by Eric LaRedd

Created on: November 12, 2007

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, even our own American dollar bill. What do they all have in common? They are written in English, a language that should indeed be our nation's official language. English is the language spoken by our government, spoken by our businesses, and spoken by the general public.

Our goal here in America is to continue to advance as a country. The U.S. is made of many different kinds of people, united as one. President Theodore Roosevelt once said, "We have but one language here, and that is the English language." By requiring immigrants to learn to speak English, it would strengthen the bond between native-born Americans and the immigrants who come into our country.

English is the language spoken by our government and its leaders. When our country's president gives his State of the Union address, he delivers it in English. The founders of our country built the country to what it is now, in English, and any problems our country faces are deliberated by our government in English.

On February 14th, 2007 a bill was introduced into the U.S. House of representatives that would designate English as the countries official language. The same bill was introduced in 2005, but the bill never moved out of committee to the House floor. In a June 2006, a Rasmussen poll was taken and found that 85 percent of Americans support making English our country's official language.

People in America are not the only ones that feel English is needed to succeed in today's world. Between 2001-2003, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of 66,000 people from 50 different countries. One statement in the survey was "Children need to learn English to succeed in the world today." The percent of people agreeing with this statement is truly astounding. Ninety eight percent of people surveyed in Vietnam agreed, 96 percent in Indonesia, 93 percent in India, 92 percent in China and the Philippines, 91 percent in Honduras and Japan, and 90 percent in Mexico.

If you take a look at that list, you may notice that all of those countries are major producers of goods that are sold in the American economy. Also many immigrants are coming from those countries also, showing that immigrants do know the importance of speaking English.

The U.S. isn't the only country to have a debate about the official language. Our friendly neighbors to the north, Canada, have two official languages, French and English. Back in 1995, French speaking separatists in Quebec had a referendum that if passed would allow Quebec to secede just because they felt they were being singled out because of their language. The separatists lost the referendum 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent.

The separatists were .7 percent away from taking Quebec, and separating it from Canada. This whole situation was brought up because of the fact that there was a language barrier between the English and French speaking Canadians, a problem that may have been solved had Canada just selected one official language.

By naming English as the official language of our country, we move one step closer to becoming a country, consisting of many people from many different backgrounds, yet united as one, communicating as one, towards a better future.

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