Should English be the official language of the United States?

[muon2]

There's a number of meanings for "official language".  I can mean the use of English as the official language for legal documents including laws, it can interpreted as a designation of English as a language for all business in the country, and it can be merely a formal recognition of English in an official capacity. Thirty states already use English as the official language of the state - that's the legal sense. As you can see in the map below some states have had that requirement for quite some time, and other states have jumped on the more recent bandwagon as suggested by some posts.



IL has had it since 1969 and it doesn't stop providing services in a variety of languages. It just means that English is the official language in the same sense that the cardinal is the official state bird and "Land of Lincoln" is the official state slogan. There are also specific official records in IL that are required to be in English. There's a useful policy goal to have those records in English since it simplifies the need for the courts to have translation from any number of arbitrary languages.