Hi Ant
The "quickly integrated" kids you speak of aren't actually integrated so well.
Although most have at least a "satisfactory" command of English, they prefer Spanish in all contexts, and at schools the Spanish-speaking kids tend to have a separate social life than the English-speaking kids, even though most of the Spanish-speaking kids are fluent in English as well.
As far as the internet, if you go to "teen central" at the Burton Barr branch of the Phoenix Public Library (4th floor I think?), you will see that a good percentage of the kids are browsing the internet in Spanish, mostly checking e-mail at yahoo.com.mx (Mexican Yahoo!) though sometimes doing other things.
I'm guessing that if they wanted to use Wikipedia, they would use the Spanish version if they knew it existed, although in a school context they might use English instead (sociolinguistic reasons: Spanish is, in many ways, seen by kids as not OK for any usage inside the classroom, so they will often use English even if there are two versions available).
Mark (In Tucson right now)
On 26/05/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me.
But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.
- Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
English-speaking regions. There is little or no need for most US citizens to ever speak another language in day to day life. While this may or may not be a bad thing, it is a true thing nonetheless, and that being the case I'm not surprised if US citizens tend to pay little attention to matters that involve other languages most of the time. The same cannot be said so easily of other languages (with a couple of notable exceptions, perhaps): Europe, for instance, consists of a large number of countries, many of whom have their own associated languages largely distinct from the languages of their neighbors, and yet much of Europe would fit within the borders of one of the larger states in the US. This forces a certain amount of multilingual awareness on Europeans, whereas the opposite tends to be true of Americans, pretty much through no fault of their own.
Since you are focusing more on an american perspective, though english is the only official language in the usa, many more or less recent immigrants only poorly manage english.
When I lived in Arizona, I was in the part of the city most inhabited by teachers and students, as it was the city where the university was located (Tempe).
However, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in two other cities located in the south and east, essentially because the medical center and the children care center was located in east (Mesa) and the hospital in the south (Chandler, where my son finally born).
Admittedly, most cheap clothes and most cheap cars were also in Mesa, which is also why it was a key area for me :-)
However, what was striking is that most of this area was inhabited by mexican immigrants, some legal and some illegal; and many of them did not manage english well, or even not at all, as they only recently came in.
I particularly remember supermarkets entirely in spanish (which was easy to manage for me), but also a supermarket entirely in chinese near my appartment (which was much harder to manage :-)).
I went to a church in that area as well, it was a bit different approach from the way we usually practice religion in France, but it was better than nothing (I am catholic). Many catholics there were from Mexico or San Salvador. And some of the meetings were in spanish to address their needs. The church also organised some courses for them, to try to help them manage better in english (sort of adult courses of english).
Most of those families listened to radio station in spanish or watched tv in english. The kids got integrated amazingly quickly thanks to school (french people would do well to understand how americans can integrate immigrants so quickly), but it was much tougher for adults and most of time these were poorly educated immigrants.
So, my question is this one, and it is addressed to spanish editors as much as english ones. Do you know how much impact the spanish wikipedia has amongst spanish speakers in the usa ? Are they participants amongst rather recently immigrated people ? Do you know if there were some articles on wikipedia in spanish speaking american press (I suppose there is press in spanish) ? Or radio interviews ?
I know there are sometimes some little disagreements between the spanish editors from Spain and the spanish editors from latine american. Are they some fully spanish editors from USA ? And what is their representation in the USA media ?
Ant
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