Senate Votes Twice On English Language

WASHINGTON(AP) Whether English is America's "national language" or its national "common and unifying language" was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate.

The Senate first voted 63-34 to make English the national language after lawmakers who led the effort said it would promote national unity.

But critics argued the move would prevent limited English speakers from getting language assistance required by an executive order enacted under President Clinton. So the Senate also voted 58-39 to make English the nation's "common and unifying language."

"We are trying to make an assimilation statement," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of two dozen senators who voted Thursday for both English proposals.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that President Bush supports both measures.

"What the president has said all along is that he wants to make sure that people who become American citizens have a command of the English language," Snow said. "It's as simple as that."

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., disputed charges that making English the national language was racist or aimed at Spanish speakers. Eleven Democrats joined Republicans in voting for his measure.

The provision makes exceptions for any language assistance already guaranteed by law, such as bilingual ballots required under the Voting Rights Act or court interpreters. It also requires immigrants seeking citizenship to demonstrate a "sufficient understanding of the English language for usage in every day life."

The Homeland Security Department is in the midst of redesigning the citizenship test and some groups have been concerned about efforts to make the test more difficult.

Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo, offered the alternative. The only Republican to vote solely for Salazar's "common and unifying" language option was Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, whose home state's constitution prohibits discrimination on basis of inability to speak, read or write English or Spanish.
Both provisions will be included in an immigration bill the Senate is expected to pass and send to conference with the House, where differences will be resolved.

President Bush, who often peppers his speeches with Spanish words and phrases, had little to say about the Senate votes while visiting the Arizona-Mexico border. "The Senate needs to get the bill out," the president said.

Bush toured an unfortified section of the border in the Arizona desert Thursday, where he endorsed using fences and other barriers to cut down on illegal crossings. The Senate on Wednesday voted to put 370 miles of fences on the border.

Bush's border visit was part of his efforts to win over conservatives balking at his support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and a new guest worker program.

Bush asked Congress for $1.9 billion Thursday to pay for 1,000 Border Patrol agents and the temporary deployment of up to 6,000 National Guard troops to states along the Mexican border.

His request was not warmly welcomed by some key senators.

Sen. Judd Gregg, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, delayed a vote on Bush's promotion of U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman to White House budget director to show his displeasure. He said Bush's request calls for using money for proposed for border security equipment to pay for operational exercises.

Sen. Robert Byrd, the Senate Appropriations Committee's top Democrat, complained that he had offered amendments providing for border security nine times since 2002, only to have the Bush administration reject them as extraneous spending or expanding the size of government.

"If we had spent that money beginning in 2002, we would not be calling on the National Guard today," Byrd said.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers supporting the immigration measure continued to hold through the week. The group was able to reverse an amendment that denied temporary workers the ability to petition on their own for legal permanent residency, a step to citizenship.

Bill supporters restored the self-petitioning with the condition the federal government certifies American workers were unavailable to fill the jobs held or sought by the temporary workers.

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The bill is S. 2611

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On the Net:

Senate: http://www.senate.gov

Didn't Congress already make English the official language back in '98?



From Wikipedia: List of sovereign states with "official language" problems:

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

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:

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.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

I say that we join such advanced world leaders as Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Iraq and have a civil war over this issue.

When you have a war with people who aren't citizens of your country, it's not called "civil war". It's "an invasion". :-)

Yeah, I've noticed how Mexican wetbacks are all bringing in WMD's.

[Ibby]

The provision makes exceptions for any language assistance already guaranteed by law, such as bilingual ballots required under the Voting Rights Act or court interpreters. It also requires immigrants seeking citizenship to demonstrate a "sufficient understanding of the English language for usage in every day life."

Dammit, that's exactly what we DON'T need to do

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Yeah, I've noticed how Mexican wetbacks are all bringing in WMD's.

You proposed a "civil war". But obviously that can't apply...

Originally Posted by Webster's

civil war a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

invade 1 : to enter for conquest or plunder
2 : to encroach upon : INFRINGE
syn: see TRESPASS

Originally Posted by Senate minority leader Reid

While the intent may not be there, I really believe this amendment is racist.

As we all know, all white people speak English.

Well, I didn't exactly propose a civil war. Most white folk in this country DO have English as their first language. Many first, second, even third generation Hispanic Americans have Spanish. If our treatment of Hispanic people continues in the manner it has, there might well be some civil unrest (there has been already). I don't know that things would proceed to the civil war stage - I was being sarcastic.

