Presence of Mandarin in Hispanic business show us that...

The Decline of Spanish Language

Christopher Jones, who live in southern France, says "There is one language that has defended itself admirably against Pop culture: French. I can personally attest to the decline of Spanish and the outright destruction of German, but French sofar is holding up (in my opinion, despite franglais which is disappearing). Spain's Spanish had to contend with regional languages like Catalan and Basque, Francoist political promotion and destructive accents like Andaluz. Gallego is nothing other than Galego Portugu廥 which was once the language of the royal court of Alfonso el Sabio. But has anyone noticed that today's written Spanish syntax is completely obtuse? I wonder what P甐 Baroja would say? His command of Castellano was magnificent and his Basque? German has been confronted with the linguistic consequences of unification and its centrifugal dialects like Bayerisch. All in all, la langue subl螸e will triumph as Europe's first, second language. (I hope that sounds contradictory.)

But the real enemy is TV!!!"

RH: The destructive affect of the cult of regional dialects on Spanish is painfully evident- Did P甐 Baroja have a magnificent command of Castilian? It escaped me. I knew him, and his speech was somewhat uncouth. He did not know Basque. Christopher lives close to the Spanish border, where Catalan is spoken. My impression is that he is generous in his assessment of French. The decline in languages may be due in part to the loss of the habit of learning to recite poetry, which was an essential part of education. How many school children today can recite Goethe, Racine, or Shelley?

Ronald Hilton - 5/9/03

http://www.stanford.edu/group/wais/Language/language_thedeclineoflanguages5903.html

The "SPANISH" LANGUAGE: Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries are splitting into new langauges

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Films for the Humanities and Sciences, based in Princeton, New Jersey, performs an invaluable service in providing us with a vast array of informative films, useful in teaching and fascinating as documentaries. It has issued a six-part series, "Biography of the Spanish Language." It is not aimed at specialists, who might argue with many of the statements, but at the broad public; indeed, it began as a series of programs for Mexican television and possibly schools. To attract a wide public it uses the tricks of the trade: noisy background music, lighting effects, and slapstick humor. The problem is that these effects tend to drown out the speech, the subject of the series.

It treats language as the expression of a culture and its history, with literature, especially poetry, as its elevated form as opposed to the vernacular. It views Spanish from a Mexican perspective, which is understandable, since Mexico has more inhabitants than any other country. However, it mentions only briefly other Latin American forms of Spanish, with not a word about Catalan or Portuguese. The first film deals with the history of Spanish down to its introduction in the Americas. The conquistadores appear as a violent, rather stupid lot, while Indian life is romanticized. There are pictures of beautiful colonial cities, but no credit is given to the Spanish civil authorities who planned them. The Inquisition is condemned, while the missionaries,are praised. The Jesuits are lauded for having promoted the cause of independence in the colonial period. are there any books on that subject?

The section on modern colloquial Spanish, especially that spoken on television, is discouraging. It is often difficult to understand, even for people from other Spanish-speaking countries. The film makes light of this, but it is a pathetic decline from the beautiful Spanish promoted by the Spanish Academy. Even some Latin American students at Stanford use a slang unknown to me and often to other Latin Americans. Some WAISers defend the variants as the expression of a people, but they seem to have a romantic longing for the good old times when the inhabitants of one valley could not understand those of the next. John Wonder complains about this, and about the machine-gun like speech of young people. Indeed, in the Bogota I first knew, the "Athens of America," the intellectual elite spoke a very beautiful Spanish. Now SCOLA rebroadcasts news programs from Cali. The young women announcers on the program rattle off Spanish is high-pitched voices without the intonation indicating comprehension. The decline of Spanish in Colombia is a tragedy, admittedly insignificant in comparison with the major tragedy of life there.

The influence of politics on language may be baneful in many parts of the Spanish-speaking world. In 1932 I went to Barcelona to study Catalan with Pompeu Fabra, revered as the father of contemporary Catalan studies; a university is named after him. The atmosphere was very pleasant. Then came the Civil War and Franco, who suppressed Catalan autonomy and the Catalan language. The backlash has been distressing. I am probably the only surviving pupil of Pompeu Fabra, and I thought that would earn general respect. Nevertheless, a young Catalan has accused me of insulting his language, while others have charged that I am a victim of Spanish propaganda. This mentality is counterproductive, endangering Barcelona's leading place as a publisher of books in Spanish. One WAISer tells me she has an American friend who speaks very good Spanish and is married to a Barcelona businessman. They live in New York, but he does not want his children to learn Spanish. Does he realize that he is closing the door to opportunities which would open to them in the vast Spanish-speaking world?

