Bilingualism
strengthens America
By
Carlos
Alberto Montaner
It is not true, as the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
maintained, that Spanish is a confidential language useful
only for singing in the shower. It is also useful for winning
elections.
It is possible that the six million U.S. Hispanics who communicate
basically in Spanish, watch Spanish-language television, listen
to Spanish-language radio and read books and newspapers written
in Spanish will decide the next presidential election.
All candidates know that the relative sympathy created by
President Bush among Hispanics -- perhaps because of his heroic
attempt to speak to them in their native tongue -- substantially
increased the support of that ethnic group for the Republicans
and cleared Bush's way to the White House.
That phenomenon
is universal. In Latin America, especially in the Andean
countries, speaking Quechua or Aymara is an undeniable
advantage to any politician, while in Paraguay there is no
national leader who cannot communicate eloquently in Guaraní.
Czech and
Slovak politicians make great efforts to appeal in Hungarian
to the Hungarian minority living in their countries.
Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar
swore that he was able to speak Catalan -- one of Spain's four
languages -- in the privacy of his home. And in the recent
French elections, there were candidates who learned some phrases
in Arabic to court voters who came from northern Africa.
Nevertheless, this circumstance -- though normal in an inevitably
pluralistic world -- make many in American society nervous,
particularly people who stubbornly refuse to learn other languages,
despite the widespread hospitality that exists in the United
States to foreign cultural manifestations.
Fear of other languages
In the United States there are 8,000 Taco Bell restaurants,
Gloria Estefan sells three million copies of her extraordinary
Conga, and Japanese cars top the selling charts. But almost
no one feels the need to learn Spanish, French, German or any
of the other major world languages that have sculpted the Western
world.
The person who best expresses the American fear of other languages
is Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a candidate for president. According
to him, the United States must avoid at all costs becoming
bilingual or bicultural because that duality would weaken the
American identity and sow the seeds of disunity and conflict,
as (he says) it happens in countries that do not have the linguistic
and cultural unity that (he assumes) characterizes the United
States.
Naturally, when Tancredo -- whose origin is Italian -- thinks
about an intrusive and dangerous language, it is undoubtedly
Spanish that comes to his mind. And what terrifies him is the
warning from the Census Bureau that in 2050 there will be 100
million people of Hispanic origin roaming all over the 50 states
of the Union.
Is Tancredo wrong? Of course. His mistake is not understanding
that Spanish is a transitional language that weakens during
the second generation and practically disappears in the third,
because Hispanics integrate perfectly in U.S. society, the
way the Italians and the Japanese have done.
It is not true that Hispanics wish to form a different linguistic
entity. One thing that Hispanic parents repeat to their children,
over and again as if it were a mantra, is that they must learn
English perfectly to compete and triumph in the American mainstream.
At the same time, many of those parents, with great prudence,
insist to their children that they should not lose the familial
language, Spanish, because it contains a fountain of emotional
and aesthetic satisfactions, in addition to certain comparative
advantages.
If Rick
Sánchez, Marianne Murciano or Andrés
Oppenheimer can work as journalists in both the Spanish- and
the English-speaking media, it's because Spanish confers upon
them professional possibilities lacking in someone like, for
instance, Lou Dobbs, a person who is victim to his idiomatic
and cultural limitations.
In addition, the latest findings of psycho-linguistics seem
to demonstrate that bilingualism stimulates the development
of intelligence by substantially multiplying the neuronal connections
in certain regions of the brain. Researchers who measure and
compare the intelligence quotients of people who are monolingual
and multilingual usually confirm that relation: the more languages,
the higher IQ.
The funny thing is that those who most fear the Hispanic presence
usually are those who most contribute to perpetuating the problem
by advocating barriers to the integration of illegal immigrants.
Common sense should lead them in the opposite direction. The
convenient thing to do is to encourage Americanization by enabling
the immigrants to study and work, because the school, the workplace
and the religious organizations are the aggregating factors
and the means to acquire the habits and values that are predominant
in the mainstream.
Actually, that reasoning is very easy to understand in any
language.
Carlos Alberto Montaner is an international
syndicated columnist and one of the Latin American region’s
most respected journalist. His column is read by an estimated
6 million readers. Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
Note: This commentary was originally published by Firmas
Press, June 12th, 2007 (www.firmaspress.com) Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
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