|
|
I love everyone that wants to come to this country to be Americans. Not come to this country and demand we make it little Mexico, or little Iraq, or little any other country. You want to live in America be proud of America. Keep your traditions, keep your language, keep who you are, just don't expect US to change to accomodate you. The people who came to our country in the early early decades of the 1900's didn't expect that. The worked hard to learn the language so they could succeed here. Thats the difference in the people that came then and those that are coming now. All they want is to reap the benefits of America without trying to become Americans. The want to stay Mexicans living in America. Screw that, you want to be an American then learn English. Don't except us to make everything bi-lingual for you.
I don't think that this is the case. The immigrants in the early 20th century usually moved into ethnic enclaves in major metropolitan areas. The Irish spoke English due to the forced eradication of the Gaelic language in their homeland, but if you went into an Italian neighborhood you'd hear Italian, a Jewish neighborhood you'd hear Yiddish, a Russian neighborhood Russian, etc. The children of these immigrants learned English in school and taught their parents to varying degrees of success.
I live in a community that experienced both the immigration wave of the early 20th century and the new wave of immigration the country is experiencing today (Hispanic, Southeast Asian, etc). When I was a kid, before these people largely died off, we had the "Old Italians", folks who had immigrated to this country and spoke very broken English, and largely spoke Italian to each other.
Like I said, my community has many recent immigrants, and I don't think any of them want to be "accomodated" in any way. They're very hard working people. There really just isn't a mechanism in place to teach English to adults who work 12 hours a day, other than gradual assimilation. This was largely the same in the early 20th century. Their children are learning though, and will grow up to be bilingual.
Ultimately, the commerical with Spanish subtitles is about money, as someone else said. With technology making mass marketing possible, we're going to be exposed to this sort of thing. I'm sure advertising during the early 20th century was often done in non-English languages if immigrants were being marketed to.
|
What the hell is this about...
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by euphoricism
