The Politics of English Only in the United States: Historical, Social, and Legal Aspects

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between language movements and high levels of immigrants in the early and late twentieth century. High immigration is an important factor in the emergence of political movements to abolish bilingual services, such as the recent initiatives in California. The chapter examines Official English legislation and recent legal cases, focusing on English Only laws and Proposition 227, which effectively eliminates bilingual education in California. It analyzes the issues raised by English Only rules. The imposition of English in the United States has not been uniform across different language groups. Of particular interest is the divergent treatment of linguistic groups and the ideological aims on the part of the dominant groups. Like racial minorities, non-English speakers have suffered a history of discrimination (including voting and access to political power), been stigmatized by government action, and suffered economic and social disadvantage.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.