If Spanish becomes the primary language, what would you do?

[SOON2BNSURPRISE]

Originally Posted by wolf39us

Still doesn't negate the fact that English is the primary language. It is the language that MOST native people here speak as a first language, and those who aren't natives generally can speak English pretty reasonably.

If you were to walk up to a random person in the USA and attempt to speak to them, you would choose English every time even if you knew another language. Just because there are segregated areas where languages can be different doesn't change this. A person who speaks Chinese can head on down to China Town and speak all the Chinese they want. Hell, you can go to tons of Asian style food joints and speak Chinese there as well.

You wouldn't walk up to someone talking to them in Chinese though here in America, you would use English.

I understand and accept that many languages are available here in America. Hell, I appreciate languages and envy those who are multi-lingual. There's simply no saying that English isn't the "go to" primary language of the USA though.

I live in the USA and the majority of people in my small town of 204,000 probably speak Spanish as well as English and chances are with many of them I would speak Spanish first before English. I would at least ask if they even knew English.

[wolf39us]

Originally Posted by SOON2BNSURPRISE

I live in the USA and the majority of people in my small town of 204,000 probably speak Spanish as well as English and chances are with many of them I would speak Spanish first before English. I would at least ask if they even knew English.

Small areas of Spanish speaking majority needn't count. Point still stands.

[Unsettomati]

Originally Posted by ryanms3030

Don't count on it. We passed a ballot measure in CA that passed by 75% this year that allows for bilingual education in public schools. This gets rid of English immersion and allows students to go through public school being taught in English and Spanish. In theory this is supposed to make it easier for students to learn English but in reality it's a crutch so they can graduate high school without ever being fluent in English. CA is 12% of the total US population. Spanish speakers outnumber English speakers in CA. Mexico is the only the only country with more Spanish speakers then the US and by 2050 the US will have the most Spanish speakers in the world. It's inevitable that the United States will eventually become officially bilingual much like Canada is especially as we get more and more hispanics elected into office as is already happening in CA and other states with huge hispanic populations

Oh, the horror. Not 'allowing' bilingual education!

Look, do you see this country dominated by German speakers?

In 1880, the majority of St. Louis public schools offered instruction in German, and over half of all students were using this instruction exclusively or in part. And plenty of those students were American-born German speakers. Even in the 1920s, fully one-third of the public schools of Baltimore (with a population of three quarters of a million at the time) offered German-language curricula - not just the study of German but the study of all subjects conducted in German. German language public schools were widespread in other cities, like Milwaukee and Cincinnati. And it wasn't just in big cities.

Here's a report card from 1907 from Menomonie:



Again, these young children mostly were not immigrants themselves. For the most part, they were born in the United States. And their mother tongue was German.

And what happened? It died out. In the long run, it just couldn't compete with English. And those were the days when it was much easier to live an insular life. Now, with mass-communications and ease of travel, it is much more difficult to live in the United States without knowing English, which explains why the vast, vast majority of second-generation immigrants from Latin America are fluent in English.

English Use on the Rise Among Latinos | Pew Research Center

If bilingual education was the boogeyman that some hold it out to be, we'd have long dropped English for German. But it's not. History proves that. And, to repeat what myself and others have noted earlier, the assertion that our wonderful white European ancestors immediately learned English and subsumed themselves into the pre-existing American culture simply did not happen.

[southwest88]

Originally Posted by Unsettomati

...


Again, these young children mostly were not immigrants themselves. For the most part, they were born in the United States. And their mother tongue was German.

And what happened? It died out. In the long run, it just couldn't compete with English. And those were the days when it was much easier to live an insular life. Now, with mass-communications and ease of travel, it is much more difficult to live in the United States without knowing English, which explains why the vast, vast majority of second-generation immigrants from Latin America are fluent in English.

...

Yah, German was seriously considered for a national language, along with Greek - in the newly independent 13 colonies. But it was decided to carry on with English, @ least provisionally.

German didn't exactly die out - German continued as a language of instruction in the German schools, the German National Catholic schools (& other religious schools, I think), & wherever there was a sizable German-speaking population - up into 1914, & then 1939 (WWI & WWII). The turmoil in Europe in the 1840s also hurt German speakers there - although some of them - for political or labor reasons - may have emigrated to the US. In any event, if not for the World wars & other political unpleasantness in Northern Europe - including the Red Scare in the US in the 1910s & 1920s - German (& Yiddish) would probably have continued as a second language in the US - especially in the heavily industrialized areas in the Midwest.

I lived in South Bend, IN for a time. There had been flourishing ethnic communities & newspapers & churches in the region - German, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Hungarian - which lasted until the kids acclimated to speaking more English than the home language, grew up, usually married, & moved to the suburbs. The public libraries & IU library & other college libraries have archives, with lots of the local newspapers in their languages, on microfilm. Some of that material is being scanned & put on the libraries' websites.