Originally Posted by PJ24

Not true. Way back when, most of the United States immigrants were from Europe. If you could find statistics on it, for the past 100 years, I'll bet Europeans outnumber Mexicans in immigration to the US. Funny thing about that? Most of them did it legally.

I unfortunately think my point is still valid: We're talking languagewise. Europeans as a whole may outnumber Hispanics but they never spoke the same language. If they had, they would have probably weakened the predominance of English. I believe you see what I mean.

The numbers aren't even close IG.

http://www.census.gov/population/www...029/tab02.html

Originally Posted by The Cooler King

The numbers aren't even close IG.

http://www.census.gov/population/www...029/tab02.html

I know. But Europeans have never spoken the same language hence they could have never exerted a pressure comparable to today's Hispanics'.
Can you guys be sure that the predominance of the English language in the United states would not have been threatened if there had been such a thing as a "European" language?
Europeans have always come from small countries (when compared to the continental areas), and each one of their countries of origin had its own language.

They must have exerted some type of pressure since this sentence I am typing right now is in English. Now, let me throw a few numbers at you...

According to the most recent Census in 2000, 47 million people 5 years and older spoke a language other than English. That is up from the 31.8 million in 1990. Of those 47 million, 59.9 percent spoke Spanish (up from 54.5 percent in 1990). That is 28,153,000 people, about 10% of the United State's total population of 281,421,906. That is a whole lotta people. That's roughly 3.5 times the population of our most populated city, New York. And all of these numbers are from 2000. I am quite positive that the numbers have gone up in the past six years.

English was already THE ONLY language in America when Irish, Dutch, German, Swedish, Italian, French, Greek, Jewish, Polish immigrants started to flow in.
They could not change that as each of those groups spoke a language of its own.
Anywyas we do agree that this issue is going to grow and that the US will have to adopt a clear-cut policy to deal with it.