Official Or Not, English Reigns Supreme

IN TUCSON, ARIZONA, LAST JULY, 76 HISPANIC IMMIGRANTS WERE sworn in as U.S. citizens. While the oath was administered in English, the surrounding ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Last May, Florida's 13-member Dade County Commission unanimously repealed an English-only ordinance that banned the use of other languages in public meetings and most government publications.

Are these harbingers of a long slide into bi- or multilingualism and a culturally fragmented citizenry -- the Quebecification of America? There are those who fear so. "Whatever happend to the idea of E pluribus unum?" asks Robert Parker, chairman of Arizonans for Official English, an organization endorsing English as the state's official language. Republican Representative Toby Roth of Wisconsin is so alarmed he has introduced a bill -- the Declaration of Official Language Act -- that would eliminate bilingual ballots and require English-proficiency exams for all citizenship applications. Last March, California Republican Congressman John Doolittle submitted a constitutional amendment that would make English the official language of the U.S.

Despite often emotional debate over such incidents, however, bilingualism remains a scattered, mostly local concern. Demands that Spanish be granted equal status have been limited to places like Miami, where Hispanics have achieved a measure of political power. Similar claims for other languages are virtually nonexistent. Nor is the issue new. In 1862 Congress defeated a bill that would have required U.S. government publications to be printed in German, then widely in use. In 1975 a similar debate erupted over the decision to require bilingual ballots in places with large non-English speaking populations. That the U.S. is -- and will remain -- an English-speaking nation has yet to be seriously called into question. P.G.