How many of you feel inhibited in using a language other than English when you are out in public? I know that I think twice about speaking in Punjabi on my cell when there are others around. Here are two examples of recent language xenophobia incidents. The first involves Zach Rubio, a 16 year old student in Kansas City who was suspended for speaking Spanish in the halls:
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Zach Rubio’s high school had no such signs |
“It was, like, totally not in the classroom,” the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. “We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he’s like, ‘Me prestas un dolar?’ [‘Will you lend me a dollar?’] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I’m like, ‘No problema.’ “A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school… in a written “discipline referral” explaining her decision to suspend Zach for 1 1/2 days, she noted: “This is not the first time we have [asked] Zach and others to not speak Spanish at school.” [Link]
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p>Note that this high school has no policy against speaking Spanish outside of class, and even if it did, it would be difficult to understand how such a policy could be legal.
The second incident involves an editorial assistant at the Chicago Tribune named (verdad) Ahmad. A. Ahmad:
The Amtrak train was four hours outside New York City when we heard the conductor’s voice on the loudspeaker…We were all stuck, somewhere in the middle of New York state, and we would have to wait for a bus to take us to the nearest big city… I decided to call my mother in Chicago to tell her what happened. We spoke in our native tongue, Arabic.… I heard sirens approaching, and the bus suddenly came to a stop on the side of the highway. Police cars came–so many I couldn’t even begin to count them… The man told police he understood Arabic and had overheard my conversation. He thought I was talking to some terrorist cell when I was chatting with my mother… The authorities questioned me for nearly three hours at an Albany police station. They asked me where I was from, whether I was a United States citizen, who I knew in New York City, who I worked for, and why I was traveling alone. [Link]
In this latter case, tripple A has nothing but praise for the authorities:
The officers were, for the most part, courteous and understanding of my situation.
One officer, Investigator James L. Rogers of the New York State Police, would later call me twice to make sure I made it to New York City with no hassles. Once the police realized the man couldn’t actually speak Arabic, they knew the allegations were baseless, and that he was a wacko, hell-bent on deporting every Muslim back to the Middle East. [Link]
But the ease with which he was stopped and detained without having done anything makes me … uneasy. Just imagine being detained and questioned for hours just because somebody overheard you reciting the latest bollywood song lyrics into your phone and you’ll see what I mean.
UPDATE:
A semi-related but very funny story:
In Dallas, on the weekend, I talked to a woman who spoke good but accented English. She told me that spoke an aboriginal language most of her childhood. She didn’t learn English till she was about 10 years old. She learned it from the women who came to live with the family and the 13 kids after her mother fell sick.
She didn’t have a chance to use her English outside the community until some years later. She and her brother went in to Tucson to buy the hose and the bucket they needed to build an outdoor shower.
She went to the hardware store and placed her order. The person behind the counter looked at her and raised his hands in the air, the sign of incomprehension. So she tried again: “can you sell me a bucket and a hose?” She got the same reaction.
Now she said, “What is the matter with this guy? Doesn’t he speak English?”
The man beside her looked at her with surprise and said, “Lady, you’re speaking Spanish.” [Link]
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Regarding Latin@ integration, this argument presumes some kind of Latin@ homogeneity and also ignores the impact of race on integration. Latin@s are one of the most racially diverse groups in the US, and understandably folks who look more “Anglo” and come from historically rich families have had an easier time absorbing into white privilege than Afro-Latin@s who may have histories of poverty and slavery instead.
The Cuban-Americans (those who don’t look African-American)are most likely to become white. The Dominicans most likely to become African-American. Mexican-Americans in the US are overwhelmingly of Indian origin (as I believe Razib stated on his blog) and live a stone’s throw from their homeland. Even the Cubans live close. It is unclear whether Spanish will disappear easily among Mexicans, and since they have critical mass in the country, there is no reason for them to “marry out”. (And I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing.)
Perhaps we are living in an era where multiple identities become the norm? Even India is extending a watered-down version of citizenship to PIOs. As capital is easily transmittable, so will be people, especially skilled people.
Or perhaps the American Hispanics are successful in creating a enduring third national identity, alongside black and white.
