The State of Indiana believes all Hoosiers should be able to speak English. Seems like a good idea to me.
Who would not want to be able to speak the same language as nearly 98 percent of the rest of the nation? In fact, we Americans like speaking English so much that 86 percent of English speakers cannot speak any other language. That is quite an endorsement.
Furthermore, most of that 2 percent of our population unable to speak English seems to want to learn the language, judging from the rising number of students in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes around the state and across the nation.
Still, there are those among us who continue to worry about some future linguistics apocalypse sparked by a tsunami of immigrants bent on requiring road signs in Swahili — or maybe Armenian translations on our breakfast cereal boxes.
Anticipating such a potential catastrophe back in 1984, the Indiana General Assembly passed legislation making English the official language of all Hoosiers.
The resolution was written and shepherded through the legislature by the late state Sen. Joseph Corcoran of Seymour, who said the purpose was to solve our “foreign language problem” before it becomes a problem. Sen. Corcoran said, and his fellow legislators agreed, that “bilingualism could divide and destroy our nation and its culture.”
Problem was, while Indiana had established a preemptive, linguistics border wall, would-be invaders could still climb over the wall and begin speaking Navajo in a city council meeting or a parent-teacher conference without penalty. (By the way, for you naysayers, 84 Hoosiers speak Navajo as their primary language, according to the 2010 census.)
Then in last year’s General Assembly, Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, submitted a bill to try to plug up some of the holes in the wall. His bill encouraged Hoosiers to promote the use of the English language by all Indiana residents and to “reach out to those who don’t speak English and encourage them to use it.” (I have no idea how he intended for people who don’t speak English to use it, or where he found people who know English but refuse to use it.)
Sen. Delph’s bill also would have mandated that English be used for every public record, public meeting and official act of the state of Indiana. (The bill died in committee and no new version has emerged so far in the current legislative session.)
Although 26 other states have joined Indiana in declaring English the “official language,” numerous attempts at constitutional amendments to do the same for the whole country have failed through the years.
Our Founding Fathers considered naming an “official language” when they wrote the Constitution 230 years ago, but decided no problem existed. This was in spite of the fact that a fairly large number of citizens around the original 13 states spoke German, French or Dutch, and could have launched a terrorist attack on our mother tongue.
Since that time, the issue has come before Congress several times, but has been voted down. No linguistics apocalypse has surfaced.
Still, we must credit the State of Indiana for being cautious. No one wants his or her children kidnapped in the middle of the night and forced to learn Norwegian.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. Contact him at editorial@therepublic.com.
