Bilingual.

[nerdanel]

Many Americans seem to fear the possibility of a bilingual (English/Spanish) nation greatly. From time to time, we see Congress and state legislatures grappling with the question of how vigorously to endorse English as "the" official/national language.

How important is it that we remain "officially" or practically predominantly monolingual? Would we have the same fear of two languages if we were contending with a sudden influx of Quebecois and/or native French people who were not English-literate? To tie it into the other thread: to what extent are people's issues with illegal immigration (or, for some people, their prejudice against legal Hispanic immigration as well) caught up with their apparent distaste for English/Spanish bilingualism? Might increased openness to the Spanish language facilitate our "melting pot" dynamic and multiculturalism more generally? On the other hand, are two languages genuinely too much to contend with? Would we have to bear significant government expenditures? Loss of efficiency? Does the experience thus far in the private sector contradict these claims? Is there any serious danger that if we become bilingual, at some point in the foreseeable future, we will need to become trilingual?

I would especially value tales from other countries with more than one prevalent language.

Unfortunately, I myself have little to add. I tend towards a kneejerk, "We have one language, and you should speak it in addition to whatever other languages you have, if you want to live here" unrefined view that I am hoping to parse a little more closely. As my not-so-rhetorical questions above hopefully indicate, I am open to being persuaded either way.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm afraid I too am rather insensitive to people who come to this country and make no effort to learn the language. Rather hypocritical of me, since I myself only speak one language. But there you have it.

[vison]

Well, I live in an officially bilingual country. French and English are both Canada's official languages.

There has always been a lot of controversy about this, with some in the English majority saying, "We beat you on the Plains of Abraham, so you should forget being French and speak English". Many English speakers bitterly resent the fact that in order to rise in the Civil Service you must be bilingual.

English was the language of the Power Structure for a long time. We have a kind of informal tradition that our Prime Ministers alternate between French and English: but the French speaking Prime Ministers HAD to speak English while until very recently the English speaking Prime Ministers often spoke no French at all. Naturally enough this was resented in Quebec. "Les Anglos" were brutes, etc.

Kellogg's Corn Flakes boxes in Canada have bilingual labels. So does almost everything else. Our federal laws are codified in both French and English. The law requires that no matter where you live in Canada you should be able to do business with the Government of Canada or be tried in a court of law in either language. This is often difficult, particularly in more remote areas.

To add fuel to the controversy the government of Quebec passed a language bill, I think it is Bill 101, which provides for French to be the dominant language there and makes it illegal for business signs to be either bilingual or in English. French only. There was a department store in Canada called Eaton's, but in Quebec it had to be "Eaton" only and all the old buildings looked so weird with the missing apostrophe and "s" still plainly visible on the walls! They even have measurements for signs inside stores that tell you how big the letters for each language should be! So much for bilingualism. The French feel threatened, fearing they are losing their language and culture. I think the battle will be lost in the end anyway, all the laws and rules in the world can't prevent the inevitable, and I would guess in a hundred years the French in Quebec will be about as numerous as the Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton. Unless Quebec separates from Canada, I guess, but that's a whole other question.

It's an expensive business. Everything done twice and if you get a bad translator it leads to trouble.

My view is, for the US, STAY unilingual. It would be a nightmare to bring in any kind of official recognition of Spanish. Of course, the reality is that some accommodations are made now, at every level, but keep them informal and ad hoc. I do think people feel threatened and annoyed when people don't speak English, but the answer to that is that the newcomers learn English.

We aren't about to drop the bilingual state of Canada for the foreseeable future. I like it, myself, it's one of the things that make Canada different from the US.

[Erunáme]

If I were to move to another country, I would do my darndest to learn the language of that country. I would make every effort and not expect the native residents to cater to me by speaking English. When you move to another country, you change to their ways.

[JewelSong]

So - I guess that means that if I DO move to London, I'll have to actually learn to speak English, won't I?

[Primula Baggins]

I agree that newcomers should learn English, but there should be some accommodation for people who are still learning—I don't approve of the places in the United States that now forbid government information to be given out in any language other than English, for example.

