Posted on 08/26/2006 9:30:40 AM PDT by Reagan Man
All across the U.S., hordes of immigrants -- legal and illegal -- are chattering away in their native language and have no intention of learning English -- the all-but-official language of the United States where they now live.
Can you blame them? They are being enabled by all those diversity fanatics to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise.
It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldn’t speak English you couldn’t get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote.
Nowadays we kowtow to demands that everything from ballots to official documents be presented in many native languages as well as in English.
The result? According to Census Bureau statistics reported in HUMAN EVENTS:
* In California, 42.3 percent of the people do not speak English at home. More than 28 percent speak Spanish instead. One in five Californians told the Census Bureau they speak English “less than very well.”
* In the city of Los Angeles, for example, 60.8 percent of the people do not speak English at home. Instead, more than 44 percent speak Spanish while 31.3 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* In the city of Santa Ana, a whopping 84.7 percent do not speak English at home while more than 75 percent speak Spanish instead, and 50.8 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* In Miami, Florida, 78.9 percent do not speak English at home, 69.8 percent speak Spanish instead, and 46.7 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* In Passaic, N.J., 72.7 percent of the people do not speak English at home, 62.9 percent speak Spanish instead, and 45.4 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* The 10 states with the greatest percentage of people five years and over who speak a language other than English at home are: 1. California: 42.3 percent; 2. New Mexico: 36.1 percent; 3. Texas: 33.6 percent; 4. New York: 28.2 percent; 5. Arizona: 27.4 percent; 5. (tie) New Jersey: 27.4 percent; 7. Nevada: 26.2 percent; 8. Florida: 25.4 percent; 9. Hawaii: 24 percent; 10. Illinois: 21.5 percent.
Where is all this leading? The other day I read a story headlined “Will English Survive Immigrant Flood?” As Pat Buchanan warns in his new book, “State of Emergency – Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” if our language is gone, the conquest is complete.
What holds the country together is the commonality of language. When the Census Bureau released its American Community Survey they revealed that the U.S. continues to be inundated by a flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal. And the question this raises is are they learning out language, are they assimilating into our culture? The statistics cited above say the answer is a resounding “NO.”
Last year one in five people in Washington D.C. were immigrants, compared to one in six in 2000. According to The Washington Post, the city is one of eight U.S. metropolitan areas -- along with New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Dallas -- that have at least a million immigrants each.
Shockingly, a large segment of this rising population of immigrants does not speak English at home and does not intend to.
Incredibly, while huge numbers of immigrants already here refuse to learn English, in other parts of the world people are learning English just so they can come here. As I heard last year in Kenya, the students there said that English is the language of business and to get ahead in this world you have to learn to speak it.
We are really enabling immigrants to avoid learning English and assimilating into our culture because we give them everything they need so they don’t have to learn to speak English or become part of the traditional melting pot.
By enabling these people, we build an enclave for them that looks just like what they ran away from at home, thereby preventing them from assimilating and becoming part of the American dream. English is the language of business and trade -- if you can’t speak it you can’t get out of the occupational ghetto and move up the ladder. You are stuck where you are.
Tragically, the answer to the question of English surviving the immigrant invasion is probably “no.” The English language is on its death bed, a victim of the enablers.
¿Dice quién?
"Shockingly, a large segment of this rising population of immigrants does not speak English at home and does not intend to..."
Boy, just eliminate that first word of the sentence, and it makes sense...
My Grandma spoke Swedish at home until her death.
Tristemente, por aquí yo a menudo tengo que ordenar mi alimento en español si quiero ser entendido.
That assimilatative force is being diluted with all this garbage about "multiculturalism." By definition, America is a polyglot culture, but it works because it's a melting pot. All cultures subsume to the whole, which is then all things yet no one thing in particular.
Today, the tendency is to think of each culture separately -- the hyphenated American -- and to treasure each culture as a whole in itself. That interrupts the process of assimilation, breeds discontent, and exaggerates differences instead of identifying commonalities. It is a wall-building mentality, and must be defeated if the normal cultural dynamics are to apply.
One place we can preserve it is in our language. We decidedly do NOT hablamos Espanol!
Whew! Guzuntite... : )
Gracias. :)
English: The Vanishing Language
Que?
Interesting. I'm married to a woman whose grandparents came from Norway on her mother's side, and Germany on her father's side. They're long dead now, but her parents said that Norwegian and German were spoken as the primary language by those immigrants until the day they died. They learned enough English to get along, but always preferred their native language. My wife's parents speak almost not at all in their parents' languages, and my wife can't even say hello in either language.
Similarly, I grew up in a CA town with about a 30% hispanic population, back in the 50s and 60s. I had several very good friends who were hispanic. In the first grade, most of them spoke Spanish. By the end of 5th grade, they didn't even have accents. One was my best friend, and I used to spend a lot of time at his house, as he did at mine. His abuela (grandmother) spoke no English at all. His mother preferred to speak Spanish, but spoke English OK. My friend? By the time he graduated from high school, he spoke American English perfectly. He's now the mayor of that town.
