Ok, so yesterday's offtopic thread brought us some good religious discussion, some political jargon, a "stimulating" video from Damien, and talk of Long John Silver's combo plates...
I want to get back into the poitical side of things for a bit and discuss an issue that was brought up yesterday, and that is the idea of the United States being a "Melting Pot" of cultures.
My rant today is about language. There are a large number of countries that declare English as their official national language. The United States is not one of those countries. Officially, the US does not have a national language. 30 states (and a few individual cities) have declared english as the official language. Throughout the US, you can recieve copies of national documents in approximately 52 different languages. All of the translation and printing of the documents comes at the expense of the government. What does this mean? Recently, the city of Nashville, TN held a special election to vote on an official language. The vote ultimately failed, but what I wanted to point out in this link is where it says that delcaring english as the official language would save the city about $100k, though it did not say if this was monthly or annually. If a single city could save 100k, how much could the nation save? I have no problems with any other language. I myself can speak pretty decent spanish. But my question is: Why must our government cater to 52 different languages? Why does my government have to provide official government documents in Armenian where there are only 200k of them in the entire US (according to Wikipedia)? Or Greek when only 370k people in the US speak greek? Why do we cater to the few, when the few refuse to adapt to the many?Originally Posted by Doctor G
Discuss...