http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlYG_DJo1...

NOT FAMILY FRIENDLY, of course.

I've always maintained that the Southern "y'all" was an attempt to continue to speak "proper" English. "You" is the plural of "thou". But now it's also the singular pronoun. So some dark recess of the Southern language processor feels compelled to re-pluralize "you" and comes up with "y'all".

"How is your Latin? "

How's your Welsh? Oh wait. Welsh isn't a dead language...

And then there is this story that I doubt actually happened, but it is something to think about: My friend was in the grocery store the other day and while she was in line at the check out there was a man in front of her who was angry because a Navajo woman was talking on the phone. When she hung up he told her "This is America, we speak English here. If you are going to speak Spanish go back to Mexico!" She told him, "I was speaking Navajo. We were here before you were, if you want to speak English go back to England."

Balkanism is the goal... divide and rule.

"Unfortunately, today in the US, you can go places where you won't hear English spoken at all. "

But enough about courtrooms and Congress...

Go to your local governmental office and see how many different "native language" forms there are. Depending on the state you may find that there are as many as 20 or more different language forms for the exact same thing.

It's not about permitting or prohibiting - it's about a culture that bends over backwards to support non-assimilation.

Immigrants up through the late '60s used to focus on assimilating into the US, which included learning the predominant language - English. About that time, the do-gooders began to profess that this was "unfair" and immigrants should be supported with native language support, to the degree that assimilation was no longer needed - and balkanization has been the result. We now have a country that does not share commonality of nearly anything. The Hispanics have their own television stations, as do the blacks, as do eastern Europeans and Asians to lesser degrees in large cities. Swaths of the country do not speak the same language (southern FL, most of the SW US, large sections of our major cities - heck, there are some places in Chicago where you can go for a few miles in any direction and not see an English sign).

This supports the progressive approach, as it makes it very easy to manipulate these segments - with specific messages that are not easily understood outside the targeted demo, with specific programs that target specific constituencies, etc.

Yeah... what she said!

"If anything, it erases those divisions by helping us see the beauty of other people and cultures. "

Familiarity breeds contempt. It also helps us see the ugliness of other people and cultures, without the ability to separate from them.

Oh, here we go; because we got shiny new toys made of plastic, people have *changed*, and the ways they behaved for thousands of years just won't *happen* in this brave new world.

Imagine what would happen to Atlantis if they invited all cultures to come join them, and express themselves equally. The cultures of the looters and moochers...

No, anyone could come to Atlantis, but they had to take the oath, first, and had to accept and practice the cultural values of Atlantis.

ONLY if the government also SEALS OUR BORDERS. Americans aren't adopting Spanish by any virtue of the language; they're adopting Spanish because of the influx of invaders who will not speak English.

Flush the invaders, and Spanish will recede like an ebbing tide.

And, where Spanish-speaking, Latin-American-culture-promoting, illegal alien invaders are concerned, for me, you darned right it's an us-vs-them atmosphere of utter hostility.

That *does* come under the purview of the commerce clause, unlike much of what the gov't does in the name of that tiny portion of the document.

I'm all for letting the language evolve. Not the same thing as having languages parallel themselves, particularly along class lines.
Remember, the illegal alien invaders coming from south of the border are NOT speaking Navajo or Mayan... they're speaking *Spanish*.

I don't think it rational to expect the British to (re) adopt French and Spanish as co-equal languages to English simply because they are the nearest neighbors and like invading Britain.

Spanish is based on Latin, a language that has been massaged to death. There are ideas which are not as easily expressed in Spanish as English, for that very reason. Spanish, like most west European languages, does everything bass-ackwards. Whenever I try to translate a Spanish speaker, of Yoda I immediately think.

If 2/3 of the country becomes Hispanic, under current conditions, there won't BE a country to worry about multiculturalism.
And if adopting Spanish as part of English works like every other piece of social engineering the left does, English will be pushed aside and *replaced* by Spanish.

Historically, French was the language of court, of the government. Latin was the language of the Church and of government (depending on when/where).

Only white trash spoke "English". By which I mean, the grammarians and philologists of medieval and renaissance Europe totally ignored English, and focused on structuring and formalizing Latin and French... which is why English is such a robust and powerful language, and why Latin is now a 'dead' language.