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(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Nod. Most of your arguments are valid to me.
But, reading them, I thought of asking a question.
4. 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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