How long until the US is in practice bilingual? (Congress, Hispanics, school)
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I think it could be argued that bi-lingualism, even multi-lingualism already exists in the places which count the most -- the academic an educational communities and within the core of the industrial and commercial sectors.
Moat college graduates learn at least one language, and usually before they finish high school. I learned two. Spanish and German, My brother's wife grew up speaking French and my business partner knows some Russian. And I couldn't begin to catalogue the breadth if languages -- everything from Arabic to Philippine dialects -- among the people I interact with on any given shift.
That diversity is enough to get the message through when the chips are down.
There are several studies that indicate that children of modern Spanish speaking immigrants are acculturating (including language) at approximately the same rate as other historical immigrant groups, Germans and Italians for example. It's a process that takes a few generations so at any point in time it may seem like it's not happening.
Now that's interesting. I might have thought maybe Chinese. But Russian?? Thing must be really different out on the west coast.
We have a lot of Russian immigrants in DFW too, but I haven't seen any demand for services in Russian at all.
The languages you see printed most often on government docs are Spanish, Vietnamese, simple Chinese, and Burmese. I'm hoping a lot of the Spanish will go away as illegals either go home or assimilate, though it seems to me they are less interested in assimilating and learning English than they were in the past.
It's amazing, I travel all over the world and am amazed on how many people know English - the baggage handler in the People's Republic of China? No problem, they know English. I swear I can find more English speakers in The Netherlands then in most US cities.
Then I come back here and it's like "huh"?
No, I don't think that they did. Where I grew up in the Northeast, many had an elderly relative who had never mastered the new language.
^^^
Quote:
Originally Posted by kevxu
Ditto. I had school friends whose mother's never learned English. And the elderly Sicilians in town always spoke their own language.
^^^
Neither my Italian or Polish grandmothers could speak more than a few words of English. My Italian and Polish grandfathers could speak some English because they were more exposed to it in their work, but they mostly spoke their native languages at home, or a mix of English and Italian or Polish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chaparrito
There are several studies that indicate that children of modern Spanish speaking immigrants are acculturating (including language) at approximately the same rate as other historical immigrant groups, Germans and Italians for example. It's a process that takes a few generations so at any point in time it may seem like it's not happening.
QFT. Because there's a continual influx of Spanish speakers into the US, it seems like there's not been much progress made but that's an illusion. If Italians and Poles were still coming to the US in the numbers that they came between 1890 and 1914, there'd be howls about how they weren't learning English. If German immigrants were as high a percentage of the US population in 2013 as they were 1843, we'd have hysteria about being overrun by the Germans!
BTW, prior to WW II, there was a wide-spread foreign-language press in the US, with cities with large concentrations of immigrants, especially in the NE and the Great Lakes, having foreign language dailies and/or weeklies in a variety of languages, from German and Italian to Polish and Yiddish. One of the reasons that so many Jews became prominent in early radio and movie comedy was because they perfected their routines in the Yiddish theaters in places like NYC and Chicago, moved on to vaudeville circuit, and then into radio and the movies.
This idea that immigrants came to this country and immediately shed their language is simply myth. It didn't happen.
As to the OP's question: it will never happen because generally, by the third generation, the grandchildren of immigrants seldom know more than a few words of their grandparents' native tongues.
I've lived in California for 10 years (4 in LA, 6 in SF) and although I speak Spanish quite well, I have never, not ONCE, been in a position of having to use it to make myself understood.
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