Ronald Hilton - 4/15/01

http://www.stanford.edu/group/wais/Language/language_mexandothers41501.html

SPANISH LANGUAGE IS RECEDING IN THE WESTERN HEMIPHERES

Language policy in Spanish-speaking Latin America deals with challenges to the status of Spanish as the official language, a status inherited from the colonial administration of the New World. These challenges come from several sources: the assertion of the rights of indigenous groups, the ‘danger’ of fragmentation of Spanish into a multitude of local dialects, the growing prestige of English and influence of the United States, and along the southern border of Brazil, contact with Portuguese.

In the initial phase of colonization, the Catholic Monarchs and later Charles V required all of their new subjects to learn Spanish, just as their predecessors had imposed the learning of Castilian on the conquered Arab territories in order to bind them more closely together in the nation governed by Castile. However, it soon became clear that the linguistic diversity of the New World was too great to allow for the immediate implantation of Spanish, and some allowance had to be made for the usage of indigenous languages in teaching and evangelization. In 1570 Phillip II reluctantly authorized a policy of bilingualism in which instruction could be imparted in ‘the’ language of each Viceroyalty: Nahautl and in New Spain and Quechua in Peru, with the consequent extension of these two languages into territories where they were not spoken natively. Even this measure was not enough, however, and in 1596 Phillip II recognized the existent multilingualism: Spanish for administration and access to the elite, and a local indigenous language for evangelization and daily communication in indigenous communities. This policy lead to a separation of colonial society into a minority of Spanish/creole Spanish-speakers governing an indigenous majority speaking one of many indigenous languages. The separation became so great that it all but halted the Hispanization of rural areas and created local indigenous elites with considerable autonomy from the central adminstration. A reassertion of central authority commenced in 1770 when Carlos III declared Spanish to be the only language of the Empire and ordered the administrative, judicial and ecclesiastic authorities to extinguish all others. After Independence, the new nations and their successors maintained the offical status of Spanish as a means of strengthening national unity and pursuing modernization through education. This tendency was reinforced at the turn of the century through the 1940’s with notions of Social Darwinism, in which the vigorous hybrid groups of Latin America would eventually overcome the ‘weaker’ indigenous groups. It is only since World War II that this policy has suffered any substantial change.

Several processes converged in the post-War period to shake the linguistic status quo. One is the growth of industrialization, which requires an educated workforce and thus lends urgency to effective education. Another is agrarian reform, which raises the social status of the farmer while increasing his need for vocational training. These two processes create a growing pressure to learn the language of technology and mechanization, Spanish. As a counterpoint to this pressure, there was an understanding among policy makers of the failure of the pre-War incorporationist policies to acheive their goal of Hispanization. The confluence of these tendencies was a shift towards the usage of indigenous languages in primary schools to ease the transition to Spanish. Moreover, the dynamic of questioning the entire model of development grew, a dynamic that was reinforced by the emergence of indigenous activists educated in the new national schools. These contradictions came to a head during the labor and peasant movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, where calls for the preservation of indigenous languages served as a vehicle for the preservation of entire indigenous societies. The subsequent official response to these movements had diverse outcomes throughout Latin America. In Mexico, the new indigenous consciousness continued to grow unabated, as it did among the Bolivian Aymara and Ecuadorian Quechua, and to a lesser extent among the other Quechua speakers of Bolivia and Peru. Elsewhere, many organizations were driven into marginality or outright armed resistence, with the paradoxical result that often the only officially-tolerated supporters of indigenous languages were foreigners: scholars pursuing linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, linguists trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics for the translation and dissemination of Christian texts, or members of other non-governmental organizations engaged in aid or relief work.

Only recently have indigenous defensors of indigenous languages found any standing on the national stage. This new tolerance has been said to reflect the neo-liberal reforms required as conditions for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the early 1990’s, with the threat of Communist takeover having receeded. There are now a multitude of protective measures that go from bilingual primary education (Honduras), to constitutional protection (Columbia), to the establishment of indigenous languages as co-official with Spanish (Guatemala).

