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Williams 1 Matthew Williams Professor Vagnoni ENC 1101 5 December 2013 Multilingualism or Not? Today in America, there is a raging debate going on: should we promote multilingualism or accept a "melting pot" ideology? The melting pot ideology dictates assimilating into a common culture and language. Views on this issue are very polarized, which make a compromise seem hard to accomplish. Two articles that pertain to this topic are "American Multilingualism: A National Tragedy," by Franklin Raff published on WND.com, and "English Only Laws Divide and Demean," by Warren J. Blumenfeld published in The Huffington Post. Both articles are direct contradictions of each other with Raff saying languages other than English are unduly practiced and …show more content…

Raff also speaks of high failure rates of Hispanics but he fails to account for any success of Hispanics in America, by doing this he can gain support from people who do not choose to consider more factors than the ones only stated by Raff. He makes it seem as though it is all doom and gloom because of knowing another language. In "English Only Laws Divide and Demean," Warren Blumenfeld starts by relating an experience he had with his multilingual cousin, living in Belgium. His cousin poses a riddle to him, with the outcome saying that persons that can only speak one language are referred to as "US-American" as opposed to monolingual. Blumenfeld accepts this as a truth and goes on to lament that despite being so closely bordered by countries that speak other languages, Americans are stuck in their monolingual ways. He states that Americans’ lack of care for other languages has been endorsed by major political figures such as former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Rick Santorum. The ideas that there has been a campaign to make English the "official" language and that laws have been proposed to outlaw other languages are slammed by Blumenfeld, who states he has even started a petition against this movement. He also uses a personal experience of a friend of Mexican descent, who as a child was

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