What are the Pros and Cons of a bilingual society?

[KrazyHorse]

You're being dense.

Population US 1910: 91.6 million

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-l.../census/cen.pl

Population US 2000 280 million

Immigration (from your link) 923 000 in 1910
984 000 at present

Immigration rate was thus 3 times higher in 1910

And that's all that's important.

[Drake Tungsten]

That doesn't prove that today's rate isn't massive as well; you're the one being dense. Why can't you ever just admit that you're wrong? It's not that hard...

[KrazyHorse]

What wrong?

Why is today's rate massive? It's a third of the maximum seen by the US a hundred years ago, and is half what countries like Canada and Australia take in. As a matter of fact, on this the US is closer to Europe than it is to us (countries like Germany have close to the US level of immigration).

Snooze.

[Drake Tungsten]

Why is today's rate massive?

Just for the record, I never used the term "rate"...

Anyway, the biggest problem with American immigration policy isn't the massive numbers, but the inequal distribution of immigrants from different countries. The block of Mexican immigrants (both legal and illegal) in particular is extremely large, which is making it difficult to assimilate them. There's no need to "melt" if you can get along without doing it.

America needs to change its policy so that it spreads its immigrant population across many different regions and states. You can accept massive amounts of immigrants and still assimilate them if you make sure the individual ethnic groups each make up a small portion of the immigrant population...

[GePap]

"The Melting Pot" never really applied to all groups, now did it? The Chinese were kept out for a long time, along with all other asian immigrants. Mexicans were not invited in that much either for a logn time, or Puerto Ricans, and Blacks never seemd to be high up there in the "melting Pot". That terms alays applied, it seem to me, to the "white" european immigrants that came in the late 19th and early 20th.

As for blingualism: individuals who are bilingual geenrally have better grasp of language in general. All children should be expected to know multiple languages. But as far as making it a legal requirement for all documents to be in multiple languages..only if 2 languages are relatively equal (such as in Quebec or Belgium). otherwise it is a wate of resources.

[Drake Tungsten]

"The Melting Pot" never really applied to all groups, now did it?

True, but that doesn't mean the concept is bad, just its past implementation. Asians have been assimilated pretty well since we overcame the racism directed at them. So have many Hispanics and blacks to a lesser extent. The melting pot still works...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Quote:

That's the old "Melting Pot" theory, which seems to be a bit outdated by now.

It isn't outdated at all.

It is, if you have ever studied Organisational Behaviour. A society is a pretty damn big organisation.

[Jaguar]

Hispanics are the second largest ethnic group in the US and will reach parity with white people within this century. This is good because they make good food and hispanic girls are hot.

I've learned Spanish to deal with the growing bilingualism in this country. Obviously I'm not very articulate yet, but I can say whatever I need to. (I could read and explain a newspaper article or a book or whatever.) Everyone should do the same, those lazy bums.

I think it would be better if the world all spoke one language, however that is unlikely. A bilingual society is good because your population can talk to speakers of both languages instead of just one. Thus your population becomes more popular around the world.

[Tattila the Hun]

Cons: Swedish!
Pros: Hmmmm...

[Andemagne]

pakkoruotsi

[OliverFA]

That's not exactly the same situation, but by my own experience in one of the bilingual regions of Spain (Catalonia) and my travels around Europe the worst thing that can be done is force hispanic people to use English. Being a minority with so big numbers, it's normal that they will get their own newspapers, TV channels and speak Spanish with their family and friends. But if they want to integrate and become part of the community (and I hope they do) they will also learn and use English. Of course, there will always be an small minority that won't want to, but they are condemning themselves to margination.

So, it's ok to help them making it easier for them to learn and use English, but it isn't ok to force them to, or what you will get is exactly the oposite effect. When I was a child I was almost Spanish-Catalan bilingual, until I realized that the Catalan "government" was imposing me the use of Catalan. Then I reverted to Spanish. They forced me to choose a language and I did.

By the way, I don't think this is a new situation in the US. When I was at Philadelphia's Chinatown everybody seemed to know both Chineese and English. Why would it be different for Hispanics?

[Pekka]

It's ok, but I don't that we have to learn swedish by force. For example I had to study first of all my own language, english, swedish and german when I was 14. and first three were mandatory. It's a bit too much.

