<<hey kirk
I believe that I made myself misunderstood. I meant that there are no universities in the mainland US that TEACH in Spanish, that offer undergraduate or graduate programs in Spanish, like they do in French in Canada.>>
Oh, I see what you mean. Read my comments on that below.
<<Linguistic patterns? Alot of 'hispanic/latino' people that I know of whose parents or grandparents find it ideal to be bilingual, and many pursue to study Spanish and revisit their countries of origin to reorient themselves towards their multicultural identity. In the 21st century, people travel frequently to their home countries and maintain contact, unlike immigrants of many years ago. If their were public schools in California that exclusively offered their instruction in Spanish from Pre-K to the 12th grade, then many of those kids would speak Spanish amongst themselves.>>
Funny thing you mention it--there are. In fact, the nearest elementary school (and it's public) to my neighborhood has a program where students (regardless of ethnicity--man non-Hispanics do it as well) are taught in English as well as Spanish. It's so popular the waiting list is always long. But, yes, most classroom instruction statewide is in English.
<<It makes no sense that the education system values one language, English, over all others, when we live in a world where thousands are spoken.
Why would one choose to speak one language in a country that has historically been bilingual?>>
My point is that these things often boil down to natural linguistic phenomena--it's not that massive amounts of people "choose" to not speak one language or another, or consciously reject another language (altho that probably does happen in some cases), it's simply how it turns out. And yes, I'm fully aware many immigrants and immigrants' American-born offspring may often keep close ties to their countries of origin--if you read my experiences several posts ago with my Hispanic classmates, many of them returned to Mexico every year for the holidays and for the entire summer or major chunks of it--as well as for other social occasions such as weddings, etc., and obviously they spoke Spanish there. However, English was clearly their preferred and dominant language even when speaking amongst themselves in the US. None of them "chose" to reject Spanish, which they haven't done--they're proud of their Spanish-speaking abilities. However, that doesn't change the fact that even for this first generation of American-born Mexican-Americans that English had clearly become their dominant language.
I'll go back to my Spanish teacher I had for two years (including that class). She's the 2nd generation born in the US, born to Mexican American parents whose parents had immigrated from Mexico. However, she is not a native speaker of Spanish. Obviously, growing up she probably learned many individual words and some phrases but was still not a native fluent speaker of Spanish. From what she said, it wasn't that her parents discouraged use of Spanish in the home and were in fact proud of their heritage, it's just that it's not how it turned out--the dominant societal language of the US happens to be English. This is nothing revolutionary--I think this could be said for many waves of immigrants in the US, whether the "old country" was the country next door or halfway around the world. We dealt with this topic in a sociolinguistics course I took and it's a relatively common phenomenon (certainly not restricted to the US--humans have been moving around and dropping and adopting new languages forever...even when the place they moved from wasn't even that far away) and this may sound counterintuitive, but sociolinguists have found that governmental involvement in the way of official policies, official languages (whether for or against the language in question), etc. tends to have much less effect on what people actually do in terms of language than it might seem.
As I've said before, linguistic research has shown that, in predictable patterns, the higher you go in generations born in the US with Hispanics, the likelihood of them being Spanish speakers significantly drops--and this is being seen with the current generation as well as previous generations. It's just that the relative newness of large-scale Hispanic populations in the US means we're more at the beginning of a process, and thus at a different vantage point of the phenomenon, but it's still one which has been seen over and over again.
So, on the note of official languages, I doubt that having universities teach only in Spanish would change much. Let's look at Hong Kong. By law, all universities there must have the language of instruction as English. Yet Hong Kongers are almost without exception not native speakers of English, even after decades of this policy. Many learn English quite well, but aren't native speakers nonetheless and the language they speak to each other is almost always Cantonese.
Also, it's hard to compare with Canada because Canada has large groups of people who've historically been French-speaking for hundreds of years. As discussed on my previous thread, the US hasn't had a comparable section of people. Even in areas that were once Mexico's like California (and by "once" I mean in the 28 years from 1820-1848), there was a negligible population of native Spanish speakers to begin with.
If you get anything out of my post, I would just like to stress that these kinds of things are not surprising in terms of human linguistic history and that, however we may feel about any language in question, official "protection" of language in whatever fashion tends to do little. This is why I think an "official" language of English for the US would be pretty pointless and also why I see Spanish's (a language I happen to love and speak fluently) position in the US the way I do.
|
