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"Shockingly, a large segment of this rising population of immigrants does not speak English at home and does not intend to..."
Boy, just eliminate that first word of the sentence, and it makes sense...
That assimilatative force is being diluted with all this garbage about "multiculturalism." By definition, America is a polyglot culture, but it works because it's a melting pot. All cultures subsume to the whole, which is then all things yet no one thing in particular.
Today, the tendency is to think of each culture separately -- the hyphenated American -- and to treasure each culture as a whole in itself. That interrupts the process of assimilation, breeds discontent, and exaggerates differences instead of identifying commonalities. It is a wall-building mentality, and must be defeated if the normal cultural dynamics are to apply.
One place we can preserve it is in our language. We decidedly do NOT hablamos Espanol!
English: The Vanishing Language
Que?
Interesting. I'm married to a woman whose grandparents came from Norway on her mother's side, and Germany on her father's side. They're long dead now, but her parents said that Norwegian and German were spoken as the primary language by those immigrants until the day they died. They learned enough English to get along, but always preferred their native language. My wife's parents speak almost not at all in their parents' languages, and my wife can't even say hello in either language.
Similarly, I grew up in a CA town with about a 30% hispanic population, back in the 50s and 60s. I had several very good friends who were hispanic. In the first grade, most of them spoke Spanish. By the end of 5th grade, they didn't even have accents. One was my best friend, and I used to spend a lot of time at his house, as he did at mine. His abuela (grandmother) spoke no English at all. His mother preferred to speak Spanish, but spoke English OK. My friend? By the time he graduated from high school, he spoke American English perfectly. He's now the mayor of that town.
Thus it is in immigrant families. Thus has it always been. It takes a couple of generations to completely remove the original language.
Those who claim otherwise simply have no experience with immigrants.
If we intend to keep English as it was intended to be in the style of Shakespeare and Milton, we need to teach the support languages, Greek and Latin, as well as other modern languages such as French, Italian, German, and Spanish. English by itself or in a vacuum will die.
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Wuzzat?
I'm in the strongly-anti-illegal-alien camp. But claiming English is vanishing is absurd.
I was over in Germany and Austria in 1997. I took high school German. Forgot most of it. I would struggle to speak German to the clerks and they would answer fluently in English to help speed me on my way.
I do agree that those who come here should learn English. But those who do not are a threat to the concept of a melting pot, but are no threat to English, since a large part of the world speaks it now.
oh please ...
hyperbole does not serve the argument, it's downright silly.
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.
Although every American and immigrant should be fluent in English--and should use it outside the house--even one and a half centuries ago many immigrants used their native language in the home. The second generation, however, should use English at home. Yet, today, German is the most common nonEnglish language in the United States although the bulk of German immigration was around a century ago.