Another of Maryland's English-speaking towns poised (from the French) to go English-only
Dennis Baron
debaron at illinois.edu
Thu Jun 19 21:33:34 UTC 2008
There's a new post on the Web of Language:
Another of Maryland's English-speaking towns poised (from the French)
to go English-only
Thurmont, a beyond-the-beltway community in northern Frederick County,
Maryland, is poised to make English its official language. On June
16, Mayor Martin Burns introduced a bill 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.
Thurmont isn’t very big: its zip code, 21788, includes about 6,000
town residents, with another 5,000 people in the surrounding
countryside. 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. It’s the universal language.’”
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.
It’s not that Thurmont wants to turn away immigrants. It’s just that
there aren’t very many in the neighborhood to turn away. According
to the 2000 Census, 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. 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.
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. The new English-only law would just mean business as usual
for the town’s municipal employees.
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 (barbarian, 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). . . . .
read the rest of this post on Maryland's latest English-only town on
the Web of Language
DB
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321
www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron
read the Web of Language:
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
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