The Washington Post, January 17th, 1996
Aside from his red herrings about bilingual ballots, police and Chinatown street signs, William Raspberry missed the point in his Jan. 1 op-ed column when he questioned the point of official English {"Official English: What Is This Fight About?"}. One tongue is not a sine qua non of a peaceful United States, but it is a deterrent to the otherwise easy growth of the polyglot enclaves that add to division and friction of the kinds we see in Canada and Belgium. It is tough to learn a new language as an adult, and some emigrants may have to contribute a purgatory generation, as did the first Russi...
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