Bilingualism
strengthens America
Carlos Alberto Montaner
It is not true, as the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges maintained,
that Spanish is a confidential language useful only for singing in the
shower. It is also useful for winning elections.
It is possible that the six million U.S. Hispanics who communicate
basically in Spanish, watch Spanish-language television, listen to
Spanish-language radio and read books and newspapers written in Spanish will
decide the next presidential election.
All candidates know that the relative sympathy created by President Bush
among Hispanics -- perhaps because of his heroic attempt to speak to them in
their native tongue -- substantially increased the support of that ethnic
group for the Republicans and cleared Bush's way to the White House.
That phenomenon is universal. In Latin America, especially in the Andean
countries, speaking Quechua or Aymara is an undeniable advantage to any
politician, while in Paraguay there is no national leader who cannot
communicate eloquently in Guaraní.
Czech and Slovak politicians make great efforts to appeal in Hungarian to
the Hungarian minority living in their countries. Former Spanish Prime
Minister José María Aznar swore that he was able to speak Catalan -- one of
Spain's four languages -- in the privacy of his home. And in the recent
French elections, there were candidates who learned some phrases in Arabic
to court voters who came from northern Africa.
Nevertheless, this circumstance -- though normal in an inevitably
pluralistic world -- make many in American society nervous, particularly
people who stubbornly refuse to learn other languages, despite the
widespread hospitality that exists in the United States to foreign cultural
manifestations.
Fear of other languages
In the United States there are 8,000 Taco Bell restaurants, Gloria
Estefan sells three million copies of her extraordinary Conga, and
Japanese cars top the selling charts. But almost no one feels the need to
learn Spanish, French, German or any of the other major world languages that
have sculpted the Western world.
The person who best expresses the American fear of other languages is
Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a candidate for president. According to him, the
United States must avoid at all costs becoming bilingual or bicultural
because that duality would weaken the American identity and sow the seeds of
disunity and conflict, as (he says) it happens in countries that do not have
the linguistic and cultural unity that (he assumes) characterizes the United
States.
Naturally, when Tancredo -- whose origin is Italian -- thinks about an
intrusive and dangerous language, it is undoubtedly Spanish that comes to
his mind. And what terrifies him is the warning from the Census Bureau that
in 2050 there will be 100 million people of Hispanic origin roaming all over
the 50 states of the Union.
Is Tancredo wrong? Of course. His mistake is not understanding that
Spanish is a transitional language that weakens during the second generation
and practically disappears in the third, because Hispanics integrate
perfectly in U.S. society, the way the Italians and the Japanese have done.
It is not true that Hispanics wish to form a different linguistic entity.
One thing that Hispanic parents repeat to their children, over and again as
if it were a mantra, is that they must learn English perfectly to compete
and triumph in the American mainstream.
At the same time, many of those parents, with great prudence, insist to
their children that they should not lose the familial language, Spanish,
because it contains a fountain of emotional and aesthetic satisfactions, in
addition to certain comparative advantages.
If Rick Sánchez, Marianne Murciano or Andrés Oppenheimer can work as
journalists in both the Spanish- and the English-speaking media, it's
because Spanish confers upon them professional possibilities lacking in
someone like, for instance, Lou Dobbs, a person who is victim to his
idiomatic and cultural limitations.
In addition, the latest findings of psycho-linguistics seem to
demonstrate that bilingualism stimulates the development of intelligence by
substantially multiplying the neuronal connections in certain regions of the
brain. Researchers who measure and compare the intelligence quotients of
people who are monolingual and multilingual usually confirm that relation:
the more languages, the higher IQ.
The funny thing is that those who most fear the Hispanic presence usually
are those who most contribute to perpetuating the problem by advocating
barriers to the integration of illegal immigrants.
Common sense should lead them in the opposite direction. The convenient
thing to do is to encourage Americanization by enabling the immigrants to
study and work, because the school, the workplace and the religious
organizations are the aggregating factors and the means to acquire the
habits and values that are predominant in the mainstream.
Actually, that reasoning is very easy to understand in any language.
June 12, 2007
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