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.
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.
I have been hearing black speech for a long time, and I think you're wrong. We are all starting to sound the same. They sound more like us and we sound more like them. Someday there will be no "us and them" but I probably won't be around to see that one.
You don't know the first thing about where else I've lived or what I've experienced, yet because I live in Omaha, you assume that I've never been anywhere or seen any kind of cosmopolitan environment.
Just a hint? YOU are not entitled to define "the real world." It is just as likely that the world you occupy is false as it is that mine is. So spare me the patronizing placation.
It can be muy frustrando.
Je ne parle pas le français.
This piece strikes me as alarmist. Immigrant groups have always retained their own language through the first generation or two. German speaking troops volunteered units for George Washington's army, for example. And large sections of major cities (Chinatown, Little Italy, and Little Odessa in NYC come to mind) had populations that were majority non-English speaking for years.
Malheureusement, moi oui.
One of the California State Standards indicates that 9th/10th-graders need to learn Greek and Latin roots, prefixes and suffixes. (Gee, they're doing something right!)
Hélas.
Je le prends vous ne comprenez pas l'espagnol?
Si, muy piquito...
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