Oh dear, and from my home state too. I wonder if Texans realize that their state is bigger than most countries, so having two languages would be, in fact, quite normal.
How embarrassing.
English is not the official language in many parts of the country (maybe all of them). Some Americans are concerned that the US will end up a bilingual country just like Canada.
I believe in Arizona at least people need to be bilingual, speaking Spanish is not enough I think people need to learn English too
Oh dear, and from my home state too. I wonder if Texans realize that their state is bigger than most countries, so having two languages would be, in fact, quite normal.
How embarrassing.
Can you say “Quebec?” How about “Czechoslovakia?” Having multiple languages has been a recipe for disaster (or, at least, a formula for creating separatist movements) in too many countries. Nations, especially those whose citizens tend to base their identity around common values more than shared history (like the United States), need to be able to maintain a common national discourse. That is hampered by multilingualism.
We’ve got people coming up from Mexico and Central America who cannot even speak Spanish nowadays. Instead they converse in various Mayan, Totonacan, Mixe, Zoque, Zapotecan, and Nahuatl dialects. Having multiple languages can also become rather costly for the taxpayers. For example, I recall one case in California where an illegal alien standing trial could speak only in some Mayan language and had to have two translators in court: one to translate from the Mayan language to Spanish and another to translate from Spanish to English – all at a pretty penny for the taxpayers. Where does it end?
Our Founding Fathers were wiser. They warned against the danger to our national existence of allowing the substantial body of German speakers in the colonial era to avoid learning English. As a result, northern Pennsylvania isn’t the headache that Quebec is today. We also wisely curtailed immigration in the 1920s. This gave our wave of later European immigration who spoke Italian, Yiddish, German, and Polish an opportunity to assimilate. Unfortunately, due to our weak-willed politicians, there is no end in sight to the modern wave of Hispanic immigrants and so we aren’t likely to get a similar cooling-off period needed to fully digest these newcomers in the near future. Meanwhile, Hispanics generally perform poorly in school compared to whites and Asians, have high rates of crime and gang involvement, have higher unemployment rates among their native-born than do native-born whites, and have illegitimacy rates which recently hit 50%. We are failing to assimilate them and we are compounding that failure by forcing those native-born Hispanic children who can speak English and who do have an opportunity to advance themselves to attend lousy schools with large numbers of more recent co-ethnic arrivals who can’t and don’t.
The only multilingual state that seems to be a total success is Switzerland. However, Switzerland has a very decentralized system of politics, its people have a shared history that transcends their linguistic differences, and there isn’t much income inequality among the different linguistic groups. None of that can be said about whites and Mexicans in the United States.
If they’re coming to America, let ’em speak English.
i’m confused. i thought english is their official language? all government documents are in english — constitution, national anthem, blah blah blah, businesses have to have the signs in english….
I think it’s important for every American to be fluent in English. For new immigrants or visitors..etc it’s not as important, but it’s a disaster if citizens of the same country did not speak the same language or could not comunicate between each other.
I always thought it was English, but since that’s not the case I think they should go with sign language. I mean not everyone can speak London after all, nor everyone habla burrito…
I say let them speak Native North America languages ,that would be more appropriate, at least they are the original land owners.
Given the fact that very few Indians even speak their native languages that would be a pretty tall order. Unfortunately, the Native American languages once spoken in Texas, like Comanche and Caddo, while quite interesting from a linguist’s standpoint, don’t possess much of a technical vocabulary either. They aren’t suited to a First World existence.
But if Arabs such as yourself are concerned about “linguistic imperialism,” maybe you could argue that people in the Levant should go back to conversing in Aramaic, and the Lebanese ought to take up Phoenician again, and perhaps every Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Libyan should be required to speak only the various Berber languages, and the people of Iraq might wish to consider speaking Sumerian or Akkadian or Assyrian, and the Egyptians can go back to Coptic, and people in Yemen and Oman can all go back to speaking the nearly extinct South Arabian Semitic languages. After all, Arabic wasn’t the native language of the entire Middle East, the Maghreb, or even the entire Arabian peninsula prior to the spread of Islam. Arabic speakers were not the “original landowners” as you put it.
