OPPapers.com

Official English

Coming Together: English as the Official Language

Did you know that English, the language spoken by ninety-two percent of the citizens of the United States, is in fact not the official language of this country? Actually, there is no official language of the United States. Most of you are probably asking yourselves, "Why should I care if the U.S. has an official language or not?" The truth is there are many reasons, both social and economic, why making English our official language would be beneficial. Consider this, the United States Government spends an astonishing 3.3 billion taxpayer dollars each year to provide government services to non English speaking immigrants in their respective languages. Not having an official language also promotes disunity among citizens by creating racial and ethnic divisions based upon group's languages of choice. Having an official language would benefit all of this country's citizens if we work together to develop effective legislation and take the necessary steps to implement it.
There are many arguments for why Americans would benefit from English as its official language, but due to length constraints lets just analyze two of the best founded reasons. The first argument we will address for having an official language is mainly economic. Having one language for government documents and services would free up funds currently being used to produce documents, provide education, and countless other services in multiple languages. The second argument is more of a humanitarian one. Not having English as our official language causes several socioeconomic hardships for non English speaking citizens. This is because there is the lack of job opportunities and pay for immigrants who do not speak English. It is clearly harder to earn an equal wage as one's peers when a person cannot communicate with ninety-five percent or more of the citizens in his or her country. While these arguments provide a compelling case for the...