I know a woman from Mexico who's lived, legally, in this country for twenty years—yet her English is very rough because she can't afford to take classes or buy correspondence courses, and in fact doesn't have time. She is stuck at home with a sick mother who speaks only Spanish, so she has little chance to practice; she runs a business from her home, but most of her customers are Spanish speakers. Her kids are bilingual, A+ students, but their mom has never had the chance to catch up.

If we require English of people, we ought to make it possible for them to learn it. Kids have school, but adults are on their own—and adults have a much harder time acquiring new languages.

[Meneltarma]

India has about eighteen languages that are given a 'national' status.
We win.

[Jnyusa]

Melly, yes, you definitely win!

I was thinking about India when this conversation began. Are English and Hindi used equally as administrative languages? I mean ... presumably you don't have home morgages and things like that printed up in all 18 official languages ... do they simply draft legal documents in the language of the region? Or are there one or two languages that everything has to be written in so that there won't be confusions over legality?

Jn

[truehobbit]

I think it largely depends on the reason for which a country is bilingual.

If the territory of the country, at its foundation, subsumes substantial groups of people who speak different languages, then IMO it's only fair to make all these languages the national standard.
Like French and Flemish and Belgium, or German, French, Italian and "Rätoromanisch" (whatever that is in English) in Switzerland.

But I would also resent it if my country became officially bilingual simply because we had a large enough group of immigrants who didn't speak the standard language.
That way, Germany might one day adopt Turkish as a second national language.

Like Eru said, if you move to another country, you should adopt the language they speak there.

Of course, I don't know if the influence of Spanish in the US is all only because of immigration or if native Spanish speakers have always made a considerable part of the US-citizens - that would make a difference, I think.

[yovargas]

My mother moved to the US at age 40. She did learn English and became fluent even taking college classes years after learning the language to try and refine her grasp. She could understand English just fine and read fairly well, however, she could never speak that well and never got rid of a very very heavy Spanish accent. This made it impossible for my college-educated mother to do any work except housekeeping for the 15 years she was here. Americans simply didn't want to deal with her broken English.

I don't know how relevant any of that is to this thread, but whenever I hear people say "Learn English or go home", it makes me very very angry.

[Primula Baggins]

A considerable part of what is now the United States was a Spanish possession for three centuries, until 1821.

Link

New Spain's territory included what is now Mexico and Central America (as far as the southern border of Costa Rica), and nearly all of the southwest United States, including all or parts of the modern-day U.S. states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

So those states were Spanish territory for considerably longer than they've been U.S. territory.

[Meneltarma]

Jn - it's all very complicated.

English became the most unifying language during the Raj, obviously, so it ends up being the one most used on documents and for communication between different parts of the country - so it's used extensively on official documents. Hindi was "chosen" to be *the* language of the country because 40% of the people spoke it - the obvious problem there being that 60 did not. A lot of people have trouble with the idea of having English as the dominant national language because it's 'foreign' (though 250 years on, you'd think people would have gotten used to it) and try to avoid the problem by forcing hindi on the section of the population who don't speak the language. As a result, in most of the country you have children learning three languages.
There's a lot of resentment in states like Tamil Nadu at the dominance of Hindi. Tamil is an older language, has a rich history and literature, and they bviously don't want to give that up; whereas northerners who speak hindi fluently are at an advantage jobswise. People who speak English fluently are also perceived as having an advantage in the job market and are criticised for not being 'Indian' enough, perpetuating a colonialist mindset, being rich and exclusivist, etc.

I speak English fluently, Hindi enough to function in Delhi and a bit of Tamil. I can't read tamil because it's a completely different script.

And...er...in conclusion, one language is easier.

[Jnyusa]

So those states were Spanish territory for considerably longer than they've been U.S. territory.

But they didn't have a Spanish-speaking population for all those centuries. The inhabitants were Native Americans of the Sioux and Aztec persuasion until the English settlers arrived from the East.

There is a strong Spanish culture in the SW United States but I think the ascendency of the Spanish language is more recent and due to immigration.

I do think, though, that Spanish stands in a different relationship to our culture than French does, even though French was once spoken in the Gulf region and the Great Lakes region. The fact that we have such a large population now which maintains their Hispanic culture and lives adjacent to a country where Spanish is the national language means that this language and culture is going to persist and spread. Those of us who travel back and forth between east and west for business or leisure will end up learning Spanish out of convenience or necessity. We will be effectively bilingual if not administratively bilingual.