Somehow, I think many Arabs might sustain some reasonable objections to such proposals, however.
MeThinkPretty,
i’m confused. i thought english is their official language? all government documents are in english — constitution, national anthem, blah blah blah, businesses have to have the signs in english….
That is another good point. It would be a tragedy if large groups of people in the United States couldn’t even read their own Constitution or the writings of their nation’s founders.
Mitch,
You’re a man of clarity. If you are living among us (in Jordan), get ready to have to do lots of ‘splainin’ regarding all sorts of things that just defy reason.
But English IS NOT the official language in several states and counties (especially in Minority-Majority states like California and Texas). Texas actually doesn’t have an official language. English actually isn’t even an official language on a federal level, and in California, some counties send voting papers in other languages besides English (some even offer documentation in Farsi and Arabic)…
It takes quite a while to learn a new language as an adult immigrant who is busy working full-time and raising a family. Not everybody has time and money to take ESL classes etc. Sometimes when your choices are to wash the dishes or help your kids with their homework and leaving to go to ESL class, ESL loses.
My mom lived in the states almost twenty years before learning english…that’s how long it took to learn english just living in the US. She only studied in her home country through the third grade. Now she is a successful business owner, who speaks English with a pretty heavy accent. My parents’ three children all have graduate degrees and are relatively successful. I think that the immigrants have a hard time with language acquisition but their children learn English and progress.
I think “English only” supporters have too much free time on their hands. Everyone in the world is struggling to live a better life, sometimes that means leaving their home country for another. I emigrated from the US to Jordan and guess what, I don’t speak Arabic. Maybe the Jordanian government should kick me out of the country! God forbid I need help translating a document. I work in a office and get paid and I don’t speak Arabic! What is this world coming to!
The costs of providing translators/translations simply subsidizes the industries that hire immigrant labor at the low wages they pay them.
LOL! men wein la2e6ha hay 😀
Oh dear, and from my home state too. I wonder if Texans realize that their state is bigger than most countries, so having two languages would be, in fact, quite normal.
How embarrassing.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m not back in Jordan…I don’t understand so many of my countrymen
English is not the official language in many parts of the country (maybe all of them). Some Americans are concerned that the US will end up a bilingual country just like Canada.
I believe in Arizona at least people need to be bilingual, speaking Spanish is not enough I think people need to learn English too
Can you say “Quebec?” How about “Czechoslovakia?” Having multiple languages has been a recipe for disaster (or, at least, a formula for creating separatist movements) in too many countries. Nations, especially those whose citizens tend to base their identity around common values more than shared history (like the United States), need to be able to maintain a common national discourse. That is hampered by multilingualism.
We’ve got people coming up from Mexico and Central America who cannot even speak Spanish nowadays. Instead they converse in various Mayan, Totonacan, Mixe, Zoque, Zapotecan, and Nahuatl dialects. Having multiple languages can also become rather costly for the taxpayers. For example, I recall one case in California where an illegal alien standing trial could speak only in some Mayan language and had to have two translators in court: one to translate from the Mayan language to Spanish and another to translate from Spanish to English – all at a pretty penny for the taxpayers. Where does it end?
Our Founding Fathers were wiser. They warned against the danger to our national existence of allowing the substantial body of German speakers in the colonial era to avoid learning English. As a result, northern Pennsylvania isn’t the headache that Quebec is today. We also wisely curtailed immigration in the 1920s. This gave our wave of later European immigration who spoke Italian, Yiddish, German, and Polish an opportunity to assimilate. Unfortunately, due to our weak-willed politicians, there is no end in sight to the modern wave of Hispanic immigrants and so we aren’t likely to get a similar cooling-off period needed to fully digest these newcomers in the near future. Meanwhile, Hispanics generally perform poorly in school compared to whites and Asians, have high rates of crime and gang involvement, have higher unemployment rates among their native-born than do native-born whites, and have illegitimacy rates which recently hit 50%. We are failing to assimilate them and we are compounding that failure by forcing those native-born Hispanic children who can speak English and who do have an opportunity to advance themselves to attend lousy schools with large numbers of more recent co-ethnic arrivals who can’t and don’t.
