Well I have added my affiliation with a new group called US English Foundation. I did this yesterday during my daily web browsing session. I will let the foundation explain what it's goals are. This is taken from their website:
The Foundation has several missions:
To help improve the teaching of English to immigrants, to allow them to enjoy the economic opportunities available in this country.
To study language policy and its effects around the world, so we can apply the lessons learned through the experiences of other countries to the United States.
To raise public awareness through the media about the importance of our common language.
There is a required donation to join. The foundation would prefer a minimum of $10 however they have a box where you can enter any amount. I signed up with $1 and that seemed to work. I know what you're thinking, why didn't you enter $0 in the box? Well I did and no it doesn't work. If you think that there is not really a need for the United States to have a formally recognized official language, think again. According to this there are over 329 languages spoken in the United States. In my opinion there is definitely a need for a common language. However I am not going to take this time to argue my point of view. The arguments laid forth on the US English Foundations page, are going to be more in depth and more complete than my arguments, and I would encourage you to read them if you think this issue is not of importance.
For those of you who are living in Colorado as I am, you would probably like to know how your representatives voted on the latest bill concerning making English the official language in the United States. Well Salazar voted no and Allard voted yes. Well at least the measure was passed 63-34. I am glad that Salazar was not able to foul this up.
Apparently his dotage is growing on him. If you would like to send Mr. Salazar an e-mail expressing how you feel about him voting in opposition to this, the page for that can be found here
You can read all about this bill here.
While browsing there was a quote that I agreed with which I desired to share with you.
“A country has to have only one official language, if men are to
understand one another... It is eminently fair that a country's official
language should be the language of the majority.”
---Ayn Rand
Also I found this article at wikipedia useful for expanding my understanding of languages in the United States. According to the article English is the de facto language of the United States. Some states have adopted it as the official language for the state. There are also some states that are bilingual with one state being trilingual. Considering that wikipedia is always changing the date that I look at the following page was on
So if the page has changed since then, well I can't really help that.
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