81–90 of 203 posts
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The UK does not have an official language.
De facto it does De jure, Wales does Cambridge Dictionary defines official language as: > the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc. There is no debate whatsoever that English meets that criteria in the UK
Whenever I see Europeans railing about the destruction of their cultures by small number of immigrants, I want to point to California and be like “you’re doing it wrong.” Pretty much within one generation, everyone here is bilingual, fully integrated, we all enjoy each others company, culture and food etc.
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Can you explain exactly what you’re “all for”? Because of the handful of interpretations of your post, several are downright psychotic.
A well-intended interpretation is: the parent comment advocates for a society where there is substantial language diversity even within smaller geographic regions. This makes sense from many perspectives, because forcing people to speak the same language no matter the context is not only hostile to immigrants but also to native minorities. E.g., in the North of Scandinavia (where I reside), many people don't like tha…
in terms of non-native languages, practically this sort of policy quickly becomes a nightmare in terms of ensuring equitable access to public services
either these people become disadvantaged in terms of dealing with the state, or small fortunes have to be spent hiring substantial amounts of interpreters for every possible situation (which is a significant cost for e.g. elementary schools)
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
De facto it does De jure, Wales does Cambridge Dictionary defines official language as: > the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc. There is no debate whatsoever that English meets that criteria in the UK
But by that criterion the US also has an official language.
What's your argument there?
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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…
I know folks like this. Cantonese and Vietnamese. Most of them are (were, back when they were trying to speak English) deeply embarrassed by their accents and utterly captured by that fear.
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I don't know but my wife used to play mahjong in SF Chinatown and almost no one spoke English, including some people who had been in the US for over 30 years. It was a bit surprising.
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…
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 PhD is in second language acquisition. For my thesis I interviewed, through translators, 276 “non proficient speakers” of the dominant community language. The most common attitudes I encountered were:
(1) I’m too old to learn a new language. It’s just not possible.
(2) I don’t have the right to speak the dominant language because I’m not the same ethnicity / religion / other attribute.
(3) If I speak another language, I will lose who I am to the dominant culture, and be unable to communicate with people “back home.” This last attitude was expressed often, even when the person had no living relatives or friends anywhere else.
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…
Some platforms make internationalization relatively simple with a lot of it happening automatically (as with UIKit on iOS), whereas bring-your-own-everything platforms require someone to think to pull in the appropriate libraries and integrate them properly to have any at all.
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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" ?
Such as their education level? Is that specific to South East Asia somehow?
The vast majority of Vietnamese American came to the US not really as immigrants seeking newfound opportunities, but as refugees who have lost their home. I imagine such a sudden uprooting has made them somewhat insular, as they bound together in a foreign environment for which they were not prepared.
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acccount created 2 minutes ago just to write this?
A lot of discrimination against people who don't speak the host nations language (especially in Europe) so maybe the above commenter felt he needed to defend non-English speakers in California Nothing wrong with that