Abstract :
Politics, legislation and social attitudes became closely entangled in language
planning and policy in the United States soon after its independence. In the last two
centuries, political views and legislation regarding immigration and citizenship have
swung from libertarian to authoritarian communitarian as different political parties
have come to power and made their views known publicly. The debates have been
mainly about language and civic nationalism. In terms of language, on the one hand,
many political thinkers have argued for a common language or a public
monolingualism (see Huntingdon, 2005; Schlesinger, 1992), because they believe a
bilingual or multilingual country could result in ghettoization and social immobility
(Pogge, 2003).
