Habla Ingles?
This just caught my eye in the BBC News feed:
The US Senate has voted in favour of making English the national language. <…> But the Senate also approved a milder Democrat amendment describing English as the “common and unifying language”. Neither of the bills would bar the use of Spanish or other languages in government services.
Some will say that that was about 200 years overdue, others will glare at you for saying that and call you a racist. Frankly, I didn’t even know the US didn’t have an official language until a few years ago when M pointed it out to me. Supposedly this is something every US kid learns in school but having heard some statements from people calling into radio shows, that doesn’t always sink in apparently.
I’m going to go with the group that’s in favour of English being the official language of choice. I grew up (although I was born elsewhere) in Friesland, a province in the Netherlands where there are two official languages (Dutch and Frisian) and while at the time I picked up enough that I could understand and read Frisian, that was never enough to keep up with actual conversations and certainly don’t expect me to say (or worse, write) something in the language.
Where having two official languages goes awry is where you run into people stubbornly speaking the one you’re not fluent in or, not being from the Friesland province, don’t understand a word of it at all. If you’re a tourist in the area, that’s something you might expect and prepare for, but that isn’t always the case. Having no official language at all can only be worse, I would think.
Add to that the fact that, sure, a lot of people learn to speak some foreign language when they’re in school, but most of them will never be fluent in it and unless you practice regularly that only gets worse. Do you remember any of the French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc, that you took in high school (or its moral equivalent elsewhere)?