I do, but they all have trust funds 😉
Razib – nobody is talking about eliminating either SES variance or linguistic variance in high school. The question is how we deal with exclusionary behavior that stems from these cleavages.
Nobody objects to rich kids exluding poor kids from conversation, but they object to spanish speakers excluding english speakers from conversation. Neither of these is necessary.
People get all agitated about the “black table” but nobody asks the jocks to scatter and sit with the rest of the high school during lunch.
I went to a college that was committed to integration across all sorts of boundaries – freshmen were randomized, and while you got to choose your roomates afterwards, groups of people were randomly assigned to different dorms for the remaining 3 years so that there could be no “jock dorm” no “asian dorm” etc.
Put in sociological language – high school is about overlapping and reinforcing cleavages rather than creating and encouraging cross-cutting cleavages. That’s why your argument is inconsistent.
Camille:
What took you so long? And who do we displace? Shouldn’t I have been your original favorite as the only Sikh mutineer 😉
Essentialism! Everybody needs to get in touch with their inner Sikh 😉
To put it harshly but truthfully, bilingual education is a joke. Take it from someone who has worked as a public school teacher in a high school with a student body 68% of which was designated LEP (Limited English Proficient). I’m going to make a controversial statement here, so I’m bracing myself for flames — it’s the ENGLISH-speaking (and, in my district, mostly African-American) kids who get shafted. They’re the ones who don’t have enough textbooks. Let me explain why.
According to the law, LEP funds (which are quite healthy) can only be used for LEP students. Meaning, any excess left over after distributing LEP funds CANNOT be used for students classified as fluent English speakers. Now, LEP students, at least in my school system, usually take as many ELD classes as possible. Many students’ parents want their kids to remain in bilingual classes (which basically end up being taught ONLY in Spanish) so they can either A) make sure their kids don’t fall behind in coursework, which the kid might if stuck in an English classroom when s/he isn’t fluent in English yet. The sad truth here, though, is that bilingual classrooms often move more slowly in their coursework, for reasons I’m not clear enough about to speculate on. B) Parents who want to help their kids with coursework (this assumes they themselves are educated to the high school level, which many immigrants in our district are not) or, more usually, C) parents who don’t want their kids to “forget where they came from.” Also, more rarely, D) because they intend to take their kids back to the Spanish-speaking nation of origin (usually Mexico, in my district) after the kid graduates. (These are the parents who came here so their kids could get a “better education.”) Now, there ARE parents who speak only Spanish who refuse, despite their kids’ pleas, to enroll their children in bilingual classes, because they believe it’s crucial to their child’s success in the USA to be able to speak English. But for every one of those parents, there is another who insists his or her child be put in as many bilingual classes as possible.
So, we have overloaded ELD classrooms, but we have the funds to supply those classrooms with materials. What we lack are enough qualified, certificated LEP teachers, because in general we pay our teachers shit wages, and of course anyone who is flawlessly bilingual generally has plenty of other better-paying career options by virtue of their bilingual abilities. As a result, we also often get LEP teachers who speak Spanish natively but were raised in American classrooms, and so their Spanish is more like “Spanglish,” and isn’t grammatically sound at all. So the Spanish education in bilingual classrooms is also sub-par, and people like me, who formally learned Spanish in American classrooms, end up appalled at all the grammatical inaccuracies in the LEP kids’ Spanish. So the LEP kids get screwed: substandard lesson plans, performed in substandard Spanish.
Meanwhile, the NON-LEP kids get screwed too. All those funds going to LEP programs, by law, CANNOT BE USED on fluent English speakers. So the money allotted to LEP, which otherwise would have been allotted to mainstream education, is lost out on by the English speakers. But the money allotted to ENGLISH-SPEAKERS must also, by law, be shared by the LEP students; to deny LEP students access to this money would be discrimination. Hence, English-language classrooms end up with less funding. Textbooks, multimedia materials, and sometimes even desks!, are in short supply. Now, kids whose parents can get them out of this crappy situation, DO get their kids out. But in our district, not everyone has the funds. And guess what ethnicity most of our English-speaking students are. Good guess! They are African-American and, to some extent, Southeast-Asian American. So LEP programs, which aim at aiding minorities, end up shafting the very kids they hope to help — either through poorly (and incorrectly) taught LEP curriculum, or through creating a situation in which teachers of English-speaking kids cannot lay claim to the amount of funds which they desperately need.
