Imaginary exchange with an English Only bigot

[muckefuck]

Me: You know, you might not be so paranoid about all those funny brown people speaking their mother tongue if you actually got off your lazy ass and learned a little Spanish.
EOB: Why should I be forced to speak a foreign language in my own country?
Me: That's a damn good question. Why don't you go ask the Navajo?

Comments

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

Uh, dude, if you want someone to be less paranoid about large groups of strangers coming in and taking over everything, I don't know if you want to bring up the Navajo.

YOU ARE SOOOO RIGHT, in many ways.

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

I think that multi-lingualism is a good thing. My Grandparents on both sides (born in europe) learned moderate to good english. My Slavic grandparents lived in a slavic neighborhood, where all the store signs were on Russian/Ukrainian and/or Polish. Those languages were spoken in the stores as it was at home.
Greek, Macedonian and English were spoken in my Mother's family house. All of this is fine and good, but where I draw the line is in business and commerce. If I call my bank and get a person with a really thick accent I am not sure if that person will (1) understand everything I am asking and (2) be able to convey ideas back. Its one of my big complaints about outsourcing. If I go to Chinatown or the Mission I don't expect to hear English as the first language, but at my local Safeway, I expect that every clerk will understand me 100% and respond in english with a high degree of accuracy.

If I went to live in a foreign country, I would expect to have to learn the native language. I expect nothing less of those emigrating here.

NOW... knowing a bit of spanish for Shopping in the Mission. or using Greek at the one Greek Market in SF is a good thing. I believe that the more languages in which one can converse, is a really good thing. But knowing that I can take my drivers test in Spanish, Mandarin, and Tagolog makes me very nervous.

DID YOU GET...

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

My email?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Fair point, that. Except it's not that I want them to be less paranoid as much as I just want them to shut the hell up.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Crap, could you resend? I thought it was spam (due to the lack of a surname and the one-word subject line) and deleted it!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I agree: Anyone who is being hired for a position should have the skills necessary to perform it competently. However, there's a lot more to communication, let alone customer service, than just language knowledge. (To see what I mean, look no further than my previous entry.) I don't assume that simply because someone speaks with an accent it means that they don't understand my requests, just as I don't assume that just because someone doesn't they necessarily do. I'll take an eager immigrant who is doing his damnednest to fulfil my wishes over a sullen native who could care less if I get what I want any day.

monshu has complained before about his difficulty in understanding non-native English speakers during service calls. To me, this is not really much different than getting a speaker you can't understand because of their poor diction or because their speaking pitch and your range of hearing don't match up well: You ask if they can speak more intelligibly and, if they can't, you ask to speak to another representative.

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Amusing, but it also raises a more serious point. I would think this would be completely unconvincing to a bigot; there is no equivalence, because the Navajo's defeat leaves them with no standing whatsoever. I imagine that saying this would cast you, in the eyes of a bigot, as a namby-pamby multiculturalist who doesn't understand the difference between victory and defeat in the eternal struggle for dominance.

Not that I care about that "struggle" myself, or even believe it's relevant when American culture is already so dominant. But I do have my doubts about whether multiculturalism is sustainable in practice.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think it all depends how we define "multiculturalism". All the examples of uniculturalism I can think of have been short-lived experiments.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

You funny.