I analyze how people write and revise local language policies, through text histories of four policies in Frederick County, Anne Arundel County, Queen Anne’s County, and Carroll County in the state of Maryland. Three of the four policies follow the same general template, and that template emerged out of an even earlier partnership between the organization ProEnglish and the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. This state of affairs complicates previous accounts of local language policies, which tend to treat the phenomenon as either a purely grassroots phenomenon or as a case of astroturfing. Instead, all language policymakers have agency and are strategic about their writing processes. I argue that three writing strategies are particularly important: ghostwriting, making conscious choices about genre, and working with templates. While language policies are sometimes treated as transparent windows into language ideology, the reality is more complex because there are so many other procedural and interpersonal factors involved.

From the beginning, local language policies were crucial to the formation of the English-only movement. From the 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s, relatively disparate activists and politicians started to notice each other, collaborate with each other, and form English-only organizations together. To tell this story, I focus on the perspectives and experiences of key figures like Emmy Shafer, who started the current English-only movement in 1980 when she started organizing support for an Antibilingualism Ordinance targeting Spanish and Kreyòl in Dade County, Florida. Shafer pioneered a number of groundbreaking strategies that would become a blueprint, like emphasizing the local economy, starting a nonprofit, and hiring a ghostwriter. I also introduce the two figures who really popularized the idea of making English official: John Tanton and Senator S. I. Hayakawa. I discuss the founding of U.S. English and of English Language Advocates (later renamed ProEnglish). Ultimately, these people and organizations paved the way for the local language policies discussed in future chapters.

Language policies are difficult to enact, but they may be even more difficult to undo. Frederick County is one of the rare communities to ever repeal an English-only policy. I analyze how activists and politicians worked in concert to dismantle the ordinance, both in terms of actually passing a repeal bill and by marshaling community support more broadly. I find that people used four strategies: flipping the economics script, linking language to race and racism, questioning whether English can even be defined and separated from other languages, and highlighting the role of collective action. At the same time, focusing on the economic benefits of multilingualism nearly eclipsed the other approaches, with the end result that the repeal bill itself offered a more limited vision of language policy than the rest of the repeal campaign and the interviews. Ultimately, I argue that there are advantages as well as risks to cultivating and combining different alternatives to English-only policies. In light of these people’s successful advocacy, I also conclude that scholars have much to learn from activists’ expertise.

While the desire for “One Nation, One Language” has played a key role in language policies around the world, I argue that it is not really what drives the English-only movement in the United States. Some previous work on language and power oversimplifies how power works, since a policy seeming quaint and innocuous (and therefore impervious to criticism) can be just as powerful as a policy framed in terms of nationalism or globalization. Instead, drawing on Jan Blommaert’s theory of “upscaling,” I argue that downscaling plays just as pivotal a role in the English-only movement, and I examine examples that cut across my interviews, archival research, observations, and policy documents. I begin by analyzing examples of downscaling on its own, then turn toward situations where people engage in both upscaling and downscaling in a single text or interaction. Ultimately, scaling in either direction can be a way to claim linguistic authority. At the same time, sometimes policymakers do not walk this tightrope successfully, and there can be discursive dissonance. I argue that this sort of dissonance played a role in the eventual downfall of Frederick County’s Official English ordinance.

I consider the implications of this study for future research and policymaking, and I reflect on the legacies of the people and policies I discuss in the book. For instance, I discuss potential applications to healthcare policy, specifically around the opioid epidemic, and education policy. I also address how the themes of the book play out in my own everyday work as a teacher.

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.