Those crying for recognition of individual languages fail to realize that our public school systems (at least in CA) are overburdened already, and we don’t have the funds to attract qualified teachers in languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Farsi or Arabic, though we certainly do have the funds for the kids who speak these languages.
It’s all a mess, really. Any suggestions welcome, because reform is desperately needed.
“language divisions are tractable. germans were swallowed into the america body politic. latinos will be swallowed, it is matter of when, not if. class fissures, or fissures between butt ugly and attractive, or athletic and non-athletic, well, in the last two cases, go to god, and the first, go to greed.”
I have to disagree with Razib_the_atheist. Spanish is in a unique position in USA.First It is truly an international language.Second Latino’s just became the biggest minority and the third and most important factor is that Mexico is a neighbor which supplies fresh Spanish speaking immigrants. IMHO ,I predict the reverse will happen within 20-30 years. Coming from Sri Lanka ,I can see more and more parralels to her situation despite the size.
Sinhala (which has roots in Sanskrit and Pali and considered a member of indo-aryan language family .Also it has strong influance from Tamil .Minor influances from Portugese and Dutch) is spoken by 70 percent. The rest speaks Tamil.(Sri Lankan Tamil ,Muslims and Tamils of indian origin)Tamil Nadu is 20 miles accross polk straight and there was major immigration during British rule to work in tea plantation as cheap labor,too.Also have to consider that Tamil Language acted like an international language within the southern part of subcontinent in history mainly used for commerce. Latino just need a majority concentration in some area of the country to keep Spanish as one of two languages in US.It might be happening in south and west isn’t it?
Ennis buddy, you’re not the only Sikh Mutineer…..A number of us here have quietly infiltrated the ranks 😉
Simran, I really enjoyed your post and I think it totally speaks to the problems with LEP programming. With respect to African American students – wasn’t this why the push for Ebonics took place? I thought it was to ensure adequate supplies and lessons for students who are not native “Standard” English speakers?
Haha, my inner Sikh and I are (essentially) fine! A girl can’t go around lavishing “favorite” status on everything right off the bat. And unfortunately, being Sikh gets people nowhere with me – maybe I’m self-hating? 😉
This is a brilliant point. But it’s also an argument for encouraging more integration, along racial, SES, linguistic lines, isn’t it? Unfortunately, such integration often falls prey to “tracking” students by (mis-?)perceived ability: honors classes often somehow get filled with white students, etc.
(Maybe bi-lingual ed. plays some role in this, too, as Simran says. But seems to me that bi-lingual ed. may be necessary to keep Spanish speaking kids from getting “segregated out” in other ways — falling behind, dropping out, getting shunted into remedial classes.)
This doesn’t seem like a foregone conclusion. Language divisions in India haven’t dissolved, have they? Isn’t it also possible that Spanish will spread (as Chandare said), or that in 100 years we’ll all be speaking some version of Spanglish?
I don’t have time to sift through all the comments or write this up well, but here’s a relevant link about a study done on bilingual education.. Unfortunately, the LA Times article cited is now archived, but I think this JHU press release covers the relevant info.
Matters of inclusion and exclusion aside, I think we all need only to look at our own parents to realize that multilingual education and a polyglot lifestyle is good for the brain.
i’ve cited statistics that shown 1.5-american born browns marry at rates of between 25-40%
I wonder if the 2.0 american borns have a higher rate of outmarriage than the 1.5’s as some 1.5’s are not as ‘Americanized’ as the 2.0s.
Aw, thanks Camille! =)
perhaps a simple solution to this would be a realtime natural language translator. Maybe then i’d be able understand some of the in-bred rednecks in this country.
maybe we all just need a babel fish in our ears?
and then we wouldnt have this speaking a ‘secret’ language problem?
although…i definitely capitalize on my ability to conveniently speak hindi when i dont want whomever is around me to know my personal business.
Mr. Cocopuffs:
It’s called a universal translator; members of Starfleet, Klingon Empire, Romulans, Cardassians, etc. have used it very effectively.
