Why Do I Have to Press One for English?

This is America right? We speak English here and always have, so why do I have to press one for English? According to a recent census, nearly 90% of Americans speak English, and it's the generally accepted language in America and always has been!

Is this really true?

The first people here, the American Indians spoke a multitude of languages. Christopher Columbus spoke Spanish and Italian. While Erik the Red spoke Icelandic. In St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest, continuously occupied European settlement in the modern United States they spoke Spanish.

So English hasn't always been the primary language spoken in America but 90% of the people here speak it now. Shouldn't the other 10% have to learn English? When our grandparents or their grandparents immigrated here they spoke English.

Once again I ask the question is that really true?

Up until the start of World War One over 10% of our population spoke German as a first language. In 1923 most states eliminated German from their schools curriculum. In some states, it was illegal to speak anything but English in public.

The United States had traditionally permitted only a relatively small number of people to immigrate into the U.S., thus allowing for decades of assimilation. After the peak of about 8.7 million in the first decade of the 20th century, numbers went steadily down. Immigration averaged only 195,000 per year from 1921 through 1970. With the change in immigration laws in 1965, immigration levels have shot upward from 250,000 per year to over 1 million per year.

Now we are seeing four times the number of legal immigrants that we had in past years, not to mention the illegal immigrants. The majority of these people are coming from Spanish speaking countries. Due to she sheer number of people the assumption is going to be they are unwilling to learn English. When in fact they are assimilating as fast as or even faster than generations past.

Growing up an "Army Brat" I took six years of German in school and later taught myself a broken Spanish. I have always been amazed that most Americans only speak one language whereas most Europeans speak at least two. My take on learning language is simple learn as many as you can. It's great to be able to communicate with other people in their own language.

So why do I have to press one for English? Because I'm an American and I welcomed these people who are here legally into my homeland with open arms with the hopes that their differences will better me as a person, and make America better as a whole.