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| Authored by: artp on Saturday, May 26 2012 @ 11:07 AM EDT |
As people immigrated to the US, they tended to cast off
their European ways and adopt what they found here. By the
third generation, pretty much all traces of heritage were
gone, with some pockets remaining here and there.
My great-grandfather came here from Austria (Bohemia in
German, Cesky in Czech) and he probably spoke four
languages: Czech, Slovak, German and Hungarian. Then he got
called a dumb Bohemie because he didn't speak English
fluently.
So a small ethnic minority in New England was somehow able
to spread their culture over the remaining 90% (a guess) of
the country because they held the power.
It got so bad that laws were passed in the 20s prohibiting
the use of languages other than English. Ethnic language
newspapers struggled to stay alive. Ethnic celebrations
became private instead of public.
The Amana Colonies, a German religious settlement, still
spoke German in the homes when I was a kid. It isn't as
common now, not because of the laws, but because the
Colonies have become more a part of the culture around them.
A couple of Amana men - members of the Armed Forces in WWII
- were talking to each other in a large city while in
uniform. THey were speaking German, of course, as they all
do when speaking to each other, and there were some
difficulties because officials didn't believe that they
weren't Nazi spies.
Iowa and Wisconsin and some of the plains states that were
settled during the Great Famine in the early 1800s still
have pockets of ethnic identity, but they are all getting
diluted. The Germans, Czechs, Welsh, Swedes, Norwegians,
Dutch and others are slowly getting assimilated.
If your heritage is split into 16ths of this and that, what
language do you speak? I am half Czech, a quarter Irish and
a quarter English, and I only speak a few words of Czech and
no Gaelic. How do you keep ethnic identity alive when it
gets diluted and distributed like that?
Look at the history of trade languages, and I think you'll
understand. The trend is not toward more languages, but to
fewer. What is the language of commerce, of technical
trades, of diplomacy, of religion? We tend to settle on one
language to learn well instead of several to learn poorly.
So many conflicts developed because language barriers
created a misunderstanding.
Perhaps the problem is as bad as painted. The US will learn
more as Hispanic population continues to increase. And it
won't be two languages, it will be one merged language, just
as it always has happened.
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Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Nope - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2012 @ 11:55 AM EDT
- Nope - Authored by: rcsteiner on Monday, May 28 2012 @ 01:50 AM EDT
- Yup - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 28 2012 @ 08:41 AM EDT
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