Perhaps Americans should migrate to countries throughout latin America en masse, and set up english speaking enclaves.

But i doubt these gringo's would be welcome.

I thought English was already the official language of the United States. What language does the US President give their State of the Union address in? What language does Congress use? Does anyone give speeches in Congress in any other language?

As to whether the US Parliament can stop individuals from using other languages is probably a matter for the Judiciary in interpreting the First Ammendment right to Freedom of Speech. This would not stop the publication of all government forms in English rather than in multiple languages.

Dear Prof, what a load of bollocks. How do you get away with it? You must be even more amazed than I am.

Reminds me of the great gag: "What would you get if you crossed Bill Clinton with George W.Bush?
A pimp with a speech impediment!"

I can't quite understand this. Is the writer objecting to English being made the official language because of the plethora of languages spoken in America? In that case he should be speaking about "anglicising" the language, not "americanising" it, as no such language as American exists any longer - the Spanish wiped it out.

Having an official language in no way inhibits other linguistic usage - it means only that a standardised language, primarily for the administration of the laws of the land, exists. In England itself the official language until the seventeenth century was Latin and before that it was Norman French. The language that Shakespeare wrote was a London construct and was a mixture mainly of Latin, Greek, French, Dutch, Saxon, Danish, Arabic, Greek, and Celtic. The tongue he grew up actually speaking would probably be incomprehensible to us now. This London dialect was spoken in the Inns of Chancellry and so was the language which King James chose for the first printed Bible. James himself probably spoke a mixture of French and Celtic.

That America, a country with a wide and diverse language base, has adopted this stance is simply in accordance with the fact that English is the primary language of law and commerce in a global community. PNG, which has 700 different languages, did the same thing and China, in which there are currently also geographical language bases, is in the process of doing the same thing now that it has taken its place in global commerce. This doesn't mean that people in PNG no longer speak Motu, or that Chinese no longer speak Mandarin.

RSA tried an eclectic approach and had 11 official languages which led to monumental stuff-ups including the time it took to sing the National anthem eleven different times before any sporting event!

Being strictly pedantic there is no such language as pure "English" - so one can hardly anglicise words like salsa or chilli for which there is no English equivalent: that is how our language has grown to encompass the largest vocabulary of any other tongue in the world.

The précis for this article says that "America’s self-righteous language police want to make English an 'official' language". Is Professor Walt Brash aware that there are already language police in action in North America in the Canadian province of Quebec?

The original version of Quebec's Bill 101 (passed in 1974), barred all languages other than French on outdoor commercial signs. The law was amended in 1993, after the United Nations Human Rights Committee intervened, calling it a human-rights violation. The new law requires that French be "markedly predominant."

Bilingualism is tolerated on smaller signs, but anything as big as a sign on the side of a bus or a billboard must be entirely French.

It's not only the authorities who enforce Frenchness. The battle is also being fought on the streets by minor terrorists.

In the fall (autumn) of 2000, three coffee shops owned by a chain called Second Cup were firebombed. Earlier, a group calling itself the French Self-Defense Brigade warned that the cafes in the trendy Plateau Mont Royal district of Montreal violated "linguistic purity," and that the Second Cup was "in the line of fire."

Second Cup's crime - in the eyes of these neo-fascists - was that the company traded in Quebec under an English name.

Anyway, I wonder what the Professor would have to say about Quebec's language laws. Would he defend them on some half-baked politically-correct, culturally-relativist grounds?