ENGLISH-ONLY LAW GOES TO HIGH COURT.

Byline: Aaron Epstein Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The controversial drive to make English the official language of government, which already has seeped into this year's presidential election campaign, soon will undergo its first Supreme Court test.

On Monday, the justices agreed to weigh the validity of the toughest of the nation's language restrictions - a 1988 Arizona constitutional amendment that requires English to be "the language of the ballot, the public schools and all government functions and actions."

The outcome of the case, which will be argued in the fall and decided in the first half of 1997, could have widespread effect on an increasingly multilingual nation.

Behind the dispute are two conflicting sets of American values. One stresses the need for a common culture that speeds assimilation of foreign-born children and reduces the "Babel" of multiple languages. The other tradition emphasizes the benefits of a tolerance that avoids repression of languages and permits a variety of cultures to flourish.

Census figures show that the numbers of U.S. residents who speak a foreign language at home are increasing. From 1980 to 1990, the number who speak Spanish grew by 56 percent; the number of Chinese speakers increased 109 percent.

In all, nearly 32 million people over the age of 5 - 14 percent of all U.S. residents - speak a foreign language at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That's up from 11 percent in 1980.

California is among the 21 states and more than 40 cities that have enacted laws or amendments declaring English their official tongue. In most states, however, the adopted policies are largely symbolic.

The Arizona case accepted for Supreme Court review stems from a lawsuit filed by Maria-Kelley F. Yniguez, a bilingual state employee who spoke English or Spanish while evaluating medical malpractice claims in 1988.

She complained that forcing her to stop speaking Spanish violated her First Amendment rights of free speech. It was necessary for her to speak Spanish on the job as "kind of a solidarity thing" and "to demonstrate my belief that Arizona enjoys a pluralistic society," she said.

Jaime Gutierrez, a Latino state senator, joined the suit, saying he was afraid he would be sued if he continued to speak to his constituents in Spanish.

Last year, the appeals court for eight Western states and Hawaii voted 6-5 to strike down Arizona's English-only amendment as coercive, overly broad, damaging to government efficiency, and unfair to state residents, especially Latinos. Arizona ranks fourth among states in the percentage of Latino residents (19 percent).

One's choice of language is as protected by the First Amendment as the content of one's speech, Judge Stephen Reinhardt observed in the majority opinion. "Language is by definition speech, and the regulation of any language is the regulation of speech," he said.

The amendment was so broad that "the Arizona state universities would be barred from issuing diplomas in Latin and judges performing (Jewish) weddings would be prohibited from saying 'Mazel Tov' as part of the official marriage ceremony," said Reinhardt, whose liberal opinions have not fared well at the conservative Supreme Court.

Dissenters said that choice of language doesn't qualify as speech and that the general public and state employees have no constitutional right to insist that government services be performed in languages other than English.

Particularly vehement objections came from Alex Kosinski, a conservative judge who said Reinhardt's opinion would give state employees "the right to turn every policy disagreement into a federal lawsuit."

"Since they (Arizonans) were paying Yniguez's salary, I had assumed it was their call whether Yniguez spent her work time processing claims, promoting English or twiddling her thumbs," Kosinski declared.

Reinhardt retorted in a counterattack aimed at Kosinski: "His would be an Orwellian world in which Big Brother would compel its minions to say 'War is Peace' and 'Peace is War' . . . Judge Kosinski's view of the rights of non-English-speaking persons would make the Statue of Liberty weep."

In agreeing to hear the case, however, the Supreme Court raised the possibility that it may not reach the free-speech issues. The justices requested arguments on whether Arizonans for Official English, which sponsored the amendment, has a right to appeal when the state government declined to do so.