With respect to the status of Spanish among native speakers, Independence lead to the creation of national educational institutions and a desire to reform Spanish orthography so as to facilitate its learning by American speakers, as well as to foster a literary tradition independent of Spain. Such reforms come to little in the face of the turbulence created by Independence, but a second round of standardization began as part of the modernization process initiated around 1870. Increasing immigration to Latin America and the strengthening of trends towards democratization lead to the fear among the intellectual elite that the linguistic unity of Latin America would collapse into a cacophomy of local variants, much as the Latin of the Roman Empire fragmented into the variety of Romance languages.

The final threat to the official status of Spanish is the growing contact with other European languages: with English throughout Latin America, and with Portuguese along the southern border of Brazil. Contact with English arises through migration to the United States for economic or political reasons or sojourns for business or education. This contact is particularily acute in the case of Puerto Rico, where its adminstrative dependency on the United States has led to an extensive diffusion of English, as well as the threatened imposition of English as the official language should Puerto Rico ever gain statehood. This threat has sparked intellectual debates that echo the Spanish-vs.-indigenous-language debates heard on the mainland: language is an expression of identity, perhaps the fundmental expression of identity, and it should not be given up lightly.

Selected references
Angel Rama (1996) The Lettered City. Duke University Press.
[spelling reform after independence, p. 43ff; foundation of Spanish American Academies, Cuervo, Caro & Bello p. 59ff]
Julio Ramos (1989) Desenceuntros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX. Tierra Firme, México.
[Ch. II sobre Bello]
Julio Ramos (1996) Paradojas de la letra. Ediciones eXcultura, Caracas, Miami, Quito.
[Ch. 1 sobre Bello]

http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/Pubs/LALangPol.html

Europe News
Spanish threatened in Spain, campaign claims (Feature)

By Sinikka Tarvainen Jul 25, 2008, 2:08 GMT

Madrid - While Spanish is consolidating its position as one of the world's most international languages, a debate is raging in Spain on whether it is under attack in the country where it was born.

A group of intellectuals, some media outlets and citizens' associations have launched a campaign in 'defence' of Spanish which they see as being endangered in regions promoting their own languages in the country with a plural identity.

The debate focuses on whether parents wanting to educate their children only or mainly in Spanish should be able to do so in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Basque region and Galicia, which want pupils to learn Catalan, Basque or Galician alongside Spanish.

The pro-Spanish campaigners stress the role of Spanish - known in Spain as Castilian, language of the region of Castile - as the only language common to all Spaniards and as one of the cornerstones of the national identity.

The idea that a language spoken by 500 million people worldwide could be threatened by minority languages is nothing short of ridiculous, regionalists hit back.

Spoken in most of Latin America, Spanish is the second most important language in the United States.

It is also studied increasingly worldwide, making it the most widely used language after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and English, according to Culture Minister Cesar Antonio Molina.

In Spain itself, however, regional governments are questioning the domination of Spanish in an attempt to promote regional languages.

These include Catalan, spoken widely in Catalonia, a north-eastern region of 7 million residents, and on the Balearic Islands; Basque, spoken by about a quarter of the region's 2.1 million residents; and Galician, the first language of more than 60 per cent of the region's 2.8 million inhabitants.

Catalan and Galician are Romance languages related to Spanish, while Basque or Euskera is not known to be related to any other language and is much more difficult for Spanish-speakers to learn.

Dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939 to 1975, repressed the use of regional languages which could often not even be spoken in public.

Franco's death in 1975 turned the tide. The constitution now establishes the coexistence of regional languages with Spanish. Regions enjoy wide measures of autonomy including the right to teach regional languages in schools.

Some now see the decentralization as having gone too far, with Catalonia and Galicia having made bilingual education compulsory and the Basque region preparing to adopt a similar policy.

Policies to promote regional languages are the most extensive in Catalonia, where the regional government is sparking controversy with plans to cut down the number of Spanish classes from three to two a week in primary school.

Even children of immigrants from Latin America or Africa now speak Catalan, a language without the knowledge of which it is often difficult to find a job in the region.

Educational and other measures to popularize regional languages sparked a 'manifesto for the common language' launched by some 20 journalists, philosophers, historians and authors including Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.

Parents' associations have also sprung up in several regions, demanding the right to educate children in Spanish.

The most vocal critics include representatives of the opposition conservative People's Party (PP), which has also accused Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialists of endangering national unity by granting regions more self-government.

Madrid media close to the PP accuse Zapatero of allowing regionalists to 'persecute' the national language, something that the government firmly denies.

