Well over thirty million people in the United States speak a primary language other than English. Nearly twenty million of them speak Spanish. And these numbers are growing. This book lays out the two approaches to language policy - linguistic assimilation and linguistic pluralism - in clear and accessible terms.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: A Politics of Language in the United States? I. The Issues and the Context 1. Language Policies in Conflict: An Overview 2. Making Sense of Language Policy Conflict 3. The Social Foundations of U.S. Language Policies II. The Arguments 4. Historical Perspectives on U.S. Identity Politics and Ethnolinguistic Inequality 5. Language Policy and Equality: The Search for Justice 6. Language Policy and National Unity: The Search for the Common Good III. Critique and Reform 7. Flaws at Every Turn: A Critique of Assimilationist, Pluralist, and Confederationist Alternatives 8. Pluralistic Integration: Toward Greater Justice and a More Common Good Notes References Index

"Finally, a study that is at one and the same time understandable and scholarly, factual and ethical, pluralist and integrationist, and sensitive to the often disregarded overlap between class, race and ethnicity, a study that sympathetically examines all sides of the American language policy issue and finds that these sides can and should come together productively, so that both pluribus and unum will obtain." -Joshua A. Fishman, Ph.D., editor of Language and Ethnic Identity, Oxford University Press "In Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States, Schmidt provides an innovative approach to considering how issues of education, linguistic access to political and civil rights, and English as the official language are centrally tied to understandings of national identity." -Luis Fraga, Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University "This book is a major contribution to an understanding of language conflicts. It shows in a very insightful way that, beyond the controversies over specific issues and policies, such conflicts involve confrontations between socio-political values and diagnoses of the implications of ethno-linguistic diversity for the social order. Schmidt's analysis also makes sense of an enigma: Why is language a source of conflict in a society in which the national language is clearly not threatened?" -Raymond Breton, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto "Professor Schmidt's thought-provoking and insightful book offers a significant contribution to our critical understanding of language concerns and identity politics, not simply as primordial attachments, but as important initiatives towards the redefinition and reconstruction of society itself. In the process, he compels our respectful recognition of the varied and valuable ways of being human in the world." -Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair, Department of Black Studies, California State University, Long Beach and author of Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings "Moving beyond analysis to specific plans, [Schmidt] provides us with our national agenda for the new millennium. He enables us to see the dawning of identity politics as a high priority in our new political understanding of the United States." -David F. Marshall, Professor of English, Linguistics, and Peace Studies, University of North Dakota "[A] comprehensive examination of American language policy debates." -Journal of Politics "This comprehensive and carefully researched book fills a void in the literature in this area; it provides a balanced overview of the issues to identity politics. Insightful and challenging, it constitutes a significant contribution to the language policy debate." -Journal of International Migration and Integration