<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">There's a new post on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; "><a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">the Web of Language</a></span>:<br><br><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px; white-space: pre; ">Another of Maryland's English-speaking towns poised (from the French) to go English-only</span><br><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; "><p class="blog"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#144FAE"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">Thurmont, a beyond-the-beltway community in northern Frederick County, Maryland, is poised to make English its official language.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;" style=""> </span><a href="http://www.gazette.net/stories/061908/walknew191430_32358.shtml" mce_href="http://www.gazette.net/stories/061908/walknew191430_32358.shtml"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;">On June 16, Mayor Martin Burns introduced a bill</span></a> requiring town employees to speak only English and ordering Thurmont’s municipal paper-pushers to generate their copious (from the Latin) paperwork only in English as well.</span></font></p><p class="blog">Thurmont isn’t very big: its zip code, 21788, includes about 6,000 town residents, with another 5,000 people in the surrounding countryside.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to Mayor Burns, the official-English measure is necessary to ensure the proper integration of immigrants into the American melting pot: “It’s a way of saying, ‘We speak English in America.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the universal language.’”</p><p class="blog">While it may seem premature of the mayor to equate America with the universe (the Klingons aren’t about to give up their language, not without a fight), it’s clear that Thurmont has always conducted its municipal affairs in English because almost nobody in town speaks anything else.</p><p class="blog">It’s not that Thurmont wants to turn away immigrants.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s just that there aren’t very many in the neighborhood to turn away.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts?_event=Search&geo_id=&_geoContext=&_street=&_county=21788&_cityTown=21788&_state=&_zip=21788&_lang=en&_sse=on&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&show_2003_tab=&redirect=Y" mce_href="http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts?_event=Search&geo_id=&_geoContext=&_street=&_county=21788&_cityTown=21788&_state=&_zip=21788&_lang=en&_sse=on&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&show_2003_tab=&redirect=Y">According to the 2000 Census,</a> the few Thurmont residents who speak a language other than English (about 199 residents of Hispanic or Asian background and a couple of high school foreign language teachers) have no trouble communicating in English too.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s only 1.9% of the 11,000 people who make up Thurmont 21788. In comparison, the national average of people over five years old who speak a language other than English at home is almost 18%, though most of them also speak English.</p><p class="blog"><p class="blog">Since there’s not much demand in Thurmont for any language except English, no one was surprised when Mayor Burns acknowledged that the city has never received a request to do business in any other language. <span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new English-only law would just mean business as usual for the town’s municipal employees.</p><p class="blog">As it contemplates an unnecessary official English law, Thurmont joins the growing number of communities where everyone already speaks English but feels the need to protect the language from the barbarian hordes outside our gates (<em>barbarian,</em> from the Greek, meaning ‘someone who stammers,’ in other words, someone who doesn’t speak Greek – note that the Greeks considered the Angles and the Saxons, who would eventually bring English to England, to be barbarians). . . . .</p></p><p class="blog">read the rest of this post on Maryland's latest English-only town on <a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">the Web of Language</a></p></span><div><br></div><div><br>DB<br><br>____________________<br>Dennis Baron<br>Professor of English and Linguistics<br>Department of English<br>University of Illinois<br>608 S. Wright St.<br>Urbana, IL 61801<br><br>office: 217-244-0568<br>fax: 217-333-4321<br><br><a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron">www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron</a><br><br>read the Web of Language:<br><a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage</a><br><br><br></div></body></html>