The coexistence of Spanish with other languages was 'the richest, most open and most democratic' way, the premier said.

The government has done a lot to make Spanish more popular in the world, establishing dozens of new Cervantes Institutes to spread it, Molina said.

Some experts worry that Catalan or Basque children will speak poor Spanish after learning it mainly from television and stress the right of parents to make educational choices for their children.

Children in some Catalan schools reportedly have trouble expressing themselves in Spanish.

Overall, however, there are few signs that teaching regional languages would have undermined the Catalans', Basques' or Galicians' knowledge of Spanish and regionalists dismiss such arguments as absurd.

'If any language is threatened, it is not Spanish, but Catalan,' Catalan politician Josep Antoni Duran y Lleida said, attributing the language row to underlying political power struggles.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1419303.php/World_language_Spanish_threatened_in_Spain_campaign_claims__Feature_

Spain’s regional languages squeezing out Spanish 25/06/2008 00:00

The rampant use of Catalan and Basque in schools and public services discriminates against Spaniards who can only speak Spanish, say intellectuals.

25 June 2008

MADRID - Spanish is the first language of up to 400 million people worldwide, but, according to a group of writers, historians and philosophers, it is coming under threat in its homeland.

The creeping use of Catalan and Basque for education and in practically all public services in Catalonia and the Basque Country has led a group of intellectuals to publish a "Manifesto for a common language" in a bid to goad the government into defending people's right to use Spanish anywhere in Spain.

"For several years there have been growing reasons to worry about the institutional status of the Spanish language in our country," the manifesto warns. It goes on to demand that parliament approve legislation to ensure "unequivocally" that Spanish is the single, common and official language" nationwide.

In Catalonia, practically all classes in public and many private schools are taught in Catalan, with Spanish offered only as a second language as English and French are elsewhere.

Similar changes are also making progress in the Basque Country, while in both regions it has become common practice to stop people taking public jobs - even as garbage collectors or gardeners - if they cannot speak the regional tongue.

Spain's Socialist government has so far failed to intervene in the defence of Spanish - a taboo issue after decades of linguistic repression in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and to a lesser extent Galicia, under the Franco regime.

Now, the authors of the manifesto argue, the discrimination flows in the opposite direction, particularly affecting Spaniards from other areas of Spain and foreign immigrants who take up residency in regions where another language is spoken.

"It is one thing to promote knowledge of the regional language and another to impose it at the expense of the common language," philosopher Fernando Savater declared at the presentation of the manifesto in Madrid on Monday. "This discrimination... hurts the least fortunate the most, including immigrants, by denying them social and job opportunities," he added.

The manifesto is supported by around 20 noted intellectuals, including historian Carmen Iglesias and writer Álvaro Pombo.

[El Pais / E. Granda / Expatica]

http://www.expatica.com/nl/articles/news/Spain_s-regional-languages-squeezing-out-Spanish-.html

lol, you're funny, let's see.

Spanish is not receding in Latin America, in the North people will never stop speaking Spanish, in fact chances are that the United States will add Spanish as an official language. And in the South no one learns Portuguese because they already understand it, in fact Brazil is the one that promotes the Spanish language among its citizens at school, not the other way around... but oh well you can believe whatever you want it if makes you feel better.

LANGUAGES SPOKEN IN HISPANIC COUNTRIES OTHER THAN SPANISH

Argentina - Spanish (official), English, Italian, German, French

Bolivia - Spanish 60.7% (official), Quechua 21.2% (official), Aymara 14.6% (official), foreign languages 2.4%, other 1.2% (2001 census)

Costa Rica - Spanish (official), English.

Ecuador - Spanish (official), Quechua, other Amerindian languages

Equatorial Guinea - Spanish, French (both official); pidgin English, Fang, Bubi, Ibo

Gibraltar - English (used in schools and for official purposes), Spanish, Italian, Portuguese

Guatemala - Spanish 60%, Amerindian languages 40% (23 officially recognized Amerindian languages, including Quiche, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Mam, Garifuna, and Xinca)

Honduras - Spanish (official), Amerindian dialects; English widely spoken in business

Mexico - Spanish, various Mayan, Nahuatl, and other regional indigenous languages

Panama - Spanish (official), English 14%, lots of bilinguals

Paraguay - Spanish, Guaraní (both official)

Peru - Spanish, Quéchua (both official); Aymara; many minor Amazonian languages

Puerto Rico - Spanish, English

Spain- Castilian Spanish 74% (official nationwide); Catalan 17%, Galician 7%, Basque 2% (each official regionally)

Venezuela - Spanish (official), numerous indigenous dialects

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0855611.html

No one is mourning the diverging of Argentinian, Venezuelan, Cuban, Chilean, Uruguayan, Puerto Rican and Andalusian Spanish...it is a hideous horrible sounding idioma that has no business being called "Spanish."