Jn

eta: Melly, we cross-posted. Thank you for your answer! Yes, it's an odd situation to have a foreign language be one's administrative language, but India is certainly not alone in that. French, Russian and Swahili are used in the former colonies of Africa and the former 'stans' of Central Asia, and that persists out of convenience up to the present. In the case of Swahili, it's been the foreign administrative language for, like, ten centuries, such that it's now the language of East Africa.

But there is an enormous cultural price to pay for that. I think that what the problem boils down to in most cases is that the 'countries,' as they are formed today, are artificial constructs based on colonial territories. If they had been allowed to nationalize along historical boundaries, there would be a lot more countries and fewer misfits between the native and administrative language.

[Holbytla]

I know a fair number of Spanish speaking people who have immigrated to this country.
Some speak English very well, and some very poorly. Most seem to be in the middle somewhere.
Age seems to be a big factor, but I believe one of the biggest obstacles for immigrants learning English is the communities they live in.
Many live in Spanish speaking neighborhoods. The store owners speak Spanish, their neighbors speak Spanish, and certainly they speak Spanish in their homes. They watch Spanish language TV stations, and listen to Spanish radio stations. Many of the signs in this country are in Spanish.
Without a decent amount of exposure to English, it must be terribly difficult to become fluent in English.

[Alatar]

Re: Quebec

I can see why they are panicking a little. 200 years ago Ireland was effectively monolingual. Everyone spoke Irish. Irish is now effectively a dead language, taught in schools and spoken as a second language in a few "Gaeltacht" areas. It takes only a couple of generations to kill a language.

[Teremia]

I do think Spanish is a special case in a large part of the United States. What are California's cities and towns named? San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, Richmond (all right, all right, just seeing if you're still reading! ). Anyway, a lot of this area was Spanish-speaking before it was English-speaking, and even if many of the Spanish-speaking people here came more recently, still it seems right to acknowledge that history here has a Spanish accent.

I don't speak Spanish myself, but I feel guilty about that! I can understand it moderately well and say a few things here and there.

I think all elementary education should be bilingual -- not necessarily English/Spanish, but all children should have serious training in another language while they're still young enough to learn languages properly.

[Erunáme]

Without a decent amount of exposure to English, it must be terribly difficult to become fluent in English.

Really, many have no need to. There are spanish television stations, spanish-speaking stores, and they can find work where all of their colleagues speak spanish. I do think it's sad to limit oneself and not try as you couldn't progress very far.

I do realize it's very hard to learn a new language when one is an adult. I'm horrible at learning a new language so it would petrify me to have to move to a country where English wasn't spoken. Though, I've known quite a few immigrants who didn't even try to learn. That's what's frustrating. Those that did try were usually able to converse enough to be understood. I always had fun trying to teach the spanish speakers I worked with some english and they in return would try to teach me the spanish equivalent. All that's necessary is for one to be able to understand the new language and possess the most basic skills. I wouldn't want to require that an adult immgrant be able to hold an erudite conversation in English. I think just learning enough to get around is fine and completely fair. So their English is broken and not perfect. So what? I think it's wonderful that they're trying.

I think all elementary education should be bilingual -- not necessarily English/Spanish, but all children should have serious training in another language while they're still young enough to learn languages properly.

I completely agree with this. European schools do this, don't they? I think it's absurd to start the language courses once a student is 14. By then, it's too late as their brains have developed past the language aquiring stage and it's very difficult.

[Jnyusa]

Yes, and we teach math too early. They should reverse the order - languages in elementary school and math in middle school. Then it would fit the way our brains operate.

Jn

[vison]

Although English is often said to be a difficult language to learn, in fact it is very easy to make oneself understood. However it IS difficult to master the intricacies of English, to speak like an educated person, to spell properly. An immigrant beginning in the thirties or forties is going to likely have a hard time. When we hear someone speak English badly we tend to make all kinds of assumptions about them, mostly unpleasant. What yovargas says about his mother is a common tale.

My first French teacher in high school was an Italian man. He was a true polyglot, he spoke every European language including Finnish and Basque and was able to get by in Chinese and Japanese. But he was a man with a gift for language, obviously. Though his English was fluent and idiomatic, grammatically perfect, he still had a heavy Italian accent. I used to wonder what Finnish speakers thought of that, or Japanese!