I would also like to lodge a complaint. I am a card carrying member of the Redneck Anti-Deflamation League, and take offense to your ‘inbred rednecks’ comment. Rednecks may be difficult to understand, but that’s because many are uneducated, have lost their teeth from aggressive Copenhagen chewing habits, are drunk, etc.
The inbred redneck population does represent a minority within our ranks, and they are difficult to understand PERIOD, regarless of how redneck they are. “Ugh, gggnaa, yawpaw, bleebedoo, ya-huuaa” cannot be deciphered by anyone. We, however, take no offense when you say that rednecks are difficult to understand. We are. Difficult to understand, for sure, but mistunderstood also. So next time, please leave the inbred references out. If you would like to address that particular community, I would suggest calling them by the appropriate term of ‘retards’, not ‘inbred rednecks’.
Thank You, GujuDude
ok sand niggers, i’m back.
this fear of an alien tongue is somehow unexplainable
no. see not by genes alone for psychological research on innate human ‘groupishness’ and the possibility of language as being one of the major drivers of interpopulation variance being far greater than intrapopulational variance (i.e., dialectal variation within english is dwarfed by differences with french).
i guess my thought is that i feel that South Asian culture holds educators with a view that they can NEVER be wrong–even when they are.
i think there is something to that, but surely the high SES of the ‘first wave’ of south asian immigrants would mitigate this? after all, there is a difference between dishwashers and M.D.s in their egos when faced with a high school principle.
Maybe I’m an idealist, but I think some radical policies and wealth distribution could do some good in this category, and I don’t think wealth inequality is a “natural” phenomenon simply b/c it’s prevalent in most societies.
inequality of wealth can be mitigated, but it can’t be eliminated. see sweden. see north korea (kim don’t live like starvin’ cannibal!). also, there is economic lit. out there which suggests that envy and perceptions of inequality have to do with relative differences rather than absolute ones, and people can generate status and wealth signifiers of various sorts, not just market ones.
to make this short, role playing games that are predicated on total equality suck ass and no one wants to play ’em. on expectation, humans want to be queen bee and king of the hill. otherwise, we wouldn’t be here (group selection doesn’t really work people).
As far as linguistic difference being erasable, I think this is true and also deplorable. I mean, we could all mimic the Japanese in Korea, but I think most people who identify with classical liberal norms/morality would see this as disgusting today.
well, there is some evidence that homogenous countries tend to have the least SES inequality. pick your poison. and you are wrong about classical liberals, ben franklin hated the germans in pennsylvania with their foreign ways, and most of the founding fathers probably would have shipped blacks back to africa to maintain the pure anglo-saxon character of the nation. shame on them, but thatz be the facts.
the fact is that there is a two-sided game being played here. on the one hand, being with your own kind is good, you share norms, values, inside jokes. on the other hand, diversity is great for america. it isn’t necessarily and either/or, but i definitely wish americans would share inside jokes. some people worry about integration, well, if people speak different languages, what do you think will happen? my position, which is a purely normative values based one is that anything that doesn’t favor individual liberity and libertinism must fall. the rise of language based group identities is evidence of that, people are assimilating to particular groups, and those groups are now being encouraged by some outside of them to stay as they are. i found the moral of spanglish repulsive, instead of being like momma, girl should have gone to private school, exceled, and hired herself a nice white-assed maid from the boonies if that was what she felt like.
Nobody objects to rich kids exluding poor kids from conversation
bullshit. people with balls do. i’ve seen it. and i’ve seen good looking poor kids and butt ugly rich kids meet on a level playing field (two balancing parameters).
but nobody asks the jocks to scatter and sit with the rest of the high school during lunch.
at my high school they did actually. and by senior year the jocks collapsed in a haze of marijuana and class divisions and popular non-popular dichotomies disappeared to a large except (except for the notoriously ugly or crack-headed).
i don’t concede the transparency of your points, and i don’t grant that the parameters you are presenting are easy to decompose and characterize like something like language. perhaps i lived a very different life than most of you people, because i’m an egocentric fuck and i always felt like i was excluding all those dumb-ass jocks and not the otherway around. but that’s the problem with extrapolating from personal experience. native language is something that can be quantitized. economic inequality can be too. but when we get into the realm of popularity, now that’s a moving target.
but as i say, some things won’t change. in the end, i don’t think all cleavages have equivalent powers of destabilization for a polity. class differences do. religious differences do. language differences do. race differences do. popularity, jockness, etc. have a non-trivial effect, but these cliques often dissolve now do to social mobility. i guess you could rewrite the red vs. white wars in russia as nerds vs. jocks, i don’t know, i’m skeptical. in the short term a meathead beating the shit out of nerd is devastating, but in the long term the ties of blood, language and socioeconomic deprivation bind, tie and cohere, and can be turned into a fist. cheerleading sqaud ain’t gonna do it.
