Thank you, jayjay. That’s very helpful information.
There seems to be a common thread running through many of the posts which roughly states:
The predominant reason for learning Spanish is to deal with low level service industry workers and a significant segment of the polulation on the marginally low income (or welfare) econimic strata of US society.
Being an immigrant myself (at the age of 10) and not speaking either of the official languages of my host country (Canada), I can certainly relate to how difficult it is to learn a new language. Admitedly, it’s easier when one is young and progressively harder when one is older. My argument of not having ATMs, social/gov’t services, consumer goods instructions, public cable TV channels and various other critical services readily available in my mother tongue may come across as being… well… sour grapes, but I beg for a bit of latitude.
My parents and I had to come up to speed very quickly to learn the new languages without the benefit of “virtually” institutionalized language assistance. In the short term, if was very difficult. In the long term, I believe it helped us get integrated into Canadian/NA society much quicker.
So to answer a question posed ealier by Zoe, yes I believe knowing a second (or more) language(s) helps to bring about a better understanding of a related society and culture. That’s always a good thing and I’d always encourage people of any nation/culture to study other languages if/when possible. But, isn’t America doing a disservice to many of the Latino immigrants by making it (arguably) easier to avoid learning English as quickly and thoroughly as they otherwise might?
Also, some of you stated that mandating an “official language” policy smacks a bit of racism… or perhaps of elitism. By extention, do you consider Canada, having English and French as the only official languages, to be racist in this respect?
By this I mean, of course, in our mother tongue! BTW, that would be Russian and Ukranian… and bit of Yiddish for spice… ;j
Thus, :wally is satisfying on a very personal level!
Different issue, really. There is NO necessary conflict between “learning English as quickly and thoroughly” and making accommodation in the meanwhile. It’s just cheaper and easier to let it be that way.
With 13% of the population identifying as Hispanic (a majority US-born, rather than immigrant), and a little less but still close to 10% who either need Spanish or will feel comfortable and welcome in Spanish, well, that’s a lot of potential customers. And let’s not even mention the demographic projections for a couple of generations down the road. You bet businesses will want Spanish-speakers, and will let school systems know that’s in demand. The markets at work. Making a godawful mess of education and accommodation programs so that people end up not learning English at all, that’s got the telltale pawprints of politicians at work.
Many immigrant communities of the past had grandpa and grandma live their lives out in ethnic enclaves where they’d still be speaking the language of the Old Country to their neighbor and their corner grocer; travel back in time to New York 80 years ago and people mayd be telling you that to manage a kitchen or a sew shop you needed to speak Italian or Yiddish (but I would appreciate a different example of the usefulness of Spanish being brought about than “you need to speak it to run a restaurant kitchen”) The reason it seems such a specially Latino-contemporary issue is that we are so many and are everywhere.
In that respect, and that respect only, yes.
One obstacle I see with studying Spanish in elementary/middle/high school is that at those levels, even taking four years of Spanish in high school isn’t going to get a student much ability to use Spanish unless they spend some significant time immersed in the language in another nation.
How much good does Spanish do unless one knows it proficiently?
Even in states that don’t have this requirement, schools do. In order to graduate from my high school you had to pass two years of Spanish or French, or one of each. Knowing Spanish is handy at work, (I’m one of the few people who can translate essays into English) so it has its practical applications. ::shrugs::