The Week That Was ...

I thought you decimated Tom Tancredo with one of your questions tonight. After he went on for a while with the usual thing about how Hispanics are going to overrun the English language, you asked him, basically, why on earth this hadn't already happened, since immigrants have been coming here all along. You pointed to your experience of diversity in Baltimore and how somehow the kids in those families all wound up speaking English.

His answer (?) was completely illogical: that his own grandmother encouraged them to speak English. I guess Hispanic grandmothers never do that??

I'm 100% sure that any legitimate studies would show not that English has been in any danger, but that the native languages people bring here are continually being lost in two or three generations. I used to teach English as a Second language. I also worked as school counselor in a highly diverse elementary school in Arlington, VA. And there's the experience of my own family: my grandparents on one side and great grandparents on the other immigrated from French speaking Quebec, Canada.

It's always the same story. First generation parents who stay at home usually pick up little to no English. More often that seems to be the case for immigrant mothers, who appear less likely to find employment outside the home. For the very reason that they stay at home, we English speaking Americans can rest easy, knowing we will not lose our English skills from listening to them too much...

Those first generation parents who do get out of the house pick up English with varying degrees of proficiency but retain their home language. Their children, as soon as they start school, pick up English quickly, often amazingly so. Usually they end up fully fluent in English but less than fully fluent in their home language - writing ability is the first thing that's lost.

Once they in turn have kids, the likelihood is that these children will have entirely lost their home language unless the family made a conscious and deliberate effort to keep it going.

Au revoire, that is, if I remember my high school French correctly...

Paul -- originalfaith.com

Sent by Paul Maurice Martin | 11:13 PM | 7-20-2007