The Dominicans most likely to become African-American. Mexican-Americans in the US are overwhelmingly of Indian origin (as I believe Razib stated on his blog) and live a stone’s throw from their homeland.
no, the genetic studies i’ve seen indicate white-european parity with a minor african genetic quanta. there is variance around the mean population values so, so many are mostly indigenous, some are mostly white, with many in the middle. there is also the confounding factor of a recent wave of un-hispanicized indigenous people from the far south of mexico. california mexican americans are generally ‘browner’ than texas ones from what i recall.
IMHO ,I predict the reverse will happen within 20-30 years.
IMO you have issue with basic extrapolation. assuming that races do not mix, non-hispanic whites are not going to be a minority in this nation until 2050. 20-30 years from now hispanics will be a majority in some states (cali, arizona, new mexico) but a large minority in much of the country. and i suspect on the language issue blacks will side with whites. if you want a language of trade, i’d go with mandarin, the chinese productivity is already kicking latin mexican ass.
honors classes often somehow get filled with white students, etc.
oh, and people with brown and ‘yellow’ skins. oh, i forgot, asians became white when we need to trot out the white-non-white dichotomy.
. Maybe then i’d be able understand some of the in-bred rednecks in this country.
you know, i like cracker jokes as much as the next guy, but let me speak up and note that there is brown, black and yellow trash but we wouldn’t shit on them like we do rednecks. a redneck threatens you, and oh, they are racist fucks, but if a black mugs you, well, no stereotype please.
uncle-niece and cross-cousin lovin’ browns need not throw stones from glass houses in regards to inbreeding.
Give the rednecks some credit; they made up 2/3 of my high school Spanish teachers. Their Spanish accents totally sucked (think Peggy on “King of the Hill”), but it warmed my heart that these native Texans took such an interest in a foreign language & teaching it to others.
Liz here. I’m about as white-bread-WASP as it is possible to get. I’m reasonably fluent in French, and my Spanish is, well, funky. I’d be expelled all the time, though, as we speak Spanglish all the time. “No problemo” being one of the more common responses around here.
Turns out the school district superintendent reversed the suspension and apologized to the student.
Relative to Simran’s excellent comment, Joanne Jacob’s new book, Our School, addresses in one passage the reality of bilingual education:
(p. 129).
Jacobs says the bilingual program had noble goals, but floundered on the poor curriculum in bilingual classes and the lack of highly trained bilingual teachers (forcing districts to rely on bilingual teachers’ aides with high-school educations). The book as a whole deals with the first few years at a charter school, Downtown College Prep. The school also learned how to meet parents, many of whom did not speak English, and the parents’ assumptions and preconceptions about education. If you are interested in the American public education system, I highly recommend it.
A second language as a private code: when I was a young woman studying in Europe, I’d get flustered when men on the street or the subway would make suggestive remarks. “Back off, buster!” didn’t seem to do the job. At the time, I’d memorized some chants and song lyrics in Hawai’ian. Growling out something like “Ke kai moana nui la!” (The great big ocean) and glaring seemed to do the trick.
Camille wrote,
Camille’s mother suffered a failure of code-switching — that mental process that lets a person switch seamlessly between languages, dialects, or even “registers” within a language. It is what lets a person who uses a foul-mouthed register most of the time person drop all scatalogical language in an inappropriate setting (such as church), switching to church or formal register. It is a pretty interesting field. If you are interested, there’s a code-switching forum.
There’s an urban legend that goes like this (I heard it said of a Baptist church lady in Alabama):
Wikiquote attributes the root story to Miriam Amanda “Ma” Ferguson (June 13, 1875–June 25, 1961), who was the first female Governor of Texas (1924), who is reputed to have said it while clutching a Bible, about her reason for objecting to teach Spanish at school.
