U.S. English (organization)
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- This article is about the political organization, U.S. English. For the dialect of English spoken in the United States, see American English.
U.S. English, Inc. is an American political advocacy group founded in 1983 by Senator S. I. Hayakawa and Dr. John Tanton to advocate the adoption of the English language as the official language of the United States of America.
Early advisory board members included Alistair Cooke, Saul Bellow, Walter Cronkite, Norman Cousins, Gore Vidal, Norman Podhoretz, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some of them are no longer affiliated with the group. Schwarzenegger is still a board member. Commenting on the group's diversity, its director of government relations, Tim Schultz said "A lot of our members have a lot of vowels in their names...That's something we're proud of." [1]
To date, the United States federal government has recognized no official language, even though nearly all federal, state and local government business is conducted in English. Some states and territories do have English as an official language; a few have passed laws embracing another language alongside English, such as Hawaiian in the state of Hawai'i. In total, 30 states have English as their official language. The U.S. House of Representatives passed English as the official language in 1996, but the Senate did not act on the measure before the conclusion of the 104th Congress.
In the view of U.S. English's members, making English the official language of the U.S. would mean that all government business must be conducted in English, "with commonsense exceptions" of necessity, for example the dissemination of public-health information to non-English speaking immigrant communities.
Opponents of the goals of the U.S. English organization or of English as the official language object that the practice would express a bias against immigrants who have not yet learned English. U.S. English suggests that the practice would instead encourage immigrants to learn English more quickly, and thereby reap greater economic and political benefits. Thus, in the view of many supporters of this approach—including members of other English-only advocacy groups—the move to make English the only official language can have benefits for non-English speakers, and is not merely a form of legalized discrimination.
Walter Cronkite was once a board member of the organization, while Linda Chavez was once executive director. Both resigned following the leak by the Arizona Republic newspaper of a 1988 memo from John Tanton which some including Cronkite believed went too far in its characterization of Latinos; Cronkite called the memo "embarrassing".[1] John Tanton also severed his ties to the group in 1988 following the leak of the memo, and is no longer associated with U.S. English; he later went on to found a separate pro-official English group, ProEnglish.
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1. Niven, David. "Finally, a bill to protect those who speak English" in The Other Paper. Autust 3-9, 2006, p 11. Suburban News Publications. Columbus, Ohio.
