Marginally more interesting than usual (which is to say, ever so slightly interesting) post at language log: When two become four on the subject of attmepts to make English the official language of the United States.
On this question I find my feelings ambiguous. When I was young, and interested in everything, especially languages, I considered it a tragedy if someone who grew up in a second-generation immigrant household didn't speak their parents' mother tongue. What a loss! They would never have that as it were stereoscopic vision of things that even a rough and ready biligualism can bring. As someone who won a small proficiency with French the hard way, I thought people who had rejected, or otherwise been denied, the chance to be bilingual were the most pitiable kind of unfortunates.
Now that I'm getting old, and somewhat tired, I like to be able to understand what's being said to me without having to go to too much effort. In sum, I want it to be presented in my native tongue. The people I feel sorry for now are those who've lived all their lives in one place, and find that that one place has become a foreign country, no longer their home.
But enough about the deficiences of my twilight years. What I think is interesting is not just attitudes to the languages that immigrants bring with them, but the wide differences in attitudes to the different things that they bring with them. so for example, I'd characterise anglo-american attitudes broadly thus:
- Food: "Yum! More please!"
- Politics and/or religions: "Please keep it to yourselves."
- Languages: "Hmm. Not for me thank you."
- Money: "You can't use that stuff here."
It's the contrast between the first and the last one that's strongest. Most westerners like to try foreign food, and some cuisines get a really rapturous welcome. Nobody in the West, neither the general population nor the state itself, wants foreigners to try to pay for things in anything other than our own currency. Languages — somewhere in between.
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