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Language Policy and Planning in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2008

Richard Ruiz
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Extract

While the United States has never declared a national official language, the primacy of English in public affairs has been well-established since the time of the earliest colonies (Crawford 1992a, Ruiz 1988). This is so in spite of the reluctance on the part of the British colonial authorities and, later, leaders of the early republic, to legislate matters of language—considered traditionally one of the most fundamental freedoms of civilized societies (Heath 1992). English even at that time was considered a language of political, economic, and social power and prestige; its preeminence in the United States, as elsewhere, has been reinforced in recent times by its establishment as a language of technology.

Type
Country and Regional Surveys
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 14 , March 1994 , pp. 111 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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