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Guest
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Didn't Congress already make English the official language back in '98?
From Wikipedia: List of sovereign states with "official language" problems:
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Note that only the languages that are causing political disputes in their respective societies are listed here.
• Algeria (Arabic and Berber): moderate to serious
• Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani, Talysh, and Tat): serious
• Bahrain (Arabic and Persian): serious
• Belarus (Russian and Belarusian): serious
• Belgium (Dutch and French): moderate to serious
• Cameroon (English and French): moderate to serious
• Canada (English and French, particularly in Quebec; also, to
varying degrees, English and Aboriginal languages): moderate to
serious
• Cyprus (Greek and Turkish): serious
• Estonia (Estonian and Russian): serious
• Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia and various native languages): serious
• Iraq (Arabic and Kurdish): serious
• Iran (Persian, Azerbaijani, and Kurdish): serious
• Kazakhstan (Kazakh and Russian): serious
• Latvia (Latvian and Russian): serious
• Macedonia (Macedonian and Albanian): serious
• Moldova (Russian, Moldovan, and Romanian): serious (ironically,
part of the issue is whether Moldovan is the same language as
Romanian)
• Serbia and Montenegro (Serbian, Albanian, Hungarian, Bosnian,
Montenegrin): serious
• Spain (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish): serious. Aranese,
Asturian, Basque, Catalan and Galician are co-official in certain
regions. (Catalan and Valencian): serious).
• Sri Lanka (Sinhalese and Tamil): serious
• Syria (Arabic and Kurdish): serious
• Uzbekistan (Uzbek, Persian, and Russian): serious
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I say that we join such advanced world leaders as Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Iraq and have a civil war over this issue.
Heres an amusing take on "official" English:
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We might as well ban English, too, because no one seems to read it much lately, few can spell it, and fewer still can parse it. Even English teachers have come to rely on computer spell checkers. Another reason to ban English: it’s hardly even English anymore. English started its decline in 1066, with the unfortunate incident at Hastings. Since then it has become a polyglot conglomeration of French, Latin, Italian, Scandinavian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Celtic, Yiddish and Chinese, with an occasional smiley face thrown in. (emphasis my own  )
The French have banned English, so we should too. After all, they are so rational they must know something we don’t.
More important, we should ban English because it has become a world language. Remember what happened to all the other world languages: Latin, Greek, Indo-European? One day they’re on everybody’s tongue; the next day they’re dead. Banning English now would save us that inevitable disappointment.
Although we shouldn’t ban English without designating a replacement for it, there is no obvious candidate. The French blew their chance when they sold Louisiana. It doesn’t look like the Russians are going to take over this country any time soon — they’re having enough trouble taking over Russia. German, the largest minority language in the U. S. until recently, lost much of its prestige after two world wars. Chinese is too hard to write, especially if you’re not Chinese.
There’s always Esperanto, a language made up a hundred years ago that is supposed to bring about world unity. We’re still waiting for that. And if you took Spanish in high school you can see that it’s not easy to get large numbers of people to speak another language fluently.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what replacement language we pick, just so long as we ban English instead of making it official. Prohibiting English will do for the language what Prohibition did for liquor. Those who already use it will continue to do so, and those who don’t will want to try out what has been forbidden. This negative psychology works with children. It works with speed limits. It even worked in the Garden of Eden.
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