Bilingualism In The United States

Revolutionary leaders knew that encouraging the growth of the multilingual population in the United States was vital to maintaining distance from Great Britain. The Founding Fathers sought to respect the minority groups that helped free the nation from the British crown, therefore avoiding instituting an official national language from the Constitution. In fact, around this time many documents were printed in German and French to stimulate political participation among multilingual citizens. But when the political arena of the 1980s fostered bilingual legislation (for example, introducing bilingual schooling and bilingual voting forms), this respect for foreign languages nearly vanished as many citizens took up arms against American-English being challenged.
English was founded with the sole mission of establishing an official language through the English Language Amendment (or ELA), attributing its motivations to the unification of the country. Because of its ‘coincidental’ timing, the nonprofit U.S. English is generally thought to go hand-in-hand with the birth of the English-Only movement and thus, the rejection of bilingualism. Influencing 30 out of the 50 states to pass Official English Legislation between 1981 and 2009, the heavily funded U.S. English has been met politically with more embrace than backlash. However, despite its wide support at both the individual and legislative levels due to the “unity” an official language could bring, legal scholars such as Judge James Crawford are suspicious of the real reasons behind the movement and organization’s popularity. In the preface of his book Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of “English Only”, Crawford