What catalytic events shook colonial America and Encouraged Independence?

What if Congress chose to speak German in The United States of America, after Independence from Britannia?

• One told me long ago when I was a student in USA that there was a committee once to decide on the language to be spoken in the United States of America after independence from Britannia. At that time I heard number of English spoken were less than German and French speaking people and by majority America was going to speak German. However, influence of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington the first president of the nation who was English speaking turned the history. What would be the world like today if the United States of America spoke German?

• Answer:

  All of this story counts as an urban legend. Here are the facts. English was the majority language in the Thirteen Colonies. The United States never seriously considered making German the official language - and whether they considered it even idly is doubtful. While many of the Founding Fathers were multilingual, virtually all of them spoke English as a first language. So how did the urban legend come to be? In 1794, a group of Virginian German-Americans petitioned the government to print federal laws in German in addition to English. In January of 1795, the House of Representatives had a vote on whether or not to table discussion on the proposal for a later date - they hadn't yet voted on the proposal itself. The tabling vote failed and the proposal was simply dropped. Which is to say that German never came close to being the US' official language, and George Washington had nothing to do with that. Having said all that, what would have happened if German had been voted the official language of the US? It wouldn't have taken. Again, the majority of the population spoke English, and it was the lingua franca of the Thirteen Colonies and of the early USA. Besides, the US was already using English to define itself as different from Great Britain - Noah Webster was already publishing books that were differentiating American spelling (though his dictionary wouldn't come until the 1820's), so linguistic breaks had already been made without taking such a radical step. Also, the authority of the US government to collect taxes wasn't universally recognized in the early days of the Republic. Congress wasn't about to make a law forcing people to switch languages when they couldn't enforce an excise tax on whiskey without sparking a rebellion.