Spanglish

Out of pure coincidence I got into a discussion this week about how our country should deal with Spanish speakers in areas like southern California. The stance I took was that we should make efforts to teach the incoming Hispanic population English, but that we should not make changes that make it difficult for some one from another region in America to manage. My girlfriends stance was a lot more humanitarian, claiming that there a necessary part of our agriculture industry, which aught to make their native language a priority as well. I still hold my views, mainly because I believe that while this is thoughtful in the short-run, it does nothing to encourage emigrants to learn English, or teach it to their children. There is a division in those areas, and while it is due to a whole lot of things, it’s probably safe to say that a majority of these are caused by not being able to communicate.
I still hold all of my opinions the core of which that English should be maintained as our countries dominant language in all of its regions, but I’ll admit that the way to do this isn’t to make managing without it impossible. I have my own experience learning a language and I really don’t think that without being immersed in it I would have any chance, and even then I would be marginal at best. So I can’t honestly say that Mexican adults can be expected to master English. It also can’t really be expected that they don’t speak to their children for fear of passing along Spanish. Spanish is obviously going to be the first language for a majority of second-generation Mexican-Americans. It’s not until the third generation that it can be reasonably expected that English will be the child’s first language. When someone mentioned Spanglish the other day it made me curious why it’s not considered a pidgin language. I don’t know too much about the Hawaii case but it doesn’t seem to me that the situations are all that different. There are two groups that speak different languages that need to be able to understand each other. Maybe pidgin languages also require an isolation factor, like an island or secluded area, so that there is not an established language being used. It will be interesting to see if the best thing to do is nothing, and allow the generations to work this out.