My grandfather didn't WANT to speak German. He told my mom (his daughter-in-law) when he came here he came to be an American and wouldn't speak German any longer. He did keep up some German traditions, in his own home, and didn't foist his culture on the rest of the world.
Anyone wants to come to America and be an American, fine. If you want to come here and try to foist your culture on the rest of us, please go home...
In my experience, most of those people are born in the US, to WASPs, and speak no foreign languages.
But they're usually hyphenated by others, not by themselves, and I don't know any immigrants who aren't highly pro-America.
Besides the obvious oversight of our illustrious public school system, the problem with us not speaking foreign languages is what?
Imagine moving to Mexico and expecting them to speak English. Good luck with that.
No Habla...
Or what about when the Phoenix city council voted to not put up Christmas decorations downtown, the only dissenter being the sole Jewish council member?
If that happened in your school system, I guarantee you wouldn't make any effort at all to remedy the situation. You're too lazy.
Your grandpa was a Nazi, like all Germans.
Equivalent: All Muslims are terrorists.
How pathetic that you and the rest of the 54% (who enacted "official language" laws) are so afraid of sounds that are different. Do your children know how pathetic you are?
Ireland: English (official) is the language generally used, Irish (Gaelic or Gaeilge) (official) spoken mainly in areas located along the western seaboard
Russia: Russian, many minority languages
Mexico: Spanish, various Mayan, Nahuatl, and other regional indigenous languages
Switzerland: German (official) 63.7%, French (official) 20.4%, Italian (official) 6.5%, Serbo-Croatian 1.5%, Albanian 1.3%, Portuguese 1.2%, Spanish 1.1%, English
1%, Romansch (official) 0.5%, other 2.8% (2000 census). note: German, French, Italian, and Romansch are all national and official languagesFrance: French 100%, rapidly declining regional dialects and languages (Provencal, Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Catalan, Basque, Flemish), overseas departments: French, Creole patois
Spain: Castilian Spanish (official) 74%, Catalan 17%, Galician 7%, Basque 2%, are official regionally
Isn't this fun?
China: Standard Chinese or Mandarin (Putonghua, based on the Beijing dialect), Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese), Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, Gan, Hakka dialects, minority languages (see Ethnic groups entry)
India: English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 21 other official languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanscrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India but is not an official language
Canada: English (official) 59.3%, French (official) 23.2%, other 17.5%
Iran: Persian and Persian dialects 58%, Turkic and Turkic dialects 26%, Kurdish
9%, Luri 2%, Balochi 1%, Arabic 1%, Turkish 1%, other 2%Puerto Rico: Spanish, English
Bermuda: English (official), Portuguese
Argentina: Spanish (official), English, Italian, German, French
Shall we continue listing all these scary sounds?
Other languages are interesting, unless you are brain dead.
Agreed.
I find it amazing that would mention France as a country tolerant of diversity of languages. The French are Nazi's when it comes to language. The have outlawed (yes I mean "outlawed") many technical words such as email, etc that typically have American English origins because the originated in the US first.
About 5 years ago, the French president was listening to a an address at the UN given by a French Minister. The French Minister gave the address in English, since it was the one language that everyone in the room knew. The French President stormed out of the meeting in protest and lambasted the French Minister for not giving the speech in French.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Excellent. It's 10:40 or so where you live. Still plenty of time to figure out something you can do that will be more successful than attempting to disagree with me. Maybe you could clean your bath tub.
Maybe if you got away from your computer for a while and actually talked to people in real life you would find out I am correct. It won't take long for you to find out you are the true idiot when forced to associate with people in the risky world of face-to-face communication.
Sure, it's good to see some of those countries have pride in their culture and don't kowtow to political correctness. It's good to see some of those countries actually care what language the majority of people use and have made it possible for them to communicate with each other.
How many people have you spoken to about this issue? What were your relationships with those people?
I don't remember any French, German, Dutch, Belgian, or Polish options when I visited England.
Why would I attempt to disagree with you when I've already successfully done so?
For the moment. The more appeasement, the more violators. The undersheriff merely pointed out the obvious to anyone living here.
Both my wife and sister-in-law have been involved in car accidents, the latter two of them, which had the Hispanic drivers flee the scene. None of the three were ever caught. I don't need to point out just who gets to pay increased premiums due to this nonsense.
Illegals with licenses don't necessarily carry insurance. Hell, even legal Hispanics here, with insurance, are the minority.
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