The only multilingual state that seems to be a total success is Switzerland. However, Switzerland has a very decentralized system of politics, its people have a shared history that transcends their linguistic differences, and there isn’t much income inequality among the different linguistic groups. None of that can be said about whites and Mexicans in the United States.
If they’re coming to America, let ’em speak English.
because as we all know the ppl of texas have been speaking english for thousands of years now .. frickin rednecks
I say let them speak Native North America languages ,that would be more appropriate, at least they are the original land owners.
The question is ,why all those people who are asking for this are white race only?just wondering
i’m confused. i thought english is their official language? all government documents are in english — constitution, national anthem, blah blah blah, businesses have to have the signs in english….
I almost missed the missing ‘i’ in ‘official’. God, the irony!!
Thanks Al. for pointing that out! I have been looking at this for 2 days trying to find the humor 🙂
I think it’s important for every American to be fluent in English. For new immigrants or visitors..etc it’s not as important, but it’s a disaster if citizens of the same country did not speak the same language or could not comunicate between each other.
I always thought it was English, but since that’s not the case I think they should go with sign language. I mean not everyone can speak London after all, nor everyone habla burrito…
Alurdunialhurr,
Given the fact that very few Indians even speak their native languages that would be a pretty tall order. Unfortunately, the Native American languages once spoken in Texas, like Comanche and Caddo, while quite interesting from a linguist’s standpoint, don’t possess much of a technical vocabulary either. They aren’t suited to a First World existence.
But if Arabs such as yourself are concerned about “linguistic imperialism,” maybe you could argue that people in the Levant should go back to conversing in Aramaic, and the Lebanese ought to take up Phoenician again, and perhaps every Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Libyan should be required to speak only the various Berber languages, and the people of Iraq might wish to consider speaking Sumerian or Akkadian or Assyrian, and the Egyptians can go back to Coptic, and people in Yemen and Oman can all go back to speaking the nearly extinct South Arabian Semitic languages. After all, Arabic wasn’t the native language of the entire Middle East, the Maghreb, or even the entire Arabian peninsula prior to the spread of Islam. Arabic speakers were not the “original landowners” as you put it.
Somehow, I think many Arabs might sustain some reasonable objections to such proposals, however.
MeThinkPretty,
That is another good point. It would be a tragedy if large groups of people in the United States couldn’t even read their own Constitution or the writings of their nation’s founders.
whoa, pretty intense exchange here … i just thought it was a funny picture 😉
Mitch,
You’re a man of clarity. If you are living among us (in Jordan), get ready to have to do lots of ‘splainin’ regarding all sorts of things that just defy reason.
But English IS NOT the official language in several states and counties (especially in Minority-Majority states like California and Texas). Texas actually doesn’t have an official language. English actually isn’t even an official language on a federal level, and in California, some counties send voting papers in other languages besides English (some even offer documentation in Farsi and Arabic)…
It takes quite a while to learn a new language as an adult immigrant who is busy working full-time and raising a family. Not everybody has time and money to take ESL classes etc. Sometimes when your choices are to wash the dishes or help your kids with their homework and leaving to go to ESL class, ESL loses.
My mom lived in the states almost twenty years before learning english…that’s how long it took to learn english just living in the US. She only studied in her home country through the third grade. Now she is a successful business owner, who speaks English with a pretty heavy accent. My parents’ three children all have graduate degrees and are relatively successful. I think that the immigrants have a hard time with language acquisition but their children learn English and progress.
I think “English only” supporters have too much free time on their hands. Everyone in the world is struggling to live a better life, sometimes that means leaving their home country for another. I emigrated from the US to Jordan and guess what, I don’t speak Arabic. Maybe the Jordanian government should kick me out of the country! God forbid I need help translating a document. I work in a office and get paid and I don’t speak Arabic! What is this world coming to!
The costs of providing translators/translations simply subsidizes the industries that hire immigrant labor at the low wages they pay them.