Being bilingual is becoming the wave of the future

“What is happening to America?” they lament. “Speak English; this is America,” these readers scold me, complaining about my voicemail message at work, which is in English and Spanish.

What is happening to America? I saw it for myself a few weeks ago as I sat in my doctor’s office and heard a different sound rising above the normal buzz of conversations in English.

“Is this right? Del-ga-do,” a St. Margaret’s Episcopal School student enunciated as he leaned over and showed his Spanish test to the adult who accompanied him. The red-haired boy, in his burgundy sweater emblazoned with his school emblem and the woman, who spoke Spanish, debated, searching for that other word that means “thin” – flaco.

Across the room, a businessman on his cell phone ticked off instructions in Spanish for a coming transaction, then minutes later conversed with the receptionist in fluent English.

And a few seats from me, a translator and a Latino couple huddled as the translator explained in Spanish what their doctor had diagnosed.

My mind raced back to the 1990s, all that fervor over the “English-only movements,” the anti-bilingual education campaigns, the “Speak English!” camps. I listened again to the buzz, to the Spanish trickling through, and saw clearly: This is the America the bilingual opponents fear.

Somewhere along the line, in the last decades of the 20th century, our country came to view a second language like Spanish as a handicap rather than an asset – an opportunity to create a fully bilingual generation.

“English-Only” proponent Ron Unz and those behind the Proposition 227 movement to dismantle bilingual education ignored this opportunity, but a group of Latina immigrant mothers in south Orange County hasn’t.

Last fall, Luz P. Bayer and a group of close friends, all immigrants from Latin America, decided to take action before their children lost their Spanish forever.

They created “El Club de Espanol” (“The Spanish Club”) – a once-a-week class with curriculum and activities – for their children ages 3-11. All except for one child have never had formal Spanish training.

It’s not an easy task. Like Luz, a marriage, family and child therapist, these mothers have careers: accountants, journalists, teachers. Those careers are precisely what proved to them that, beyond the cultural benefits of retaining Spanish, being bilingual translates into a business bonus.

“We live in a culture that’s dominated by international markets and globalization, and it’s a fact of today’s life that languages are going to become more and more important,” says Luz, a native of Colombia who lives in Mission Viejo. “We live in a country where the second language is Spanish.”

When she was earning her degree, Luz says her monolingual classmates had to work 3,000 hours of unpaid internships while she was paid a salary because she spoke Spanish.

In Europe, most students speak two languages, yet in the United States, bilingualism is seen as a battle, one in which Spanish is shoving English off the official language podium.

It’s simply a reality of sharing a border with Mexico and experiencing a constant influx of Latin-American immigrants. This is not Ellis Island, and we’re not in Kansas.

Sure, the Ron Unzes of the world can legislate and proposition all they want, but the coming of a bilingual America is an unstoppable meteor barreling toward us.

Those who would have you believe this is a bad, bad omen, that being bilingual has held back our immigrant children in school, are often monolingual themselves, says Harvard University Professor Doris Sommer.

Sommer says they fail to see what she’s dubbed the aesthetic advantages: the ability to navigate between two worlds (Spanish and English), to play creatively with both languages, to create interesting metaphors.

“There’s an art to being bilingual; it’s not just an economic convenience, and it’s certainly not a liability,” says Sommer, a professor of Romance languages and Latin-American literature.

Imagine the advantages this brings in the business world. University of California, Davis, professor Patricia G?ndara, associate director of the Linguistic Minority Research Institute, points out that bilinguals function differently cognitively than monolinguals.

“They have the cognitive flexibility, the ability to get outside of oneself linguistically, to be able to see things from more than one perspective, which helps individuals process information,” G?ndara says. “Essentially, if you don’t know how to do it one way, you’ll do it another because you have another set of tools cognitively.”

Beyond understanding cultural nuances (a necessary plus in the business world) or humor, bilingualism brings deeper advantages to our society.

Many credit bilingualism for increasing communication between immigrant youth who are English dominant, and their parents, who are monolingual in Spanish. Without this communication, parents aren’t able to guide their children.

“Parents lose authority because they don’t speak the (English) language, and their kids have one up on them,” G?ndara says. “It’s a real problem, a real social problem. These kids are left very vulnerable when they’ve lost the authority structure of the home.”

Who cares? you might ask. What business is it of ours what happens behind the closed doors of the homes of these immigrant families? Think high teen-pregnancy rates, think gang violence, think drug use.

The choice between being bilingual or not is a choice with societal consequences.

By insisting that our children assimilate and discard their Spanish, we create a wall between Latino parents and their children. If we instead insist that Latino immigrant children keep both languages, they’re likely to retain their parents’ values, get higher GPAs and have fewer adaptation problems, like joining gangs, G?ndara says.

Yet despite the obvious benefits to all of us, people object. In a recent letter to the editor, a reader complained that when his mother’s family came to America, Americans didn’t have to learn Russian, nor the French and German of his father’s family, nor the Tagalog of his Filipino wife.

“The recipients of our hospitality should at a minimum demonstrate their gratitude by assimilating into our culture and learning our language, not the other way around,” the reader wrote.

Americans don’t have to learn Spanish, but those who don’t are shutting themselves out.

Latinos are 30 percent of our county, California is ranked first in the nation for its Latino population (31.1 percent of our state), and nationwide Latinos comprise 12.5 percent of our population. By 2050, one in four Americans will be Latino, projects Marcelo Suarez- Orozco of the Harvard Immigration Projects.

This is no melting pot. Assimilation (i.e., loss of language) is clearly not the wave of the future when major networks like ABC run Spanish-language commercials as they did last weekend during the English-language broadcast of the ALMA Awards.

Even a California joint senate committee, which last month presented its Master Plan for Education in California to the Senate, endorsed a curriculum that requires K-16 students to attain mastery of at least two languages, one of them being English, says G?ndara, who serves on this committee.

Anti-bilingualists may claim “English Only” victories in states across the country, but the only thing they are creating is a nation of students unprepared for a global communication. And ultimately, all of us are the losers in that scenario.



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