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Article II, Section 30a of our state constitution,
approved by voters in 1988, states that The English
language is the official language of the State of Colorado.
This section is self-executing; however, the General
Assembly may enact laws to implement this section.
So Rep. Dave Schultheis, a Colorado Springs Republican, didn't need to present yet another ballot measure to our General Assembly. He could have just introduced yet another law for the legislature to consider.
Originally, Schultheis proposed that Colorado school
districts be barred from requiring instruction in languages
other than English, although they could still offer
elective courses in other languages. State agencies would
be forbidden to issue literature or post signs in other
languages. Public libraries in Colorado would have been
forbidden to purchase any printed or electronic
documents, publications or other materials in a language
other than English.
He stripped some of these provisions from his proposal, but it still died by a 6-5 party-line vote in the House Committee on State, Veterans and Military Affairs.
So it won't be on the ballot this fall, and that's a pity. We need a good public argument.
When Colorado became a state 130 years ago, the
constitution printed in English, Spanish and German. That
constitution required state laws to be printed in those
three official languages
until 1890.
So we have a tradition of having more than one official
language in Colorado. Nobody can say back in the good
old days, there was just one official language.
Schultheis argues, and is joined by former Gov. Dick Lamm in this, that polities without a single language tend to be unstable, as with Canada and the secession movement in its francophone province of Quebec.
But that's not always the case. Switzerland has been a rather stable realm for the past 700 years or so, and it has three official languages: Italian, French and German, along with semi-official Romansch. Belgium is so stable that it's seldom in the news, and it also labors under three official languages: Dutch, French and German.
Thus there's no convincing argument that multiple official languages lead to national discord. Note that when we had a Civil War, both sides spoke the same language.
As for his proposed restrictions on public libraries, there hasn't been any notion half so silly since Colorado outlawed the teaching of German in public schools during World War I. The way his proposal read, it would have been illegal to go to a public library computer and log onto a website in a foreign language
It might be possible to set up a State Board of Library Purchase Examiners to insure that no Colorado public library sullied the linguistic purity of our citizenry by subscribing to Le Monde or Der Spiegel, or by acquiring Don Quixote or the Iliad in their original languages.
But how could the prohibition against electronic messages in foreign languages be enforced? Does Schultheis want Colorado to develop new Internet filtering technology so that we'd have something to export to China, which is always looking for better ways to control what its citizens read?
In some ways, I don't have a problem with Official English. The state government and its political subdivisions -- towns, counties, school districts, etc. -- have to keep bales of records. The records need to be in some language, and it would be expensive to keep them in more than one, so why not specify English?
But when we get past that, there are more questions than answers.
For instance, can Official English be as flexible as regular English? For instance, the French have a language academy to ensure the purity of their tongue.
So while we just borrowed the Taino word batata
through the Spanish patata
to get potato,
they stuck with pure French and christened the New World
tuber the pomme de terre
-- apple of the earth. We
simplify matters by borrowing words from other tongues:
tobacco, skunk, taboo, totem, to name a few.
Who in Colorado would make the decision borrowed words?
Would a school cafeteria get into trouble for posting
burritos
on the lunch board rather than canned
refried beans, ground mystery meat, zestful peppers and
shredded processed cheese-like material all wrapped in a
thin unleavened disk made primarily of cornmeal.
Who would decide when a word like burrito
or
schadenfreude
or carburetor
can be adopted
into Official English? To date, we've let the market
decide. We don't employ an academy to determine what's
English and what isn't.
But Colorado would need an academy if Schultheis had
succeeded. And maybe that was the real plan -- a whole new
state language bureaucracy, thus providing employment for
all those English majors whose current jobs involve asking
Do you want fries with that?
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