Is The U.S. On The Verge Of Going Bilingual?

To judge from the furor raised by conservatives last week when a group of Latin recording artists released a Spanish version of The Star-Spangled Banner, you would have thought that America was on the verge of losing its very soul. Ariel Dorfman says that we’d better get used to it. “This Spanish is not going to fade away as Norwegian or Italian or German did during previous assimilated waves… If this prophecy of mine is right, and America will sometime in the near or distant future be articulating its identity in two inevitable languages, then the question looms: how will the citizens of the United States react to this monumental challenge?”