If you’re a small business owner or a hiring manager at your company, get ready to get out your international dictionary.

Thanks to President Barack Obama’s newest move, if an employer asks his or her employees to speak English at work, they’re now subject to serious fines — and even jail time — for violating the employees’ civil rights.

“Requiring employees in the United States to speak a foreign language is not discriminatory but forcing them to speak English violates federal law under a sweeping order issued by the Obama administration to crack down on ‘national origin discrimination’ in the workplace,” conservative watch dog Judicial Watch reported last week. “The government’s new enforcement guidelines state that bilingual requirements don’t meet discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act but English-only rules do because they’re restrictive language policies.”

Consider how insane this new rule is: Should a company refuse to hire a person for a position because the candidate only speaks a rare Mongolian tribal language, they’re now considered racists that must be punished.

Of course, it’s perfectly acceptable to require that workers speak a foreign language. For example, you can put in your job description that the employee must be able translate Mongolian.

But employers cannot insist their employees speak English.

If you think this is fantasy, you’re in for a harsh awakening — the Obama administration has already successfully sued a Wisconsin metal and plastic manufacturer in 2014 for asking it’s employees to speak English, not Hmong (a South-Eastern Asian language), while working on the factory line.

According to Judicial Watch, “The administration asserts that the new rules, which cover a broad range of scenarios that could get employers in trouble, were created because the American workforce is ‘increasingly ethnically diverse.’ The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces the nation’s workplace discrimination laws, made them public a few days ago.”

— The Horn editorial team