Other versions of the legend can be found at multiracial.com, victorious
Essentialism! Everybody needs to get in touch with their inner Sikh 😉
working on it…..
Ditto.
i just stick a fish in my ear.
On a more serious note, with regards to a bilingual education, the school in India that I attended was very strict enforcing English as the language of conversation. Though punishments were never dished out, students were always reminded to speak in English while in class and hallways.
It was an English Medium school like some others, but many in the state, despite the language of instruction failed to plant a good fluency of it among the student population. This resulted in many schools pumping out students
As students came of highschool age, the rules relaxed a bit, since the fundamentals were already in place by then.
Realistically speaking, Spanish speakers arrived in the Americas HUNDREDS of years before English speakers did. Not only that, English language and culture are FAR INFERIOR to Spanish Language and culture and thus, everyone should be punished for speaking English. There are invariably more Spanish speakers in the world than English. We’re right, you’re wrong, we’re more you’re less! ¡Español debe ser la lengua oficial del mundo!
Is that what they call it these days?
It is just not polite to talk in a foriegn language publicly,if there is some one around who cannot understand what you are saying, Period. But, take it with a pinch of salt as every now and then we go into our private conversation mode be in Malayalam, Hindi or English ( well, these are the languages I speak). As long as we do not use an offending tone, I guess it is appreciated by some, not all. Along with the ethnic languages; mannerism and tone of voice also can stand out in Mainstream culture. Hey, when you are in Rome, do it like the Romans…..not like how you do it in Jhumri Talayia. If you want to be accepted in to main stream you have to make an effort to assimilate. People appreciate ethnicity when you allow them to get past the blinders and misconceptions. One question I used to get asked all the time when I came to US 15 years back was: Do you guys ride on elephant backs? My reply would always be: Yes, but we also have a modern automobile industry which churns out state of the art vehicles. It is your approach…..most local white/black folks are hesitant to approach a new comer because they are just as apprehensive as you are. I live in a black/white blue collar neighborhood were we drink “Old style” beer on friday nights and roast marshmellows on open fire. When we moved in here 5 years back no one acknowledged us. But we had an open house and invited the whole neighborhood to join us to celebrate our new home. 75% of the neighbors showed up and we had a good time eating, drinking and socializing. The rest became freindly in due course.
Mind you, deep inside my heart I know that I am a first generation immigrant who speaks with an accent and I know where I stand in this society. I am not taking anything for granted. There are going to be people who will never accept me. Just like I was not accepted, growing up in Bhopal ( being a South Indian). But this is my home now, just like my neighbors, whose ancestors came from Ireland 300 years back.
i’ve seen stranger things I went to a sick school in india called Delhi Public School. It’s a private school despite the name. They wanted to be more british than the british. We were not allowed to speak any other language except english on the bus and in classrooms. The only exception was Hindi class. We had a sick system of bus monitors class monitors. They were the kissas pets of teachers who were assigned this job. Our principal carried a swagger stick with the school emblem on it!
GujuDude:
BABEL FISH!!! SEE ABOVE!
Ace: its gratifying to know that i’m not the only hitchhiker’s fan.
IMO you have issue with basic extrapolation. assuming that races do not mix, non-hispanic whites are not going to be a minority in this nation until 2050. 20-30 years from now hispanics will be a majority in some states (cali, arizona, new mexico) but a large minority in much of the country. and i suspect on the language issue blacks will side with whites. if you want a language of trade, i’d go with mandarin, the chinese productivity is already kicking latin mexican ass. Razib, Ooooops looks I didn’t make my case clear. I didn’t mean to say Latinos will become majority and Spanish will swallow English. What I meant was Latinos will be sizeable minority(numbers higher than now).Spanish will be used as a one of the two major languages.Latinos will not be swallowed like German immigrants into the culture because there will be enough space to live and work using Spanish most of the time.They will have their own language and culture ,others will have to deal with it.If they become majority in a part of the country (several states ) we will see major political tention to secede if Spanish is treated differently than English (Quebec example)
Razib, what is this fascination with me being wrong? 🙂 I’m not talking Enlightenment-era liberalism, for which there is a ton of literature about its ethnocentric racist ridiculousness. I’m talking about 20th century pre-neoliberalism political Liberalism reinterpreted in contemporary human rights rhetoric about the rights of the individual, etc etc. And then I suppose I could add some bastardized contemporary Communism to take care of the community/social/minority/economic rights component. Jeeeeez.
