Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

The new linguistic reality offers challenges and opportunities

There are times when news stories overlap in such a creative and almost hilarious manner than it is difficult to avoid the conclusion there is a secret script writer having fun in creating confusion in the minds and hearts of his unsuspected victims.

Be it what it may be, with or without a secret script writer, two stories caught my attention last week. Reading both almost simultaneously generated some interesting questions.

One story was about Dr. Humberto López Morales, from Cuba and former general director of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. According to López Morales, by the year 2050 Spanish will be the second most spoken language in the world, surpassing English and second only to Chinese, that will remain in the number one position.

López Morales anticipated that the United States will be the country with the largest number of Spanish-speakers, more than in Mexico or in Spain.

The other story was about a report published by Dr. Lourdes Gouveia, director of the Office of Latino/a and Latin American Studies (OLLAS) at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. According to Gouveia, only 4.5 percent of native-born residents in Nebraska speak a second language.

At the same time, almost 5 percent of Latino immigrants speak only English, while 77 percent speak “some English,” including 23 percent who speak English “very well.” However, more than 95 percent of those immigrants still speak Spanish. And almost half of Latinos born in the United States also speaks Spanish.

The overlapping of these stories seems to indicate that the growing number of Spanish-speakers in the United States also means a growing number of immigrants willing to learn English. However, it seems there is no correspondent desire among English-speakers to learn Spanish, at least not at the same level.

López Morales, speaking recently in Sevilla during a ceremony in his honor, said that in the United States Latinos show a “linguistic loyalty” towards Spanish, that is, Latino immigrants usually keep their native tongue. However, that loyalty to Spanish does not exclude learning English, but it develops into “bilingual situations in perfect equilibrium.” 

Among Latino immigrants, speaking Spanish is a way to promote “social unity,” according to López Morales. And learning English is “a passport to getting a good job.” Bilingual people, he said, will have better chances of finding a job with higher salaries.

But obtaining good jobs is precisely the problem, because, as Gouveia explains, in the United States we still face “the continuous social exclusion of Latinos beyond the second generation,” because “the value of dual language proficiency was not recognized in an earlier era of coerced assimilation.”

Now, however, due to globalization, a new demographic reality, and threats to national security, there is “no doubt about the value of learning two or more languages.”

If, as Gouveia said, there is no doubt about the value of being bilingual or polyglot, why then are we still so disconnected from the new linguistic reality, both present and future, of this country?

Go Back