Replies

Is this what's known as pandering? Seeing as I don't understand it I can't respond to it except to say, "Bei Mir dieses ist scheiss".

No, it is known as putting out your message in a form that will have the most impact.

When you are advertising, nobody has to read your message. It can simply be ignored.

The bottom line is that, regardless of how many languages you speak, your reading speed and reading ease will be much greater in your first, or more accurately, your "dominant" language.

In my own Cuban American family, we have been bilingual in English and Spanish since the 1800's. Since English was the language of international commercial success, my grandparent's and parent's generations in Cuba would be shipped off to American boarding schools in the U.S. to learn English.

When we came to the U.S. from Cuba in the 1960's, I, the 6 year old, was the only member of my family that could not already speak English. My grandparents, my parents and all my older cousins already spoke English fluently before they ever left Cuba.

However, one language will tend to be the dominant one unless you have many years of equal use.

My parent's generation had "co-dominance" in the languages as they had fully mastered Spanish at the highest levels in Cuba and then worked daily in English in the U.S. They read both languages with equal ease.

Our grandparents spoke English just fine but, when it came to reading, they preferred books in Spanish. They were "Spanish dominant".

My generation growing up in the U.S. was "English dominant" as our Spanish education was never at the level that our parent's and grandparent's Spanish education had been. So, given a choice of reading a professional journal in either English or Spanish, we will choose the English version every time unless we feel compelled to slog through the Spanish version when we feel particularly masochistic.

If I were to describe the reading experience in your non-dominant language to someone who is monolingual, I would compare it to the difference in reading a Tom Clancy novel to reading Shakespeare.

Yes, you can read and understand both of them. However, you can devour the Tom Clancy novel at warp speed but you have to slog through Shakespeare at a much slower pace with frequent peaks at the Cliff Notes.

When the Republican National Committee writes in Spanish, it is targeting the older voters who are and will always be "Spanish dominant".

Instead of giving their potential voters a pamphlet written in the equivalent of Elizabethan English, they are putting out that same message in the equivalent of Tom Clancy English.

That is not "pandering". That is good advertising.

One should not jump to conclusions in equating total English mastery with patriotism. A reading of the autobiography of Eddie Rickenbacker, America's leading World War One ace, will show that, when he was growing up, the language that he spoke at home was...........German.

He told about being beaten up on his way to school each day because his English was not all that great.