No, he didn't really...

Santorum, um, bottomed out yesterday in Puerto Rico.  Not only did he say they had to embrace English as their official language, he also said (according to the Daily Kos):

"Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law," Santorum said. "And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language."

Do you ever feel like it's hopeless?  (Tangent:  I think all of his female relatives do!  Not looking too cheery, there, girls!  Well, that's how I'd feel if I was related to him, too.)

ProEnglish and white nationalism?

We've called attention on this blog before to connections between right-wing extremism and English-only types. Yesterday brought a new example: CPAC featured a panel on "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity." Progressive media people have called attention to the role of Peter Brimelow at CPAC, who has apparently described bilingualism as about "the determination of the elites not to press immigrants to assimilate" (here). But there's more, according to Mother Jones,

Robert Vandervoort, who runs a group called ProEnglish and according to the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights "was also the organizer of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance" … .

The ProEnglish website includes a lot on their efforts to eliminate bilingual ballots, etc., and they're pushing the effort to remove an elected official in Arizona over her alleged lack of knowledge of English. They don't seem to play up their ties to the extreme right.

It's worth keeping an eye on what the English-only types do when they're not doing English-only stuff.

Update from TPM, here.

More English Only in Michigan

See this story. Here's the start of the piece:

Six languages were heard spoken at Spartan Stadium last weekend during the annual football showdown between Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, state Rep. Kenneth Kurtz, R-Coldwater, said.

Those watching at home heard the game in one language — English, Kurtz noted.

"Why? Because that's the language," he said.

"We're a nation of immigrants. We've come together under one system of government, one Constitution, and that Constitution is in English," Kurtz added.

If language use today is determined by the original language of documents (or speakers? cultures?), there may be big changes coming on various fronts, but what I want to know is what six languages were spoken and how the heck Kurtz knows?

Spanish speakers learning English in the US

We've been through this topic before, but here's more on just how fast Spanish speakers in this country are learning English, based on work from the Pew Hispanic Center. (Note that there's a menu bar across the top, where you can get different sub-stories.) The key info is captured in the graphic:

Even the BBC gets part of a language story right! (If you don't get why that's shocking, click here and search 'BBC'.) But of course I have a quibble:

Very often [Hispanics] switch between languages within a single sentence, or borrow English words and put them into Spanish, making a hybrid known as Spanglish.

Every language borrows from others, and English is vastly more hybrid on that count than most 'Spanglish' I've heard. Codeswitching is another game -- it's real and it's important and striking linguistic behavior. For example, you can only really do it appropriately if you're really solid in both languages. But getting at that behavior is just not something you can usually ask people. Bilinguals are often aware that they codeswitch and may report it, but what the label means varies -- I've heard people who use an occasional English word consider that 'Spanglish', and everybody in this country does that, pretty much. In fact, I'll bet you $20 that there are systematic differences in what people mean by the term across generations.

Anyway, more information in easy-to-present form for how fast immigrants are learning English today.

English Only in higher ed: Shekleton's Law

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the president of Kaplan College's Chula Vista campus lost his job for trying to enforce English Only. The incident involved a side conversation in class in Spanish.

James F. Shekleton gets it right in a quote at the end of the piece:

If you start legislating language, you're going to end up with a mess.

I hereby dub this Shekleton's Law. It has vast implications for language planning and policy people, obviously. They will need some time to digest it, no doubt.

The image is from here, and you probably should go there to get some further context on this topic ... and to understand the image.