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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414
... No other culture in our grand history has demanded that all forms of communication be available in their language as well. All of the early immigration was simply understood that one had to (eventually) learn English to work/live in America. I have a lot of Russian, Turkish, and Indian friends. They all learned English first thing, no questions asked.
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Our grand history is full of examples of having forms of communications available in their native language:
Quote:
From the mid-19th century on, the nation had large numbers of immigrants who spoke little or no English, and throughout the country state laws, constitutions, and legislative proceedings appeared in the languages of politically important immigrant groups. There have been bilingual schools and local newspapers in such languages as German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Greek, Polish, Swedish, Romanian, Czech, Japanese, Yiddish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Welsh, Cantonese, Bulgarian, Dutch, Portuguese and others, despite opposing English-only laws that, for example, illegalized church services, telephone conversations, and even conversations in the street or on railway platforms in any language other than English, until the first of these laws was ruled unconstitutional in 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska).
Currently, Asian languages account for the majority of languages spoken in immigrant communities: Korean, the varieties of Chinese, and various Indian or South Asian languages like Hindi/Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, Arabic, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Persian, and others.
From the 1920s to the early 1950s, a dozen radio stations broadcasted in immigrant languages (notably Yiddish for European Jewish immigrants in the Eastern seaboard), but was curtailed by the Great Depression (1930s), then the US government during World War II and came to an end in the late 1940s, but global radio waves on shortwave radio can broadcast in any language.[citation needed]
Typically, immigrant languages tend to be lost through assimilation within two or three generations, though there are some groups such as the Cajuns (French), Pennsylvania Dutch (German) in a state where large numbers of people were heard to speak it before the 1950s, and the original settlers of the Southwest (Spanish) who have maintained their languages for centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languag..._United_States
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I would agree that immigrants should assimilate, w/o feeling a need to abandon their heritage, culture and language.....but assimilation does not happen overnight, nor should it be expected to do so.
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"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire
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