Thus it is in immigrant families. Thus has it always been. It takes a couple of generations to completely remove the original language.
Those who claim otherwise simply have no experience with immigrants.
The difference between other waves of immigration is the fact that in order to survive here, people HAD to learn English. I don't remember my German grandparents telling me that they could vote in German, get government assistance for free(and in German.) The difference in this wave is that there are NO incentives for learning English becauses everything needed to survive is required by government to be in other languages, right up to having translators required where health care is given.
My birth town was almost pure Swedish until the 1950's, in fact they used to have a sign saying Willkommen, my dad who is of German and Choctaw ancestry caused quite the scandal when he married my mom who was from this town.
oops ... time warp
If we intend to keep English as it was intended to be in the style of Shakespeare and Milton, we need to teach the support languages, Greek and Latin, as well as other modern languages such as French, Italian, German, and Spanish. English by itself or in a vacuum will die.
Typical experience;
Me: I'd like a breakfast thing and a milk, please.
Them: Coke?
Me: Milk.
Them: What size?
Me: Leche.
Them: ¡Ah, leche!
Me: Thank you.
Them: De nada.
English is becoming the language of the whole world. That long term trend will overwhelm any short term imbalance of immigrants not learning English.
Nice comments.
Press "1" if you want to continue this article in english...
Wuzzat?
The numbers of illegal aliens crossing our borders are swamping the system ... these aren't pockets of legal immigrants, such as the Irish, Italian, Germans, Poles that arrived here & whose arrival was spread out over most of this nations history ... these are hordes, numbers reaching into the millions annually, mostly Spanish speaking from Mexico, Central America, South America that will, in very short order, turn the U.S. into just another Latin American country. Southern CA, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado will be the first states to succumb to this onslaught.
I'm inclined to believe that too, although I also think that this "multiculturalism" crap is an attempt to defuse American linguistic and cultural dominance around the world.
You need to consider also that language tends to change on all ends of the spectrum. Where one tongue becomes dominant, inevitably dialects spring up, and eventually diverge to the point that they're unrecognizable to each other. That phenomenon has lessened with the instantaneous communications available today, but it still plays a role. As one language gets larger, some smaller language moves in to a locality and serves the needs of the populace better.
Take Ireland, for example. For centuries, Celtic -- its native language -- was actually forbidden. However, nowadays it is not only spoken, but a new generation of Irish-folk are embracing it. It may displace English some day, if history is any judge.
Even the French, vain as they are, realize that their language is in jeopardy. They recently passed laws banning the use of Anglicized terms like "internet, Big Mac, and email." Of course, as is their custom, they're fighting a losing battle. Not even the Ayatollahs could keep Western influence out of their cultures.
Too much pressure from the top on this issue will ignite a backlash, and soon immigrants will find that native-speaking Americans have gone deaf.
I'm not going to get into the mechanics of illegal immigration; this thread is about the English language. But people have been predicting the demise of English for centuries, and it's still with us. Granted, stopping the tide would protect the language, but I don't think that argument is going to carry much weight.
I'm in the strongly-anti-illegal-alien camp. But claiming English is vanishing is absurd.
I was over in Germany and Austria in 1997. I took high school German. Forgot most of it. I would struggle to speak German to the clerks and they would answer fluently in English to help speed me on my way.
I do agree that those who come here should learn English. But those who do not are a threat to the concept of a melting pot, but are no threat to English, since a large part of the world speaks it now.
You are right. My husbands family spoke Portuguese and Spanish. (denpending on the side) He grew up speaking both at home, and learned English for school. (from watching cartoons) He mostly speaks English at home, but it was important to him that our kids learn Spanish and Portuguese. They can speak all three, but rarely speak anything but English. He told my daughter the other day that if she only speaks English, she will lose her ability to speak the other two. She said "I don't care. My friends speak English!"
"If the majority of people with whom these recalcitrant immigrants do business simply refuse to accommodate their linquistic demands, then the immigrants will be forced to adapt. "
We might wonder how English these words are to begin with. There is a lot of Latin, what is 'Mac,' what does e stand for and what language did that come from? If we stand back and take a look we might find very little of English is English, but Latin, Celtic, Greek, Sanskrit, and that old devil IndoEuropean. As is Spanish our current bugaboo. Any pure English is hard to spot.
When that premium becomes too high, then those same businesses will STOP paying them. If people refuse to learn Spanish to work, then the supply of Spanish-literate workders becomes smaller and employers must pay more to be PC. They don't have to habla Espanol to get Hispanic business, and if it becomes too costly, they won't.
I guess a paying customer is a paying customer, eh?
Yes, but some customers are more profitable than others.
