Elinda wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Elinda wrote:
gbaji must be a real killjoy on It's a Small World ride.
Just to keep you honest gbaji, (as you're already apparently a bit loco) can you please cite some evidence that supports your theory that non-English speaking immigrants to the US are unwilling to learn English?
plz.
I mean, to be fair, there are people who see no particular reason to learn English. Why? Because they live in areas of the US where it's not needed. They have access to services and systems that allow them to live just fine using the language they know already. The more diverse an area becomes, the higher its capability to support those groups becomes. You end up with more ethnic groceries with multilingual staff, you end up with restaurants that are fully capable of taking orders in other languages, you probably even have access to news sources (at least for state and federal news) in your language. And then you can often get local news in your own language through local groups, like churches or other community organizations.
Nice hypothesis. I'll ask you also, is there any evidence that supports it?
I would expect rather quick proficiency in English, for young people at least as they're so bombarded with it now with the internet, cell/smart phones etc. - even if native language continues to be the main one used in the home.
Also, has the number of these non-english speaking immigrants that simply see no reason to 'assimilate' themselves and/or learn to speak passing english grown disproportionately to the total number of non-english speaking immigrants?
There are a lot of claims being made in this thread - not a single piece of evidence that supports any of them.
I didn't make any argument about population/percentages increasing or decreasing? I only said that it's becoming increasingly common for minority populations to form communities outside of cities. Or maybe that's a trend specific to NJ, which is fully possible, but there are plenty of large Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern and South/Central American communities that have appeared and grown here in the past few decades.
To be clear, I meant that almost exclusively for immigrants, not children living or born here. Kids tend to naturally learn English super quickly without any effort. The coworker I mentioned earlier in the thread? Her small daughter speaks English just as well as Arabic, even though they almost exclusively speak Arabic at home, because her live-in grandmother (who watches her during the day) speaks no English.
She picked it up from television, listening to her parents when they're out or on the phone, when her sister is talking to friends, etc.
I also think that's a big part of how these communities survive. Kids support parents in the instances where they can't communicate, and they increase the population of multilingual peoples in the group.
My only point here is that the areas in which someone can live comfortably without knowing English are growing and becoming less bound to Urban centers.
I didn't make any argument about population. Whether or not it's more or less common for immigrants to speak English, I don't know. I don't even know if the population of immigrants who can speak English is equal to, less than, or greater than what it was 50 years ago.
I just know there are far more areas of the US that a person who can't speak English could comfortably live now than 50 years ago. And I suspect that this drives people like gbaji, with their xenophobic desires for little white, structured suburbs, crazy.