanics, either immigrants themselves or with at least one immigrant parent.
Im not an American so my detailed knowledge of certain localities in the US is minimal. I do not know if a critical mass of Spanish speakers has been met in certain areas. What was obvious only a decade or two ago was that if a Spanish speaker wished to succeed in America then they had to learn English. I think this is probably still the case in the vast majority of areas. That if a Spanish speaker is unwilling to learn English then their career paths are limited to laundry work and picking fruit.
I think historically there was pressure on immigrants to learn English. English was agressively taught in schools. This was a conscious decision by educators. This policy has been proven to work in the past, its probably best to maintain a policy that has proven itself a success.
There has been little continuity between the Hispanic communities that existed at the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which is California numbered in the few thousands at most and was quickly overwhelmed by the Anglo settlers) and the current Hispanic population who are the descendents of Mexican immigration since 1910 and in particular since 1970.
That only strengthens the case to double our assimilation efforts. But I doubt it-articles from a century ago liked to note the low birth-rate of the American population of English descent and feared being overwhelmed by the Irish along with Southern and Eastern Europeans. The United States isn’t billingual except maybe in a cultural sense (you don’t see even in Southern California freeway signs painted in both English and Spanish) and Hispanic birth-rates will decline as their population assimilates into the American middle-class mainstream.
Canada is officially bilingual, as I’m sure you know.
This issue is quite controversial in Canada, especially in regions of the country where very little French is spoken. Anglo persons are often denied federal jobs, retail and wait-service jobs. The duplication in paperwork and forms and services is expensive, and in a lot of cases completely unnecessary.
I acknowledge that 50 years ago Franco citizens were unfairly excluded from certain jobs and couldn’t access services in their mother tongue in a lot of cases, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
Providing services in the language of your choice is a great idea, but is sometimes impractical, and very costly to implement across an entire country. Once you declare yourself a bilingual country you better be prepared to provide federal services in both languages in every location from coast to coast. Be careful.
Actually, both Mexican-Americans and Puerto Rican-Americans have fertility rates higher than people in their home countries. Mexican-Americans have a little under 3 children apiece (last I checked), for Mexicans in Mexico it’s closer to 2.3 kids apiece. That effect probably dissipates with time, though. I’m not sure if the same trend holds for Salvadorans, Dominicans and other groups, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
For what it’s worth, I’d favour bilingualism in the long run. Maybe not just yet, but once Latinos are around 20% or more of the population, or a clear majority in some states, then it’s time to look seriously into official bilingualism.
Actually, this sort of observation is raised whenever someone decides that we need an official language: the claim is that those recent immigrants are just not assimilating and they are refusing/failing to learn English. Yet, time after time, when we go back to the actual numbers from the Census Bureau, we find that the overwhelming majority of immigrants, (even the currently dreaded Spanish speaking immigrants), are making a serious effort to learn English. The U.S. has always tolerated, (more or less), ethnic enclaves in which the immigrant language predominated for fairly long periods of time. However, under various pressures, all of them have finally come over to primarily speaking English, because most people want to earn a living and many want to make a lot of money, and there are only a minuscule number of ways to become rich without entering the English-speaking world in the U.S. I had ancestors who primarily spoke German for around fifty years. When I was growing up in the 1950s, there were still suburban Detroit neighborhoods where the dominant language was Polish with a few Italian or Lebanese neighborhoods, all of them dating from the period 1890 - 1920. All of them are gone, now. Russians have been flooding the U.S. since 1989, yet they are overwhelmingly learning English and there is almost no second generation Russian-speaking community.
As regards the OP, I see no more reason to make the U.S. officially bi-lingual than I do to make it officially English. We have not needed either situation despite massive immigration in past years and setting an official language will solve no problems. English is the de facto language of the country in which its laws and commerce are written and conducted. Making allowances for the use of other languages on a local level while making sure that we place no barriers on the use of those languages, (thus avoiding the trap of isolating such people), has worked well for 238 years (or 226 years, depending on one method of reckoning), and I have never seen a persuasive argument to change that situation.
You are aware, I hope, that many “Latinos” do not speak Spanish. While we have a lot of recent immigrants. we also have many, many 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos who are no more conversant in their ancestral tongue than are the 3rd generation Italian and German immigrants.
One of my best friends I call “the world’s worst Hispanic” because although he is technically Hispanic, he speaks no Spanish.
Portuguese?
Wow, as I’m watching this an obviously Anglo New York official just switched to Spanish in a media scrum (on CNN) regarding Ebola. I wish I got his name. He struggled like an Anglo-Canadian politician speaking French. But good job!