What horrible things do you expect to happen if Spanish is made the second official language of the US? I studied Spanish in college and my eyes were opened to the things like the works of Pablo Neruda in the original, the writing of Sor Juana and the insults hurled at me by the people of Magdalena, New Mexico whose ancestors had lived there 300 years before the Anglo's came along with their English only policy.

What awful things do you expect to happen if the US officially became bilingual? At least our eyes might be opened to the doings of the Western Hemisphere which we just so happen to be a part of.

The Swiss have been a democracy since around 1200. They have FOUR official languages and the country has lived to tell the tale and has a higher standard of living than the US. In my part of the world, anyhow, I have become accustomed to messages from banks, the government and just about any larger business in my choice of either Spanish or English. Once I accidentally hit the Spanish button and was pleased that I could understand the instructions. I did NOT run out shrieking "Viva la Mexico."

So people in the US would be able to read Pablo Neruda in the original. I guess that means we'd all become Commies or something?

Let's all write to the American Language Commission and get them working on a fusion language protocol that can incorporate all of the immigrant languages proportional to their populations here. This might be preferable to dividing the population over more than one official language; or, many hybrid languages like Spanglish. Alternatively, perhaps Spanish could be modified to become more acceptable to English speaking Americans like English could be modified to become more acceptable to Europeans. The following was sent to me, early this year, by my favorite Cellar Dweller (who, for all I know, may have gotten it from here):

"The European Language Commission has announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.
The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas."

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

I guess that means we'd all become Commies or something?

Well...it seems to have worked for you. :-)

We all know how much you love Switzerland. This isn't Switzerland, and I seem to recall pointing out the huge situational differences in another thread. I certainly don't wake up every morning wishing the US was more like Switzerland. Maybe you do...and if so you probably can guess what solution I'd propose.

I speak a somewhat limited amount of Spanish (not as well as you of course) and my French isn't as good as my Spanish. But what's culturally enriching is one thing, and what's good policy for the conduct of government is another. I don't think road signs would be improved by a law requiring they be printed in the five most popular languages. Or even two.

Knowing a second language is a wonderful thing...and I recommend it to all non-Anglophones who wish to become US citizens.

Originally Posted by MaggieL

Well...it seems to have worked for you. :-)

We all know how much you love Switzerland. This isn't Switzerland, and I seem to recall pointing out the huge situational differences in another thread. I certainly don't wake up every morning wishing the US was more like Switzerland. Maybe you do...and if so you probably can guess what solution I'd propose.

I speak a somewhat limited amount of Spanish (not as well as you of course) and my French isn't as good as my Spanish. But what's culturally enriching is one thing, and what's good policy for the conduct of government is another. I don't think road signs would be improved by a law requiring they be printed in the five most popular languages. Or even two.

Knowing a second language is a wonderful thing...and I recommend it to all non-Anglophones who wish to become US citizens.

Switzerland has its moments. In some ways I wish it were more like the US.

I never claimed to be a brilliant Spanish speaker. Betcha you speak it better than me. Put up your dukes!:p

I'm trying to remember - Jag would know - but I don't think road signs are printed in 5 different languages. They use those universal symbol thingies. Railroad stations offer information over the loudspeakers in Germen, French and English. Thank God because I would have climbed on many the wrong train otherwise.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

I'm trying to remember - Jag would know - but I don't think road signs are printed in 5 different languages. They use those universal symbol thingies.

I recall when those universal symbol thingies were introduced in the US; hailed as evidence that the UN-compliant jet-age nuclear-fueled metric future utopia was upon us.

Perhaps their best outcome was a National Lampoon parody a decade later, offering examples for "Village made entirely of soap, 5 km", "Do not use cheese as wheel chocks" and "While not expressly forbidden, the sounding of klaxons annoys the bears".

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by NoBoxes

The following was sent to me, early this year, by my favorite Cellar Dweller (who, for all I know, may have gotten it from here):

Clearly derivative of the 1946 article "Meihem in ce Klasrum"

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Most white folk in this country DO have English as their first language. Many first, second, even third generation Hispanic Americans have Spanish.

And maybe that should tell you something.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Yeah, I've noticed how Mexican wetbacks are all bringing in WMD's.

Yes they are. Worse ones than the military could even come up with, although slower much more destructive.

Our legal forms need to be standardized and business needs to be transacted in one language.