Controversy over a Super Bowl adFollow

English violates its own rules willy-nilly, just because it can. We're allowed to make up new words in English whenever we feel like it, and if they get popular enough the OED might even make them official. We rob other languages of their words for fun.

About the only positive thing about English as a language is because it's got so many words, either made up wholesale or stolen from other languages, that it has the ability to describe details that other languages have to make idioms to describe. English is great at nuance, probably better than any other language. (Japanese and Chinese achieve that same kind of nuance through character choices, but that only works through writing.)

*looks down at my sig*

Have you tried learning French? There are too damn many exceptions of grammar rules and exceptions of exceptions, German has the whole different cases or whatever it's called. It's a royal pain anyway and Finnish has even more of them, impossible to learn language that is (though it sounds nice).

English mainly has a crapload of words but you can learn those gradually and still make perfect sense.

And every language steals words from others left and right, hell "selfie" is in the Dutch dictionaries now.

Selfie is the first entry in my Earth Language Dictionary.

Maybe the global language should be called Terran, or Giaish???




Edited, Feb 6th 2014 5:06pm by Elinda

Yes. Then midway through learning it my French teacher decided she wanted to run off with a truck driver. I'm not sure any of us learned a thing that last year.

Then in college switched to Chinese, and that was much more enjoyable.

How about appealing to friends we have and making claims that no one can verify? Because I know several immigrants through work (seriously, we don't do our own Science in this country anymore), and they all wish they knew more English. Out of the ones who have kids, the kids universally know more English than their parents.

This is true, but it doesn't create a lasting problem since subsequent generations are picking up English just as fast, if not faster, than previous generations. So, again, the "permanent enclave resident" issue isn't a realistic one. A neighborhood may remain Spanish but people from specific generations will move out and in "real" English society.

One thing that is happening is that businesses realize that brown people have money too and targeting first generation immigrants in their native tongue is good business. So businesses cater to immigrants outside the strict neighborhoods where all the signs are in Spanish*. Even in the "English" parts of town you see bus advertisements in Spanish and have to pick between two or three languages on the ATM or see "Habla Espanol" on a car dealership sign. And this is what really drives the xenophobes insane. They point to a banking ATM as evidence that American society is crumbling and new immigrants don't have to learn English -- but those ATMs are there to appeal to first generation immigrants and have no effect on traditional rates of language assimilation.

The real irony here is that these are all free market decisions. There's no leftist conspiracy here, there's capitalistic ventures saying "We can make extra cash by putting a Spanish language option on our phone menus." Companies are looking at a demographic and saying "Let's get their money by catering to them" and it drives some people absolutely bonkers because now that Spanish language Swiffer billboard means American culture is under attack. The real concern here isn't that future generations won't learn English; that worry has been completely debunked. No, the real concern is that they have to see the signs of an emerging non-white population from a non-English speaking homeland moving outside of the previously safe ghetto boundaries.

*Or Chinese, Polish, etc but let's be honest and say no one is really throwing a fit about the "Mówimy Po Polsku" signs at the currency exchange.

Edited, Feb 6th 2014 10:27am by Jophiel

I agree completely. I was just trying to point out that immigrants exist who don't have a desire to learn English, because they're living in cultural communities that enable them to live without English.

Which ties into your free market observation - these people have money to spend, and the more places enabling access, the more places they may visit.

Their kids absolutely tend to learn English, very quickly. And I'm guessing kids who move here from foreign nations learn English more now than they used to (though I don't have statistics), I'm just judging by the fact that things like ESL courses are more common.

Immigrant groups have always formed enclaves where it was comfortable for them. I think you may be seeing more of them outside of the cities because there just isn't enough available real estate in the cities to form a comfortably large new Pakistani or Vietnamese or whatever neighborhood. Plus property costs and all that and so they just congregate in a suburban area instead.

But it's nothing truly new. For as much as we imagine urban groups of Irish, Italian, Chinese, Slavic, etc neighborhoods, there was also large ethnic enclaves of Swedes and Germans in the rural upper Midwest and things like that. I had a friend back in 80's whose family would take me on a weekend trip into Wisconsin to some town that was 100% Swedish. Signs, language, food, etc. It was like going to another country just as much as going to Chinatown or a Spanish neighborhood.

That's always been the case though. Chinese people immigrated to Chinatown and Greeks immigrated to Greektown and Italians to Little Italy for a reason. Because it was easy to live there without the need to speak/read English. Some did, sure. Maybe even a majority learned passable fluency. But the ethnic enclave was always a place for comfort in culture and language and you could get groceries or buy a new kitchen table without stumbling over unfamiliar words to a pissed off English speaking shop owner.

Around 40 seconds it looked like they MIGHT have implied there were two gay men with a child however it could just as easily been 2 brothers, 2 friends.

I think some people just need an excuse to stir the pot.

Who says that the two guys weren't post-op?

I know, all I really wanted to point out is that these cultural enclaves are more visible to the typical American now, because of the impression that they're "invading." When the cultural enclaves were in the cities, grouped together and largely out of sight by suburbanites, it was easy to partition these groups off from "typical" American suburban culture.

But now that these cultural enclaves are moving into suburbs more frequently, these groups feel threatened by the exposure to the different. Suddenly, they aren't only seeing things perfectly tailored to the suburban white family, they're seeing multiracial advertisements, and multiple language menus, and (god forbid) mosques, synagogues, etc.

The end result is that these people feel their way of life is under attack, because their suburbs aren't perfectly uniform anymore.

It IS true that cultural enclaves have existed in suburbs for a long time. But the trend of attacking those enclaves isn't particularly new. Being a German in the Midwest during WWI, for instance, when they were passing laws to ban the speaking of German.

But because the idea of a suburb has been nationalized, because of nationalized news and media, combined with the higher rate these enclaves are appearing in suburbs, these people feel more under attack.

The reality is that cities are increasingly catering to the upper-middle/upper classes now, instead of lower classes. But the same perception isn't racially drawn along class lines, so these people still belong in Chinatown, not next door.

Children also naturally pick up language pronunciation faster than adults, so while an adult language learner might have a better command of vocabulary in the new language, the kid is going to sound better since they mimic the language they hear better. This facilitates overall better communication between the kids and mainstream culture, and their learning accelerates as a result.

The nail salon I go to is run by Vietnamese immigrants. (Pretty common.) The grandma who owns the shop is bilingual, but barely. Her kids (two adults, one youngster) are 100% bilingual, and they are raising the 3rd generation that way as well. Some of the rest of the family members (her son-in-law's father, a cousin, etc) barely speak any English at all. But they don't need to, since her adult kids are always around to translate in a pinch.