English and America

I was with a friend last night and we were listening to the radio when a commercial came on that was in rapid Spanish for about 30 seconds. After the commercial, my friend groaned and said, "I hate that! I have no idea what they just said. This is an English radio station in an English speaking country. Learn the language!" The atmosphere was such that I just chuckled and didn't think much about it. The attitude my friend expressed tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth, but I'm not sure exactly why.

I can definitely see the good side of this "English only" attitude. I thought this quote from the U.S. English website was good, that they want to "preserv[e] the unifying role of the English language in the United States". When I think of people who don't speak English well in the country, or state, city, or even the neighborhood in which I live, I don't tend to think of their problems as my problems (although that's probably not at all true). This feeling is compounded by the obvious language barrier, so the circumstances would be quite incredible for "us" (by "us", I mean the average American and a non-English-speaking American) to unify on anything. Speaking the same language is vital for unity and organization.

However, the website goes a step further, that our society is in danger because of this disunity. It puts a lot of stock on the term "low expectations," as in immigrants who don't speak English are coming here expecting us to cater to them, so they can be lazy and don't really need to learn the language. To me, this seems really preposterous. I'd be terrified to even take a trip to somewhere that I don't speak the native language, let alone live there. Also, there definitely is an attitude among Americans, as expressed by my friend, that immigrants should learn the language, which leads me to believe that if you walk out into society without knowing English, you'll be scoffed at by these proud Americans. These are powerful incentives to learn the language, and as the Baron and Bimer articles show, they seem to be quite effective.

All in all, I agree with Bimer that non-English-speaking immigrants are hardly tearing us apart, and that encouraging bilingualism/multilingualism is a good thing. However, I definitely fit in with the portion of Americans who grew up not feeling inclined to really learn a foreign language other than it would be kind of cool to learn some weird, remote language hardly anyone speaks. I really understand the apathetic side: what's the point of learning another language if everyone you know speaks English? A bit harder to figure out is the slightly hostile attitude portrayed by the US English website and my friend. Whereas I just totally tuned out the radio when it began speaking in Spanish, my friend paid attention and got kind of angry. I assume it's just sort of a pride thing, that when another language occurs in social discourse, that it seems to threaten their dominance as an English speaker. Or maybe it's just that people are so used to hearing English, that when they're forced to hear another language and not understand what's happening for a bit, they get irritated with not knowing what's going on.