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.