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English as the Official Language of Trade: Analysis

In the case of Frontera v. Sindell in 1975, the Sixth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals stated, "The common, national language of the United States is English" (Baron 2). Despite this legal precedent, there are people who disagree that English should be the national and primary form of communication in all areas of education and commerce; these are mainly immigrants and those that advocate for immigrants. These contesters assert that because the nation's Spanish-speaking population is increasing, Spanish should become the national language, or at least a co-primary language along with English.

Nevertheless, there are important reasons that English should remain the national and primary language in America. One of these is that it is "the language of the Constitution, laws, and government operations" (Baron 3). Allowing another language to be primary would mean converting all of these into the second language, thereby making them unintelligible to English-speaking Americans. If both English and a second language were made equal co-primaries, then everything in the government would have to be done in parallel in both languages, from Senate and House deliberations to the laws. The word "unwieldy" barely begins to describe the chaos that would ensue, and there would be vast room for errors in translation and other mistakes. In addition, in our globalized economy, it is more important to be able to communicate with a larger number of other people than ever before, and as Power (1) points out, "Non-native English-speakers now outnumber native ones 3 to 1. And it's changing the way we Communicate."

In primary education, making education bilingual has already been attempted and has proven difficult to achieve effectively (Baron xviii). At the university and research levels of education, Nunan (590) cites Swales, who estimated as far back as 1987 that "more than 50% of the millions of academic pap...

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English as the Official Language of Trade: Analysis. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:01, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001475.html