I was never interested in learning swedish, because it was mandatory. If it was obligatory, I might have even studied it and learn it properly. But by force.. what can you do, young rebels..

[Spiffor]

Wow OliverFA, that sure is surprising.
Are there many Catalans like you who prefer the use of Spanish rather than Catalan ? Everytime, I heard the Spanish people are very defensive of their regional language, is it true, or is it a mere misconception ?

Drake :
From what I've seen in France and Germany, the problem of integration applies here too. But people from the "regular" population rarely learn Arabic or Turkish to communicate with the minorities, as the latters seem to interact more with the majority than in the US. If only, the public schooling is held in French, and very very few schools can teach in another language, and need to go through a bureaucratic hell for that. Are there many Spanish-only schools in the US ?

[Hurricane]

In a perfect world, everybody would speak the same language. This is obvious.

But the world is far from perfect, and we have hundreds of different languages and hundreds of countries with long histories of different language groups within their borders. Denying part of a country's population of service in their native language is both discriminating and economically unsound. All studies I have seen show that minorities that are forced to "unlearn" their own language and culture are less productive (i.e. unemployed), less happy (i.e. troublemakers) and less well (i.e. use more medical services=cost more). All this has a negative effect on the country as a whole.

So the lesson is that it is good for the country to support the minorities. The minority language will assimilate into the majority in time, when (and if) it becomes too weak.

[OliverFA]

Originally posted by Spiffor
Wow OliverFA, that sure is surprising.
Are there many Catalans like you who prefer the use of Spanish rather than Catalan ? Everytime, I heard the Spanish people are very defensive of their regional language, is it true, or is it a mere misconception ?

I don't prefer to use Spanish rather than Catalan. My native language is Spanish, and that's the situation for the 60% of the Catalans, probably more due to the Hispanic American immigration.

I knew that this is not what the Catalan government (dis)information campaign says, but these is what they are after all. disinformation campaigns.

[Az]

I am against it, esp. all those secluded societies.

I will add more later.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Hurricane
Denying part of a country's population of service in their native language is both discriminating and economically unsound. All studies I have seen show that minorities that are forced to "unlearn" their own language and culture are less productive (i.e. unemployed), less happy (i.e. troublemakers) and less well (i.e. use more medical services=cost more). All this has a negative effect on the country as a whole.

This doesn't always apply. The comparative history of France and Spain can be interesting about this : both countries had an ambitious policy of unifying their languages and reduce regional languages to unsignificantness (in the 19th century). While Spain used almost exclusively force to destroy regional languages, France used a wide array of tools, from public education and strong economic integration to force (too). The results are very different in both countries, as regional autonomous parties are nearly non-existent in France, whereas they have much influence in Spain. Regional languages are also much less of an issue in France than in Spain.

Currently, Brittany is a productive and rather happy region of France, where there are much fewer problems than in "truely French" regions, despite the Bretonian language being nearly killed in the past, and barely resurrected today.


OliverFA :
Thanks for the answer. I didn't know the majority of "Catalans" were actually speaking Spanish as their first language.

[Sava]

A country should have one official language that everybody does business in.

Foreign languages should be taught to children as early as elementary school. Educated people often speak more than one language. Others... well... don't. But in America, the freedom to be stupid is one of the most cherished ideals. Don't try to change that.

[CerberusIV]

The real issue is that people should have one common language (at least) so they can all communicate. More than one common language does cost money though (if you are ever in Wales think how much smaller the traffic signs would be if they were just in one language and how much paint and metal would be saved).

Other languages can get out of hand in the UK with our (relative) willingness to take refugees from other countries. I lived in Sheffield a few years ago and at one point they changed the days of the week they emptied people's household bins. The leaflet explaining this was published in English but two thirds of it was taken up with lines in other languages saying that people could get copies of the leaflet in their own language. The list IIRC included Urdu, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Somali, Arabic and two or three others. Crazy! If someone really wanted to know what it said they would find a person in their community who could translate it for them.

I also remember a conversation with a MEP who explained that all EU documents were produced in English, French and German. A small (large?) army of people are employed in Brussels to do all the translating and check the documents all say the same thing.

