Re: CHAT: Multi-Lingos

>From: nicole perrin <nicole.eap@...>
>Subject: Re: Multi-Lingos
>Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 12:24:53 -0400
>In my city there are substantial Hispanic and Haitian minorities, and at
>my high school code switching goes on all the time, especially in my
>French class, which has a really high concentration of
>creole-speakers/understanders.  The only problem is, some people don't
>think it's so cool to be multilingual.  At the Catholic school in my
>city a kid was suspended for speaking Spanish to her mother on the phone
>(the mother didn't understand English) because she could have been
>saying something "bad."  Seems like the gut reaction from people is that
>"if he's not speaking something I understand, he must be talking about
>me" but a lot/most of the time this is just not true.
Would the Americans here be offended if I stated that there seems to be a
considerable sentiment of "linguaphobia" in American society? What do you
think of it? With things like the 'English-only' front (some movement
against the growth of Spanish and other immigrant languages, demanding that
English be made the official language of the US). It just seems pretty
extreme to me, no, actually quite _disgusting_, to expel a person for
speaking a foreign language (out of necessity too). I mean, isn't that an
outright violation of American law (e.g. the oft-quoted "freedom of speech"
article)?

However, I've never actually been to the US, so I won't dwell more on this.

Oskar
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