Articles

English only? Give immigrants a break

By Victor Landa
San Antonio Express-News
Dec. 19, 2007 (published in Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Inevitably, late at night while I sit at my computer plugged in to the World Wide Web, that little Microsoft chime will sound and a message from my daughter will appear on the screen.

She's going to college on the West Coast, and we rely on technology to keep us in daily contact. My wife, my son and I will type messages to her using our mobile phones as well. This is all very new to me, and I've had to do quick work to learn Instant Message formats and etiquette. Mostly, I've had to learn to write short, concise sentences, if you can call those staccato messages sentences.

An entirely different set of rules applies to instant messaging; there are shortcuts and abbreviations, and vowels and punctuation are optional. I can't call it English, because it lacks the substance of a well-fed language. But it closely resembles English, much like the language spoken in the United States resembles English. In this country, we speak an American language, and given the organic nature of language, we'd have to call it 21st century American.

Our American version of English is informed and nurtured by a world of influences. Our American language would not be what it is today if not for the variety of accents, idioms and borrowed words that make their way into our collective verbiage. I'm sure the Founding Fathers would have a hard time making themselves understood in today's America. Imagine Thomas Jefferson ordering an espresso at Starbucks.

If we were to acknowledge the changing nature of language, of our language in particular, we'd have to put ideas such as English Only on roller skates, or a treadmill. The premise behind the English Only movement is that we should all speak the same language for the sake of national unity. But our language is constantly changing (technology has accelerated the process at what seems like warp speed), so in order to speak the same language we'd all have to change in unison —- much like trying to herd squirrels. The only way to keep a language official is to make the rules mobile.

Even the sacrosanct Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, decreed into existence by the Spanish monarchs who wanted to unite the disparate tongues of the Iberian Peninsula, adds and subtracts words on a yearly basis.

This is not an argument in favor of multiple official languages. I wouldn't want to feed wedge ideas to the purveyors of single-issue election movements. They ran roughshod over the gay marriage issue in the past national election, and they are trying their best to turn immigration into the outrage du jour.

What I'm saying is that language has a transformative power; it changes and is changed by the people who use it.

In the case of the American language, it is Americans who take the basic language structure and adorn it with tangents and nuances. Everything from music to movies to new Americans transforms the language as they use it.

It's a powerful force. Most linguists agree that for newcomers language is fully acquired (or native language lost) in two generations. Our proud history of the immigrant experience bears the fact. That transforming process is ongoing as we speak.

A recently published study by the Pew Hispanic Center confirms the unifying effect of the common collective language. The study surveyed a total of 14,000 people in six separate surveys over a 10-year period. What they found was not so much astonishing as it was expected.

Here's an excerpt from the study's executive summary: The surveys show that fewer than one-in-four (23 percent) Latino immigrants reports being able to speak English very well. However, fully 88 percent of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94 percent.

It's clearly a generational thing. Time is the great equalizer. I've always said if you want immigrants to speak American "English," just wait a couple of generations. In the meanwhile, most immigrants are trying their best.

The language transition, the Americanization of children, happens on a long-term timetable. It's always been this way.

I'm an immigrant to the digital world, I wasn't born in it, but I'm trying to learn the language as best as I can.

Y? cuz I have 2.

Copyright 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Victor Landa is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

Source: http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content
/printedition/2007/12/19/landaed1219.html

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