And I really want to know, what is this assimilationist model that everyone wants folks to integrate into? Should we all become Presbyterians and Episcopalians, speak Boston English and invest in skin lightening cream and own property in the Hamptons? Would that be wicked enough? I mean, which “Rome” are we talking about? At the rate in which American society is diversifying (linguistically, ethnically, regionally, however you want to categorize things), are we still going to play into the dominant society paradigm? And what happens when you live in a state that totally doesn’t reflect the same demographics as the aggregate (e.g. NJ, NY, CA, TX)?
I’m going to go outside and speak Spanish and Punjabi to myself… TOGETHER! Just kidding.
Also a fun FYI for the folks, a lot of Mexican-Americans in the Central Valley of California are East Indian brown. Gettum Sikh sardars and Chinese Exclusion Act.
gujudude – hahah fuckin inbred rednecks….you crack me up, i guess gujus can be funny…yes i am trying to offend all sorts of people 🙂
razib – what the hell do you do with your life? i can’t even read your entries anymore i want to stick a ice pick in my eye.
camille – i like your style, except that you’re a trust fund baby…
Has anyone here ever gotten out of a confrontation with police by pretending to not know english??? Quite possibly the best reason to be bilingual…just start gibbering off in hindi with some heavy accented english words, and playing completely stupid. It’s only worked once for me… the second time the cop busted me because he remembered me from a fraternity party where i was the chief negotiator(aka the sober brother at the party)…
You’re right – there is an ambiguity between mutineer meaning all of us who are on this blog and mutineer meaning those of us who are on the masthead and who can post. I meant the latter. Maybe I’m a Mutineer vs. a mutineer. Or maybe we should all live in a classless society. What I meant was, mine is the only turban on the mastead, the only turban doing the posting …
When did I become a trust fund baby? Whoever’s got my fund – turn it over! Is it b/c I’m lazy and have all this time to post on SM? 😉
Shamefully, yes. 🙂
razib – what the hell do you do with your life? i can’t even read your entries anymore i want to stick a ice pick in my eye.
opinions your disagree with?!?! the horror…the horror!!!!!
I agree that people should be able to speak in any language they want amongst themselves. But when there are people in the group who don’t understand the language, it is best to speak in English. It is no fun when you are the one who doesn’t understand the language.
For instance, I work for a Korean company (in the US), many of the employees are Korean and speak in Korean even in business meetings. When a white guy complained some time back, the management just ignored him. At a major meeting last year, the CFO made a speech in Korean. There was no official translator. One of my colleagues would translate for me, if anything important was said. There are several Korean multi-nationals with offices/plants in the US. Soon there will be Chinese ones.
Desi,
I totally agree. Especially in a business setting the administration should try not to purposefully (or unintentionally?) isolate their employees.
At the very least if your company is going to conduct meetings in Korean they should have a translator or something…
but like i said… if we all had Babel fish in our ears, we’d never have this problem. =)
Even if the Sikh in question has a good smelling beard? 😉
Just b/c Pattie and I have whitebread names doesn’t mean we engage in the same beard-sniffing activities! 🙂
FOBs shouldn’t complain that they are asked to speak in English. You came to this country for money – You earn this money by working with others who are English speakers. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
At least with Desis, there is no hostility towards using the English language. Some Spanish speakers can spend their whole lives in an all Spanish speaking barrio in Nueva York without having to consider speaking English.
When the shoes on the other foot, you would complain as loud as the Americans. LOL. Usually when my brother and I are speaking in Bengali – we are speaking bad about somebody!
How do you know that all immigrants come to the US for money? While the % of immigrants who are refugees is fairly low, a good number of folks migrate as part of family reunification, and depending on their country of origin, tend to be older and not part of the labor force or working age population.