I'm not insisting on English - if there is a real move for a different global language I will learn it - but there is a lot of swimming against the tide by government institutions and minority rights protesters which is a ludicrous waste of time and resources.

{rant} end of rant {/rant}

[Az]

Esperanto for official EU language!

[Sava]

I agree Cerberus... my family has kept its own ethnic identity. I was the first person on my mother's side to be born in this country. If you would ever meet my mother, you wouldn't mistake her for anything else but a born and bred American. Yet she didn't speak a word of English until age 9. We still speak Serbian, and practice our ethnic and cultural rituals and such. I don't see the problem with making English a mandatory, official language for America. There are people that choose not to learn English, and that's fine. But if you want to participate in society, you need to learn it's language. That's a general rule regardless of the country's official language. If I move to France, I'll learn French. If I move to Russia, I'll learn to speak... better Russian

My grandfather recently shared with me his idea about English. He feels that a common, official language is a unifying force. Despite whatever native cultural or ethnic background two people in the world might possess, if everyone spoke English, everyone would be able to communicate with each other. I'm not advocating English be an official world language, I was just using it as an example.

[Frogman]

I don't understand why the US is always picked on for not being multilingual like our european friends. They have to be multilingual, they have a variety of countries, nationalities and ethnic groups that cling to native languages.

I took spanish for six years, I'd be happy to use it, but you just don't get that much opportunity in most of the US. We're a big country with a common language and most people who speak english as a second language want the practice of speaking it.

Its not american arrogance or ignorance that keeps us from being multilingual. The forces of society have molded a dominant language and those forces will continue to pressure minority languages into oblivion. The US will not become bilingual, generations of hispanics born here will ultimately lose the mother tongue just like every other immigrant group that isn't fed with a constant stream from the homeland.

Europe will soon face similar pressures and some languages are already endangered. I'm curious to hear from europeans on how they see language evolving and which languages are becoming more dominant and which ones are declining.

[CerberusIV]

Part of what happens in europe is that new words, often english (american), get adopted into the national language. This apparently gets the French language purists really worked up so they dream up new french words to replace adopted words like "email" and no-one bothers to use the made up words anyway.

I think education is part of the answer by offering a range of languages in school. I am always amazed by the standard of english spoken by most europeans I meet, especially compared to my own inability to put more than four or five words in french together.

It will really be decided by the majority. If people choose to speak english or esperanto or whatever and that is the language that is used and people can fluently communicate with then that language will grow and others will decline. For commercial reasons (computers, TV/movies and not many other globally widespread languages) english in one dialect or another is likely to be the global language of this century.

[Spiffor]

There is a driving force in the world so that high-end managers work in English, because English is the business language. There have been occurences in France and Germany where English became used at national level by managers instead of the national language.
English is also the scientific language, though many scientists still produce their works in thei mother tongue.
Lastly, in the EU institutions specifically, there is a drive to unite towards a one working language, which will be English once France and Germany stop their resistance.

The aim of English as the international language is not to replace national languages ; it is to become a common ground when you encounter foreign people. This forum is a great example for it : Russians, Germans, Spaniards, Brazilians, Chinese etc. meet each other here and are able to communicate because they speak English. It doesn't mean they are losing skill in their mother tongue when speaking to RL people.
This "common ground" is the ideal case.

However, the problem is to see the elites adopting English as their daily language. Such a phenomemon has begun and will continue. Historically, every time a language has been massively influenced by others, the elites have played a major role in the process. As we speak, more and more English words are integrated in national languages. It is fairly possible some languages become very much assimilated to English in some decades or so.
This is not necessarily a doom : historically, languages have re-emerged when elites from the language community became interested in it. We may be experiencing the rising tide of English, and we may experience the downing tide in a few decades.

[Frogman]

from spiffor
We may be experiencing the rising tide of English, and we may experience the downing tide in a few decades.

I don't see how that can happen. All the forces at work only serve to increase the domination of english. Languages develop in isolation and you just can't live in isolation in the world anymore. What other language do you see coming to to replace english as the universal common language? Asians learn english not spanish and there is no way were going to move to an asian language thats not based on the 26 letter alphabet.