No, what this thread is about is the impact illegal immigrants are having on the English language in states where they reside. It won't be long before California will be predominately Spanish speaking. Next you'll have these people, because they have their own language, culture, and little in common with most other states threatening to cede. I point to Quebec as a prime example ... where the French have incorporated language police to make sure the language and culture is adhered to in every facet of everyday business and living. What happened in Quebec started in the early 1960's and progressed to the point where it's today. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas are all in jeopardy of having the same thing happen to them ... they're well on the way.
oh please ...
hyperbole does not serve the argument, it's downright silly.
All languages arose from some root. So it is arguable that there is no "pure" language to be found. Sure, English, with its checkered cultural past, is more of a hodgepodge than many others, but even the Romantics have a bastard child or two in their family tree.
Any pure English is hard to spot.
I'm no purist. I think language -- particularly one as robust and polyglot as English -- can take care of itself. It's also one of the last cultural artifacts that simply, absolutely refuses to be regulated.
And frankly, before I'd be scared of Spanish taking over our language, I'd fear the ebonics-influenced street slang that is creeping like a cancer into our lexicon. Words like "diss" and "fitty" and "ho" that reflect an obsession with a failed culture can't bode well for a society that also gave us AE Housman and Lord Tennyson.
it was holdredge nebraska
Logical leap. There are already areas of this country that have little in common with other areas. I live in "flyover country," and have almost nothing in common with some Lefty in Vermont or Massachusetts, let alone some nutbutter from San Francisco. If that alone was grounds for secession, then this country would have fragmented long before this.
I point to Quebec as a prime example ... where the French have incorporated language police to make sure the language and culture is adhered to in every facet of everyday business and living. What happened in Quebec started in the early 1960's and progressed to the point where it's today.
The French/English duality of Quebec goes back way before the 1960s. It has been a schizo culture since before the Revolution, when the English drove out most of the French except in isolated pockets of eastern North America. French Canadians clung tenaciously to their heritage and coalesced in Quebec, where they exert an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Their separatist movement exists only in their own minds.
California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas are all in jeopardy of having the same thing happen to them ...
I sense some paranoia creeping into your vision. Yes, untrammeled, unassimilated immigration could construct a secessionist nightmare like the one you describe. But there is a powerful buffer in place to prevent that, ranging from social pressure against the exclusive culture of illegals, to laws that can be enforced to stem the tide, to the Constitution of the United States, which does not permit secession on cultural grounds!
Poets, maybe a couple centuries ago moreso than now, used to know their language very well, top of the class at Cambridge, that kind of thing. It is amusing to come across some Wordsworth or Keats that mimics a common street style, and in a local idiom. They could write lyrics to common barroom songs with the best of them. They wouldn't fear ebonics, not at all; they would master ebonics and out-do rap hip hop ubermasters at their own game. Shakespeare, Milton, Caesar, Cicero populated their works with neologism and the language is that much richer for it. Last count there were two million words in English; college grads know perhaps 100,000. What that might mean I don't know except that few know the whole language. Even that FReeperism loose for lose is not new at all. Coleridge and Wordsworth (or Worthsworth as Coleridge called him) used loose for lose all the time. We have little to fear from Spanish or ebonics since we will add what we like to English until English is eventually the language of earth and there are a couple hundred minor dialects, subsets such as Chinese and Hindi.
You have no clue; you're right, you live in fly over country ... not that living in Nebraska is a problem, I've spent a reasonable amount of time there and like Nebraskans. However, which is probably good, you're isolated from the real world to some extent. I've lived in CO, southern CA and in the 'La Belle Provence' of Quebec ... trust me, I've witnessed first hand what and most assuredly will happen when one language/culture is allowed to prevail over another ... which is happening at an alarming rate in America's southwest.
Or it could be the first indication that English is fragmenting into different languages, just as Latin fragmented into the Romance languages. I predict that in a few hundred years' time, "black English" will be as separate a language from American English as Portuguese is from Romanian.
I refuse to speak spanish in any place where I am being served in the USA. I repeat things over and over in English until it is 100% correct.
Fo shizzle.
Yeah, cuz you know that only the Coasts define reality.
you're isolated from the real world to some extent.
Uh huh. Who made YOU the arbiter of the "real world?"
I've lived in CO, southern CA and in the 'La Belle Provence' of Quebec ... trust me,
Good for you. That makes you ... what, again?
I've witnessed first hand what and most assuredly will happen when one language/culture is allowed to prevail over another ...
Psssst. The only culture that's "prevailing over another" is the American culture, which, even in the areas you've cited, still dominates.
C'est quoi? Je n'ai rien compris...
Street slang, especially ebonics, is a devolution, an admission by a growing sector of our society that even the effort of communicating is too demanding. It takes existing language and strips it of its precision (what exactly is a "ho" these days? or a "b_tch"? or a "niggah"?)
It makes you dumber just to hear it. And Wordsworth wouldn't have bothered with it any more than he bothered with cockney.
Once again, I've experienced first hand what you can only allude to ... living in Omaha, or Lincoln, isn't all that bad ... but it ain't the real world. However, steaks at Driesbacks in Grand Island is, or was, the center of the steak world when my travels took me to Nebraska.
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