Before you hail a NYC cab, grab a dictionary

New York City cabbies will no longer be required to take an English proficiency test to get behind the wheel.

Sponsored by Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, the ordinance exempts the 96% of drivers who were born outside the U. S from needing to converse in English with their passengers. For New Yorkers accustomed to dealing with a language barrier when buying a soft pretzel from a street vendor, this might not be especially burdensome. But for the couple visiting town to score a ticket to a matinee on Broadway, it could require them to hire an interpreter or take a Berlitz course before they set out from Omaha or Boise.

A spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said requiring a working language of English was a barrier to employment for “the city’s hardworking immigrant community.” Perhaps it might dawn on New York, if it really cares so much about removing obstacles to immigrants, that we are an English- speaking country. Economic advancement here is difficult, if not impossible, for people who cannot speak English.

Past regulations never required applicants for a hack license to recite the preamble to the Constitution. Just get me to Yankee Stadium or Penn Station. The mayor’s flack has yet to explain how house numbers will be communicated without the need to have paper and pencil.

The idea that America has a core culture has fallen into disfavor. But it is one thing to prefer chicken tikka masala to mac and cheese and quite another to open the door to linguistic anarchy.

Taxi English doesn’t have to be the King’s English. Speak it with an accent. Fine. Make grammatical mistakes. So what? Even native English speakers are no great grammarians, but they can communicate. The cultural relativists on the New York City Council do no one a favor when we can’t get to our destination without a phrase book in Urdu or Polish.

The worst part of the new arrangement is its impact on the immigrant driver. English is now the lingua franca of much of the world. It’s not just some toxic remnant of white- skin privilege, colonialism or linguistic imperialism. It’s the way people from Hyderabad to Honolulu communicate with one another. For an immigrant to our country, it is a key to success not only here but in the larger world.

There’s no better way to keep an immigrant behind the wheel of a taxi or washing dishes in a restaurant than by robbing him or her of the handholds for moving up in the world. I’m certain that Councilman Rodriguez would never have been able to win a seat on the city council if he lacked a command of English. That is the language in which the council conducts its business.

We don’t need to put immigrants through hazing rituals to prove their fitness to live here, but it is a reasonable expectation that they make the effort to speak English. The actions of the New York City Council make that task very much harder.