It takes more than a language to unify a nation

[James A. Landau]

About those multi-lingual labels:

Don't forget that in Canada there is a law (I don't know if it applies to all of Canada or only just to Quebec) that consumer products must have labels in French.  Hence any vendor in the United States who wants to sell his products in Canada must add French to the label, whether or not the vendor expects to sell to any significant number of Francophones south of the border.

Multilingual labels are nothing new; they are merely more common nowadays.  Back in the 1950's the Landau family had a metal Nabisco cracker box that we used to store crackers (from any vendor).  Of the four sides of the box, three were in English and one was in Spanish.

Hispanic communities in the US differ from 19th century non-English-speaking communities in that the 19th century ones consisted of immigrants who intended to stay in the States, whereas the Hispanic ones of today generally contain a fair number of transients, both legal (i.e. green-card) and illegal, who have not (yet?) made the commitment to become permanent residents (and hopefully citizens) of the US, and who therefore do not feel as much need to learn English as did the people who came in through Ellis Island.

Aside---someone should inform Congressman King that the rule about a person born in the US automatically being a US citizen is, if I remember correctly, due to a Supreme Court ruling and therefore cannot be changed by Congress.

    - Jim Landau

_____________________________________________________________
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org