English Language

A leading California foundation plans today to announce a broad campaign to help Los Angeles immigrants become more active citizens with a new $3.75-million, five-year program to help them learn English, improve job skills and increase civic participation. The California Community Foundation in Los Angeles also is set to release a 75-page report that documents the essential and dynamic role immigrants play in the regional economy and suggests ways to help them become even more productive.

Over the last three years, police in Dallas have ticketed 39 drivers for not speaking English, even though there is no law requiring drivers be able to do so. Amid growing public anger, Police Chief David Kunkle announced last week that the citations would be thrown out and that the officers who issued them would be investigated. The cases came to light when a Mexican immigrant, Ernestina Mondragon, went to the media saying that she had been cited for being a "non-English-speaking driver" during a routine traffic stop.

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, and were the master wordsmith alive today, I suspect he would be both a fan and a critic of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, taking place today and Thursday. Johnson penned the first annotated dictionary of the English language. At 3 million words in length, with 43,000 entries, it is one of history's greatest lexicographical achievements. As it happens, Johnson also believed that no word should ever end with "c."

A decade ago, she was an anomaly: a 20-year-old from Korea whose golf game articulated what her limited English could not. Se Ri Pak did not know then that becoming the youngest to win the U.S. Women's Open would inspire droves of Koreans and Korean Americans to dream of the LPGA. Inbee Park was among them. Last year, when she clinched the U.S. Open title at age 19, she earned Pak's previous title and humbly filled the shoes of her idol. Park's story echoes dozens on the tour.

Learning your ABCs can be a tough proposition in India. Not the alphabet; even Indians who can't speak English fluently know their letters. But pity the poor soul who strays unprepared into the world of newspapers, magazines, documents, signs, billboards -- in short, anywhere there's text -- only to find that minding your Ps and Qs, literally, can be a headache. That's because this land sometimes seems to have as many initials, acronyms and abbreviations in usage as it does people.

One-third of California's 1.4 million nonnative students demonstrated enough English fluency this year to gain access to higher-level and college-prep course work, a modest improvement over last year, according to data released Wednesday by the state Department of Education. Increasing limited-English-speaking students' access to more rigorous classes and decreasing the achievement gap between these students and their native classmates are "moral" and "economic" imperatives, said Supt.

According to the august Oxford English Dictionary, going bananas was simply not done before 1968, nobody went bonkers before 1957 and no one went to the loo before 1940. But the publishers of the 600,000-word reference book, billed as "the definitive record of the English language," are willing to be proved wrong.

Few cities have been as successful as this one in parlaying a knowledge of English into an economic boom. Every day, an army of call-center workers chirps, "Can I help you?" in lilting Indian tones to thousands of customer-service callers half a world away. In other gleaming high-rises, legions of software engineers toil at their computers designing programs for clients in the United States, Britain and Canada.

State lawmakers are considering a proposal that would require drivers to prove proficiency in English before receiving a license. GOP Rep. Dennis Himmelberger said his proposal would require examiners to determine if an applicant needs a proficiency test. Examiners would also determine applicants' citizenship and note their home country on the license. A House committee took no immediate action on the measure.

The signs are unmistakable: an NFL game at Azteca Stadium, soaring land prices from Ensenada to Merida and a Starbucks infestation of the swanky Polanco neighborhood. Though most Americans are aware of the growing "Latinization" of the United States, a parallel phenomenon is taking place on the other side of the border. Already, at least half a million U.S. ex-patriots and long-term visitors make their homes in Mexico (plus another half-million Canadians).