You should meet my dadiji! 🙂
Here is one mama’s perspective: I speak exclusively to my child in Hindi, which I have really only perfected myself as an adult over the past 5 years. I think my son will pick up the English at daycare and school. When we are out and about I say stuff in Hindi and then again in English. I feel bad because most of our friends are not Hindi speakers, but at the same time I do not want to cave on my Hindi-only lessons for kiddo. This makes playgroups very interesting. Once I explain the goal and purpose of “Hindi only” people get excited and are supportive. Hubby and I decided we wanted kiddo to have Hindi. It is our gift to him to have the option to know something about his Indian culture with the words to express it.
I am not an American citizen and I could be considered a WASP (although I am Dutch and was raised a catholic… 😎 I work in a multi-cultural (all kinds of europeans, some people from South-America and several Africans too) environment, and I actually joke about people speaking a language I do not understand. In public I don’t actually care too much what language people speak, although I must say I don’t like it when people speak a language I do not understand when we are part of the same group (socializing).
Before people start criticising others for speaking a different language, they should first learn how to speak their own language as best they can. Being from a family of academics, with a brother who is linguistically focused, a professorial father who has written two academic books and in the region of 50 academic publications and a mother who also, being an academic lecturer, is incredibly competent with linguistic skills and has also got a number of publications, including an academic book published, the emphasis on speaking English (Great Britain based English) correctly and accurately has been an important thing in my upbringing. I also am a Latin and French student and although I only have rudimentary knowledge, I can follow a conversation in French (and a little bit in Italian and Spanish also) as well as contribute some.
What irritates me in this discussion is the lack of accuracy and precision within one’s own language whilst discussing whether other people can speak their own native tongues in your presence. I for one, would find it difficult to go to another country and speak only the accepted languages of the country. It matters not whether other people feel uncomfortable or not, but it is a matter of practicality, and if one is fluent in a language, there should be no reason why one should be prevented from using that language if one has the opportunity. Fluency can be lost if the language is never practiced.
There is one incident I shall name, I was standing waiting for a bus and I saw some people looking a little lost looking at the bus time-table. I went over and asked if I could help them. They spoke no English but were French speakers. I had enough French to be able to find out where they wanted to go and to tell them how to get there. In that situation, people might thing I was telling them where the best place to put a bomb is. What is the moral of the story? Learn other languages, it will allow you to help others and give you more of a chance to understand what people are saying. I have only had tuition in Latin and French, but I can take a piece of basic to moderate Spanish or Italian and translate it into English well enough to understand the general idea, and I would be able to follow the general idea of a conversation in either language (depending on the speed of the conversation)
In short, learn your own language before discussing other people’s use of their language. Simple things are important; capital letters, noun/verb agreement, etc.
I always want my partner to say sweet nothings when I’m about to explode. Somehow saying it in Hindi makes the whole experience erotic.
But yet something tells me that hasn’t happened in a long time
Incorrect. While the culture as a whole does revere teachers for what they give to their students, my parents would have never tolerated any sort of ‘special-ed’ classes where it wasn’t deserved. While they would’ve first mulled over the possibility that their child did need special-ed classes, they would’ve raised Cain had I or my brother put in one for no reason whatsoever except that we look “foreign”. And it’s not just my parents- I know plenty of other ‘problem parents’ for teachers and educators in the South Asian diaspora.
What it comes down to is how comfortable any parents feel with asking questions. Not whether they’re South Asian or not.
For what it’s worth, I’m the only U.S. born person on a team of about 20 in suburban Philadelphia, PA. The rest are from India. If someone wants to speak to me, they speak in English. But after nearly a month, I haven’t joined a coffee room conversation, or an impromptu hallway meeting because they’re not speaking in English. If we’re in a conference room waiting for a call to start, the conversation around the table excludes me – not in English. In the current economy, I’m glad to have a job, but I’m resigned to being an outsider here for the duration. I’ll probably also start looking in another year, even though the work is interesting, because the work environment is so unpleasant because of the language issue.
Dave @ 98:
I don’t believe you.
Indians are chatty. They like Americans, and even think that knowing an American is a sign of upward mobility. 20 Indians? It is not likely that all of them are from the same part of India, in which case they will often be speaking in English, Hindi and so on. In your presence, they would most likely change to English completely.
You may want to study your own face in a mirror. What kind of body language do you have? Are you tense, wound-up all the time? You may be the one who is not open to conversation.