It is the equivalent of of the Ebonics African-American dialect in utter ugliness.

Spanish is an ugly language that unfortunately Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, and Andalusia have intention on massacring so its demise is good news to those of use who speak proper Castellano Spanish. No one is mourning the diverging of Argentinian, Venezuelan, Cuban, Chilean, Uruguayan, Puerto Rican and Andalusian Spanish...it is a hideous horrible sounding idioma that has no business being called "Spanish."

It is the equivalent of of the Ebonics African-American dialect in utter ugliness.

Spanish is an ugly language that unfortunately Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, and Andalusia have intention on massacring so its demise is good news to those of use who speak proper Castellano Spanish.

Spanish will not be a language in Spain, but a dialect only.

Spain will be a hinduphonic, let them and the moslems be hindus and fell the wrath of the deity Shiva.



Madrid... renamed to मैड्रिड

Seville renamed to सविल

etc

lol, let me laugh again, let's review:

Argentina - Everyone speaks Spanish

Bolivia - Most people do, besides it is official, and the ones that speak Amerindian languages have to learn Spanish, period.

Costa Rica - Everyone speaks Spanish

Ecuador - Almost everyone speaks Spanish

Guatemala - Most people do, besides it is official, and the ones that speak Amerindian languages have to learn Spanish, period.

Honduras - Almost everyone speaks Spanish

Mexico - 98% speak Spanish, period.

Panama - Everyone speaks Spanish, except for English residents.

Paraguay - Both Spanish and Guaraní, but they look down at those who speak Guaraní

Peru - Almost everyone speaks Spanish

Puerto Rico - It is not a country, it's a U.S. state, therefore yeah both language are official but it's just a tiny island no one cares

Spain - Spanish 74% (the one that rules the country) there are other regional languages such as Catalan, Galician and Basque but they all speak Spanish

Venezuela - Everyone speaks Spanish

And I most add that the Spanish language is phonetical, so thing are pronounced the way they're written, PLUS it has an acadamy so there are like 0% chances of it splitting apart, but keep on dreaming boy....

<< Spanish will not be a language in Spain, but a dialect only.

Spain will be a hinduphonic, let them and the moslems be hindus and fell the wrath of the deity Shiva.



Madrid... renamed to मैड्रिड

Seville renamed to सविल

etc. >>

True

So

Cadiz renamed to कडीज़.

ol, you're funny, let's see.

Spanish is not receding in Quebec, people will never stop speaking French, in fact chances are that the United States will add French as an official language. And one bothers to speak English because French is an international language too it, in fact Brazil is the one that promotes the French language among its citizens at school, not the other way around... but oh well you can believe whatever you want it if makes you feel better.

<< And I most add that the Spanish language is phonetical, so thing are pronounced the way they're written, PLUS it has an acadamy so there are like 0% chances of it splitting apart, but keep on dreaming boy....>>

Really?

Why is it that lots of hispanics pronounce español as either ehpañol/epañol/ethpañol/ezhpañol/eshpañol/ezpañol

"Yo" is also pronounced as either "jo" or "zho"

"Todo" as "to'o", "puerta" as "puelta", "dulce" as "durce", "carga" as "caiga", and "falda" as "faida"

The the irony is Spanish is indeed phonetic with less vowel and consonant sounds than English and French but hispanics come out with different pronunciation. You can even hear this mispronunciation even from the educated people. In other words the speakers do not follow the ruled of the Real Academia of the Spanish language. So, in the future it will split into numerous languages from Castellano and each other and Dutch and Afrikaans will still far more understand each other easily than between the will be new hispanic language speakers.

The real enemy of the Spanish language is its speakers because they are not serious and take for granted the Spanish language because of the poor and weak educational system in the hispanic world. Have you heard the Francophone Africans speak French? They are far better than the Spanish of the Hispanic Americans, Andalusians, and Canarians and Sorry but the truth hurts

I don't think there are ugly languages. So don't say that about the languages. May be you are Ugly.

I don't know what is the problem between Spanish and French.