I am a lifelong southerner and I took no offense at anything that was said. Plus, I think it's pretty significant that most of the people that talked about 'southerners' here are actually southerners themselves. In addition, you can thank the southern gentleman in the OP for the most egregious negative characterization of southerners on this thread. Surely, with a little internet research, you can find an address to write and tell him so.
Back to the whole English language issue, whether someone chooses to learn the language or not is of no more consequence to 'us' than whether someone chooses to get a drivers license or finish high school. People who don't learn it, will find themselves limited - in jobs, in friendships, in communicating what they want on their steak sandwiches (look I referenced a yankee bigot!
) - but as much as someone wants to make it their business, it just isn't. And it doesn't hurt or deprive you of
anything. People can attribute it to all kinds of paranoid things - they don't want to assimilate, they love their own country better than this one, blah, blah, blah - but the fact is there is going to be a proportion of the population that learns and a proportion that figures staying in their own neighborhood where people understand them and working menial jobs is good enough for them. Maybe they are intimidated, experiencing culture shock, or their education is limited. It's not a phenomenon that should be that hard to understand when you put down reactionary judgements and think of them as individuals instead of this mass of 'immigrants.'
Sure it would be great if they all, in between working and taking care of their families, learned to speak what is admittedly a difficult language to learn. Just as it would be great if all natural born Americans would learn to actually speak, spell and write coherent sentences in English themselves. *pipe dream*