'U.S. English': its life and works.

This article investigates the nature of the arguments used by U.S. English, the chief interest group in charge of urging a return to a Type A language planning policy and the most intellectually useful political science perspective which might explain how California's voters have come to think this way about language use and language function in the U.S. The first proposition upon which the group bases its demand for English as the official language in the U.S. is that without an official language the U.S. will become disunified, as with Canada's problems with Quebec. The fact that Canada's disunity occurs even when French and English are the co-official languages of the country is disregarded. But former Senator Hayakawa has for some time spoken of what he fears to bet the centripetal effect of two languages in Canada, and U.S. English has adopted him and his point of view as its own. Scholars have no way of knowing whether or not Senator Hayakawa knew the facts about Quebec history, French-Canadian ethnicity, the nature of language group mobilization, the actual social and economic forces at work in Quebec, the manifest differences between French Canadian and U.S. politics, or the nature of political leadership in Quebec as opposed to the kind of elites emerging within Mexican-American groups.