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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3806 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes  Speaks: Spanish | Message 41 of 119 28 December 2013 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Obviously Spain is in a very different economic class than Latin America, the recent economic crisis notwithstanding. Latin America has such a poor distribution of wealth; I've read that by some metrics it is the most unequal region in the world. In Mexico there are MANY rich people; Mexico is the 12th or 14th richest country depending on how GDP is measured but also has many poor immigrants that go to the US in search of a better life. So a lot of Americans associate Spanish with less well-off Mexicans, Central Americans, and a few Caribbean Spanish speakers--not with close to first world Chilean and Argentine citizens.
If somebody went up to me today and made fun of Spanish (or any language), I hopefully would just shrug my shoulders depending on how mean-spirited their comment was. It's not "my" language since I'm not a native speaker so I probably wouldn't get as riled up as natives like mwharper. Now if they made fun of my native language, I probably would agree somewhat as there are only a few million speakers of it, it has very low prestige throughout the world, it doesn't have official recognition anywhere, and it is slowly dying out. Edit: typos Edited by culebrilla on 28 December 2013 at 3:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5189 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 42 of 119 29 December 2013 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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what is your native language, Culebrilla, if you don't mind me asking?
I think anyone who makes a rude comment about anyone's language deserves a rude answer! Or at least a bit of education. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4099 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 43 of 119 29 December 2013 at 6:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have heard, in the USA and to a degree in the UK, with lesser degrees in Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand, that being a monolingual Anglophone is part of patriotism to one's country, and that learning anything else is unpatriotic or not helping to preserve English as a language that everyone in the world must be coerced to learn-- something wherewith I extremely strongly disagree. I have a feeling that this stems from the fact that the British Empire covered one third of the Earth's land mass, and the USA trying become a subtle pseudo-imperial power since 1945. But I have heard too much statements such as, "Why learn anything except English? It is the only important language in the world." or, "How can you want to learn languages when you know English? One must be proud to be an American/Australian/Briton/Canadian/New Zealander", "UK/USA control the world, so English is the most important language", "English should be the national language of every country", and other rubbish. Perhaps also another reason may be that they could be jealous that I, or any other people, are not limited to be able to only speak English. On holiday, it is known that some Anglophones almost want everyone to speak English even though they are in a foreign country, with a foreign language. But because they are Anglophones, they must be catered especially, but a Francophone, Netherlandophone, Hispanophone, Lusophone, etc. do not have this luxury. An example would probably be La Costa del Sol, Ibiza, Fuertaventura, and the Algarve. Coincidentally, I do not remember hearing such statements from non-native Anglophones about their own languages. I had an impression from history classes in primary and secondary school that the only other country to act like this was the Roman Empire with Latin, arguing that everyone must speak Latin, that Latin was the only important language, and that all educated people speak Latin and nothing else. That attitude was two millenia ago. Edited by 1e4e6 on 29 December 2013 at 7:21am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jhaberstro Senior Member United States Joined 4202 days ago 112 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 44 of 119 29 December 2013 at 6:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've heard this sentiment expressed mostly by the faction of people who are pushing political agendas of strict immigration and deportation policies. They don't have a anti-multilingualism stance per se, but rather view immigrants as "non-American" and detrimental to our society (supposedly "stealing our jobs", escaping taxes, etc.). More often than not, such immigrants who are here illegally are latin-american and thus speakers of Spanish. So, being a native speaker of Spanish (and presumably native speaker of English if second generation or fluent speaker of English if first generation) is an easy "marker" of such people, and accordingly gets negatively associated to their political agendas. I would not say though that a negative view of bilingualism is the norm however. For most, it's actually seen as quite the accomplishment, especially if it's not Spanish (due to the sole fact that Spanish is becoming more and more common in daily American life). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4422 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 45 of 119 29 December 2013 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That reminds me of an article I read somewhere. Basically one of this huge travel agencies published a number of the most ridiculous complaints they received during the year. One of them was from a couple of tourists that booked a trip to Spain via them. Their complaint was as follows: "There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners." Another pair complained: “We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish.” As we say at home stupidity goes on people not on animals. :D 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3806 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 46 of 119 29 December 2013 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You think that is bad? Here is something even worse. One of the most famous political commentators in US television, Bill Reilly was discussing Gangnam Style and didn't even realize that it was in ANOTHER LANGUAGE. He was too dense to notice this!! Even worse was that fact that a psychiatrist (physician that graduated from an ivy league college and Johns Hopkins medical school) didn't realize this either! A five second google search would have cleared things up. Amazing that these people have jobs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8O7UZePNCM 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4422 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 47 of 119 30 December 2013 at 1:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good gracious! Not only he doesn't know he's singing in Korean, he's no clue about Korean lifestyle and culture whatsoever. I wouldn't be too surprised if he can't even point Korea on the map. The entire discussion was utterly pointless to say the least. This all reminded me of this video I stumbled upon some time ago. Harvard students have no clue which is the capital of Canada. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0fdYhgJIeE 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4818 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 48 of 119 30 December 2013 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, it is ridiculous to think the UK is one of the leading powers of today's world, truth be told. The US is and when the US says jump, the UK appears to ask just "how high?". Sure, still a different league from my country but no longer the empire and going down in many ways. The world is very different from what it used to be. And English is no longer the language of the nation ruling 1 third of the world. I think the main reason why English has been so dominant in the last decades is the internet. And now, the Spanish speaking internet is catching up and so is the Chinese one. To lesser extent Russian and a few others probably as well.
It is true that the British and Americans seem to be the most bugged ones with the idea of monolingualism being a sign of patriotism. Even though, there are even czech morons who expect the staff at the hotel or taxi drivers or shop assistants anywhere to speak Czech. That is even funnier than the English native tourists, those have at least some base for their assumpsions. Have you seen the scans of blind maps of Europe filled out by american students? Made me laugh. Of course, a lot of europeans may have trouble as well but it seems to be more of an issue when it comes to people in the US. While the whole world knows only the big american cities (after all, most aliens attack New York :-) ) there is a large % of people living in small rural towns and not caring much about education or outer world. We've got a lot of country people as well and I guess their views are the same in many ways. Why would they learn languages of people they don't want to meet and countries they have no intention to visit? And why should anyone they know learn a foreign language instead of doing what they consider to be fun and useful? The thing is that this approach could have worked until now. But the US isn't the economical power it used to be. The UK surely isn't the world leader any more. Spanish speaking countries + Brazil are rising, so is India and other asian countries. And in all those countries, there are people who are just as good at their fields as the monolingual americans or british. And they know at least two languages. The English native monolingual patriots may find themselves on the wrong side of the language barrier in a few decades. Well, to add one more antimultilingualism jewel: the international federation of medical students organises an awesome network of internship exchanges. But they are all officially in English. That does facilitate the situation in many cases (without this, too few people could use the opportunity to get to a Taiwanese or Finnish or Czech hospital) but it is still ridiculous it applies to all the countries including those with important national languages widely studied all over the world. So, you can go to France or Spain or Italy and not know a single word of the language. In all three countries, I guess the patients are excited to practice their, often horrible, English when they are in pain or to wait for the doctor to translate to the foreign student. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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