Why aren't you speaking english?
The guy had lived here since 1988 and was using a translator to testify.
Twenty three years and isn't fluent in English.
I spent two years in Germany and was speaking passible German, a thick accent I am certain, but well enough that the locals weren't automatically changing to English to do business with me.
My mother's grand parents came over from Italy. Grampa was forbidden to speak Italian by his parents. Great Grampa knew some english when he came over, but his wife didn't. She was the law-maker in the house and she decided that her children were Americans and would speak only english. So she learned english well enough to teach her kids.
That's a typical immigrant story from before the 1950's.
I have German roots on my father's side, but so far in the past that nobody spoke any. The Scots/English side even had to learn to speak english all over again because a Scot sounded too much like an Irishman and everyone knows what kind of scum those potato eaters are. Great Grampa on dad's side would often say, "Better to be black than Irish." I didn't know what he was talking about for decades.
But that was then.
What we have now is not immigration. It is colonization. We are not allowed to apply the gentle pressure of "speak english" to the immigrants to force them into the crucible of the melting pot. Lots of places in the southwest are de facto Mexico del Norte. Miami is effectively the largest, most prosperous city in Cuba. Portions of New Jersey and New York are effectively part of Puerto Rico.
Now that we're realizing that letting enclaves of foreigners form was not the best idea for our national identity it's going to be that much harder breaking it up and getting them to stop being Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican or whatever and start being Americans.
For some, it's just a language issue. I know several cubans who are definitely AMERICAN, but are weak on english. They simply don't HAVE to use english for much.
It's nothing more than my ancestors did when they came over from Europe; your turn.
h/t Jay
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My Grandmother is French Canadian. Now Granted in Northern Maine that French/English Creole is pretty common so her English is loaded with French syntax and she often omits plurals.
ReplyDeleteStill Her French is worse than her English now, and none of her children speak passable French.
She told me "I married an American Man, so my Children were American and they would speak English not French"
That's a REALLY big statement if you know anything about the Québécois bullshit going on in Canada even to this day where Shop keepers are fined for having English Signs to entice American Tourists. They take their French Speaking and heritage VERY seriously, yet she abandoned the paramount part of her heritage even in Northern Maine where French is still spoken often.
That's saying something.
Next door to me lives a Chinese lady whose daughter, when she first moved here, was a little mite who could only speak Mandarin and looked at me with wonder in her big black eyes when I spoke to her in her own language.
ReplyDeleteShe's now All Grown Up...and speaks English as fluently as I do. She still speaks Mandarin (some of her elderly relatives never did learn much English, and at their age it's difficult) but she learned English!
Another thing about Miami is that it is, in effect, the main center for a lot of trade and business with Latin America, and Spanish is useful to keep up. Also, most Cuban-Americans do learn English, and thanks to Cast(rat)o, we aren't getting endless human waves from there the way we do from Mexico.
ReplyDeleteThere was a time when the second language of NYC was Yiddish; you still can see influence from it in NYC local idioms and slang.