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 Editorials | Opinions | October 2007 
Don't Fear a Different Language
 Bill Perry - The Baxter Bulletin
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 |  | What will happen is more and more businessmen will recognize that there are dollars involved in serving the advancing minority and will want to accommodate them by hiring bilingual employees and printing their advertising bilingually. |  | |
The consideration of what should be our national language is just another issue that doesn't need to be an issue if the debaters just analyze both sides of the issue. The majority will usually rule.
Currently, the majority in the United States speaks English. When or if that balance changes, we will adopt another language. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about these statements. The Spanish-speaking population is gaining percentage and will be more than 50 percent in 15 states or more by 2020, according to a research I read.
All people are most comfortable reading and speaking their own best-learned language. If you are Lithuanian, and you work in a business and most of your fellow employees are Lithuanian, you will probably speak English because it facilitates your dealing with the public. But when you are speaking to your Lithuanian fellow employees, you will probably speak Lithuanian because that is where the best comfort level is for both of you, even if you both have learned to speak some English.
Should we expect the Spanish-speaking population to do differently? Of course not. Would an English-speaking person do differently in a non-English speaking country? Of course not. They don't.
What will happen is more and more businessmen will recognize that there are dollars involved in serving the advancing minority and will want to accommodate them by hiring bilingual employees and printing their advertising bilingually.
Courts and law officers, hospitals and doctors and other medical personnel, teachers and landlords will begin to see that they need people who speak Spanish. Schools will get in the act somewhere and start teaching more Spanish to larger and larger classes, and will start teaching more and more classes in Spanish.
All the while, the Spanish-speaking public will be doing their dead-level best to learn more and more English; It is natural for them to want to be able to communicate well with all the people that surround them. And give them a break — English is the hardest, or at least one of the hardest, languages to learn on our planet. What some people fear is that the nationally most-accepted language will be changed to Spanish before they have learned it, or that the Spanish-speaking people will not try to communicate with them unless we designate the national language as English, both of which are pure bull put out by redneck bigots.
Certainly we will begin to encounter more and more Spanish media, hopefully with English printed below, and more Spanish everywhere we turn, such as business names and other signs. That is just progress. Only the thick-headed, most stubborn small segments of both English- and Spanish-speaking public will resist trying to learn some of the other's language. Most people find it fun to learn and use the other language, as well as finding it beneficial in many ways.
Is there a moral problem with socializing with the Latinos? Maybe for them. It has been my experience that as a group of people they have a larger majority with what we consider higher morals, than the English-speaking population. Along the borders with the U.S., there is a large group of unsavory types that deal in drugs, pornography and sex for sale. There are more English-speaking people in any one of our large major cities dealing in similar trade that are what I would also call unsavory types. By and large, the average Mexican is a man or woman you would be proud to know and call your friend.
In summary, Spanish is coming, whether we formalize with yet another meaningless law to declare English as being the national or state language or not. Relax and enjoy its coming; You can either fight it and suffer along the way, or enjoy it and the new worlds it will open up to you if you just try to learn a second language.
Arkansas is one of those 15 states that is probably going to have an English-speaking minority by at least 2020, if not sooner. |
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