Introduction

Summary

Many people have tried and failed to make English the only official language of the United States. In contrast to earlier studies of these national efforts, I argue that people in the English-only movement are really at their most successful when they focus on writing local language policies. Working in local governments and talking about the local community can make monolingualism seem practical at best, innocuous at worst. People who participate in the English-only movement are adept at drafting, copying, revising, sharing, and promoting language policies. At the same time, they are not a united front, in terms of either their motivations or their strategies. After introducing the topic, I address why English-only policies matter: They target people who are already marginalized, they oversimplify how language works, they are popular, and the strategies people use to write and promote these policies are ingenious. Finally, I discuss how I designed this study of the recent history of English-only policies using ethnography and other research methodologies.