US Official Language

Without getting into an arguement on the benefits/downsides of bilingual anything, what might happen if the United States Congress decided that English was the official language? When they do this is up to you.

One distinct probability is that several public services (medical, police, etc.) wil be cheaper, as there will be no need to train personel in different languages. Also, whatever companies make instructions for varying products won't be as profitable... :D
 

Diamond

Banned
DominusNovus said:
When they do this is up to you.

Well, it seems to me that the farther back they do it, the better. It'd be a helluva lot easier to make it stick if they tried to legalize it in 1800 rather than 2000, that's for sure. Any congress attempting it today would be instantly branded as racist.
 
Actually, you'd still have a lot of multilingual text on goods sold here, due to the international market.... it's cheaper to make one wrapper/box with multilingual text than to make a different one for each language....
 
Same thing with Australian official language

Hey guys it's a similar story in Aust, since English has never been definitively codified as the official language here, and AFAIK only de facto accepted as such by custom.
 
Melvin there use to be a British language test attached to the old White Australian Policy for entry into the country. If they really didn't want to let you in you could find yourself doing a writen test in Welsh or Gaelic.
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Everything has instructions in 4-6 languages on them here in the UK. Its quite interesting that while the usual ones are French, Spanish, German, Dutch etc, or in local government variations of Urdu, Punjabi etc...I recently bought something whose other-language instructions were Swedish, Estonian etc which seemed an interesting Baltic mix

Grey Wolf
 
Yeah HARRY that's true, I'm aware of such instances as Czech communist Egon Krenz (?) back in the 1930s seeking entry into Aust, and the govt, not wanting such a subversive in the country, giving him a dictation test in Gaelic since he already was a master linguist. But did this policy officially establish English as the de jure official language ?
 
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