Lingual Opportunity

[valancy_jane]

Why is it that people say, how wonderful, the Swiss speak 3 languagues!, yet so many people react badly to the concept of having to learn a second language in the United States, or the increasingly prevalence of Spanish in the southwestern U.S.?

(I think this is obvious why; perhaps mostly rhetorical. Alas.)

Comments

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

I note on a regular basis, as I go through the Boston area speaking Italian to the little one, how amazed and, to be perfectly frank, aroused people are to hear me speaking Italian specifically, and how radically different things would be if I were brown and speaking Spanish, when both cases are "bilingual".

[rinue]

Probably the same reason it's adorable to use an English pronunciation like "aluminium" (or even an English lower-class pronunciation like "wiv" for "with"), but disgusting to use a traditinally black pronunciation like "axe" for "ask."

You could replace this whole thing with "the Swiss are even more white than we are! Triple white! Jealous!"

Also Switzerland has four official languages. And I don't think most people speak all of them. There's a school requirement that you learn a second one, but I'm not entirely sure how fluent that has to be. (I had a foreign language requirement in school but certainly don't speak a second language.)