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Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

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Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#131

Post by mrweasel »

mistrial9 wrote: post #57
mrweasel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next town over from me have a large Vietnamese community, the older generation frequently only speak Vietnamese, relying on their children and grandchildren to help them navigate in society, doctors appointments, interacting with the government and all those things. I'm continuously surprised that someone would refuse to learn the language of a country they lived in for almost 50 years... Like WHY? Seems rather r…

have you tried to learn Vietnamese !? it is really different.. also, someone told me that in South East Asia, like many places, there is a lot of difference between educated people there and uneducated people there.. an illiterate in their own language, has to learn English or else be "rude" ?

> have you tried to learn Vietnamese

No, but I also haven't moved to Vietnam permanently. I can't imagine navigating another country with a low English or Danish proficiency and not wanting to learn the local language, if I planed to stay there permanently. It seems like you would be making life extremely difficult for no good reason.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#132

Post by xrd »

bhpm wrote: post #87
mrweasel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next town over from me have a large Vietnamese community, the older generation frequently only speak Vietnamese, relying on their children and grandchildren to help them navigate in society, doctors appointments, interacting with the government and all those things. I'm continuously surprised that someone would refuse to learn the language of a country they lived in for almost 50 years... Like WHY? Seems rather r…

> Like WHY? Did you grow up with formal education? Did you grow up in a place where girls were encouraged to learn? If either of these is true, your starting condition is miles ahead of the starting conditions for many, many immigrants who came to the US. It sounds simple, but in order to learn something, you have to first believe you “can.” Can in the sense that you have the ability and that you’re permitted to. My…

It looks like you are a new user. Would be very fascinated to read about your research.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#133

Post by mrweasel »

bhpm wrote: post #87
mrweasel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next town over from me have a large Vietnamese community, the older generation frequently only speak Vietnamese, relying on their children and grandchildren to help them navigate in society, doctors appointments, interacting with the government and all those things. I'm continuously surprised that someone would refuse to learn the language of a country they lived in for almost 50 years... Like WHY? Seems rather r…

> Like WHY? Did you grow up with formal education? Did you grow up in a place where girls were encouraged to learn? If either of these is true, your starting condition is miles ahead of the starting conditions for many, many immigrants who came to the US. It sounds simple, but in order to learn something, you have to first believe you “can.” Can in the sense that you have the ability and that you’re permitted to. My…

It's amazing that this is being studied, but it's some rather weird reasons. You have people who migrated to the US in the 1950 - 1980 from Europe, they didn't care about losing their ability to speak their native language. It's alway interesting to hear a Dane that moved to the US 50 - 70 years ago. Their language is frozen in time but still fairly good.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#134

Post by bradlys »

blululu wrote: post #84
izacus wrote: post #74

Can those californians now actually show some care towards support for multiple languages in the software they write and encode some basics like support for users to move between places, countries and regions? :P It's kind of incredible how absolutely terrible most SV products are at supporting other locales and how horrible experience with products is if you dare to do something silly like move to another place. God…

You seem to be operating under some assumptions that Californians are well represented in SV tech companies. I am frequently the only Californian on my team and often the only American in my meetings. Internationalization is just a lot of work. The extent to which it exists is largely due to American style multiculturalism.

The only companies where you’ll see more than one American in a meeting is in startups. They don’t have the bandwidth for internationalization when they can’t even get a domestic audience.

People outside of SV don’t get how few Americans are actually working in SV tech.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#135

Post by aegypti »

eduardo_f wrote: post #39
justrealist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California was almost empty when it was annexed into the US. Disease etc. Immigration from the rest of the English-speaking US completely dwarfed what was left. Almost 100% of Spanish-speaking Californians have come in the past 50-70 years. Basically none have historical roots to California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californios

…the 15.2 million California Hispanics, who total 40% of California's population. 2004 studies estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 have ancestry descended from the Spanish and Mexican eras of California

Parent comment is mostly correct, californios are an insignificant part of California in comparison to eg Tejanos.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#136

Post by justrealist »

29athrowaway wrote: post #127
justrealist wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, those were more recent immigrants. Read your own link. I am talking about at time of annexation, 1847.

Mestizos have a stronger connection to the land than European settlers.

Nobody has any connection to the land, people are not plants.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#137

Post by switch007 »

sin7 wrote: post #116
switch007 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the de facto language of the US is English. What's your argument there?

De facto is not the same as official.

Not much of an argument but when it comes to English it is. “Official” as in widely and universally recognised and accepted by government authorities? English in the UK (and US) absolutely is

Though now we’re just descending in to semantics which is not very entertaining

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#138

Post by switch007 »

jjgreen wrote: post #102
switch007 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degree to which we do not care what the French think about our lack of an official body overseeing and dictating the language of English can not be accurately described in words. We would have to invent a new unit of measurement to measure it. :)

On Dave's scale, probably a "Shart" https://blogography.com/archives/2019/04/the-dave-scale-of-g...

By that scale it’s “no shits given”

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#139

Post by morbicer »

izacus wrote: post #74

Can those californians now actually show some care towards support for multiple languages in the software they write and encode some basics like support for users to move between places, countries and regions? :P It's kind of incredible how absolutely terrible most SV products are at supporting other locales and how horrible experience with products is if you dare to do something silly like move to another place. God…

I agree that there is a lot of room for improvement.

However, proper internationalization is extremely hard and costly. There are soo many languages on the planet and lot of them are quite quirky, my native language is one of them. For example proper pluralization is hell because the declension has multiple forms depending on the amount and noun paradigm. ICU format helps a lot but doesn't solve everything. It's good that browsers are at least getting native support for localization of numbers and datetimes.

Right-to-left can make you sweat a lot. Then you have different sentence orders, vastly variable length of words, rules about where it's ok to break line. Then you have non-linguistic aspects like cultural context. Some icons can have different meaning, some images might be offensive.

The truth is that if you are a startup, doing all of this is a waste of precious time. You have access to 300m customers just in USA alone and the worldwide middle class with money to spend can usually work with English. Internationalization becomes worthy if you get big and want to penetrate more exotic markets or you want to sell to foreign governments which mandate it.

On the other hand even giants like Google can botch it pretty often.

Re: Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

#140

Post by WirelessGigabit »

I believe this article misses out on the impact of the development of the children from those households.

It becomes an issue where the groups are large enough that you get kids in school who do not speak English amongst themselves, and thus hamper their development compared to their English speaking peers.

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