We had a young Swiss boarder for years who spoke French, German, Italian, Romansch (not sure that's spelled right), and beautiful correct English. He contended that the more languages you learned, the easier it became. It was funny listening to him on the phone: he spoke German to his father, Romansch to his mother, English to his sister and brother, and French to his sister-in-law, all in the the space of a few minutes, switching effortlessly from one to the next. He has done very well for himself and is now a division manager with Credit Suisse, and it is a tremendous asset for him to have all these languages, making his rise in the business world much easier. He gets very frustrated dealing with Americans, not so much for himself, but when he sees them struggle to communicate; very few Americans speak any other language at all and he says it makes them look ignorant and provincial in Europe.

Most children learn two or even three languages quite easily when they are little. Their brains are wired to learn language and there seems to be plenty of circuits. But there are exceptions. Our Italian neighbours have three sons. The eldest and youngest learned both Italian and English as soon as they learned to speak. But the middle boy got confused constantly and by the time he started school it was evident that he was never going to learn English properly if his family also tried to teach him Italian, so they had to stop. And that, of course, meant that the other boys more or less stopped, too. Very sad, I think.

I can manage to read French fairly well, but, sadly, my two years of high school French were certainly never adequate to make me bilingual. French immersion schools are very popular here, with most of them having long waiting lists. I wish it was possible for my grandsons to go to a FI school.

I was at Disneyland last week. I noticed that about a quarter of the visitors seemed to be Latino and that almost every sign was posted in both Spanish and English, and that the instructions for every attraction were given in both languages as well. That's good business.

But I still think it would be a mistake to adopt an official bilingual policy, it opens up a very large can of worms.

[Túrin Turambar]

I didn’t realise that Spanish was so prevalent in the Southern US. I knew there were some Spanish communities and signs in Spanish, but I never picked up on the possibility that entire States could become effectively bilingual.

I also never really figured out how Canada worked. I knew that it was officially bilingual and having been to the country I knew that signs were in French and English, but I wondered if everyone in the country could actually speak fluent English and French.

What’s interesting is that pockets of bilingualism can spring up fairly arbitrarily. For example, I was driving through the Brisbane suburb of Sunnybank the other day, which is known for having a large Chinese immigrant population (random autobiographical note – I was born in Sunnybank private hospital). I hadn’t been to the suburb in a while, and I noticed that an awful lot of the signs were in Chinese as well as English. Not just signs for Chinese restaurants or acupuncturists, but real estate agents and shopping centres. I saw a car from a driving school with a Chinese name written in English and Kanji. None of the people walking across the street were Caucasian – they were all Asian. When I see adds for housekeeping or babysitting jobs there, they almost always ask for someone who speaks Chinese. The candidates that stand for election to State Parliament from the seat of Sunnybank are often Chinese.

What I found curious is that this is a fairly recent thing. As late as the 1960s the infamous Immigration Restriction Act (a.k.a. White Australia Policy) was in full force. Forty years on a suburb of Brisbane is almost entirely Chinese. Also, Queensland has a smaller immigration population that other states – Queenslanders are far more likely to have been born in Australia than other Australians. Finally, Sunnybank is on the outer edge of Brisbane – it’s the inner cities that are usually cosmopolitan.

The really funny thing, though, is that it could have been any suburb. There is no particular reason for the Chinese to have chosen Sunnybank – some of the original ones did, and more followed suit.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. Technically, white, English-speaking Australians have no more right to be here than the Chinese or anyone else, save the original indigenous people. Still, many of the people who’ve moved into the area obviously have no intention of assimilating – they wish to continue to speak their original language, associate with their own countryfolk, eat their own food, ect. I tend to believe that people should be allowed to act as they like as long as they’re not hurting others, but given what I’ve seen happen between communities of different cultures in the same city, I wonder if it’s necessarily a good state of affairs. It's also undeiable that this will continue - white people have less children, on avergae, than non-white people (worldwide) and more and more immigrants to Australia will be from Asia as opposed to the traditional sources of migrants like the UK (which, incidentally, is still where most of our migrants come from). Maybe I’m just racist.