I was at The Factory Stores (or whatever it’s called now) a couple days ago and was walking around when the mall greeting came over the loudspeakers. In Japanese. I was amused by that for a good while.
I mean, since the place attracts a lot of tourists, I understand that having the greeting in different languages is good business, but to go back to the idea of a more multi-linguistic America, how many languages are they going to start putting things in? North Bend is a predominantly white town. I frequently joke that it’s easy to find me because I’m one of the only Asian-Americans in the areas I’ve come from.
If America doesn’t choose official languages and the number of languages on things keeps increasing, I could see things getting complicated. Different representative groups lobbying for their language on a product, lawsuits resulting from this, etc. As it is, it seems like more products are including entirely seperate instruction booklets for products because they want to reach a wider audience. That’s a lot of paper.
I’m probably just noticing this because I don’t understand these languages and it bothers me. When I went to Japan, I had a really bad case of culture shock because my brain overloaded from all the stuff I couldn’t read or understand. If I knew that Spanish and French were going to be so prevalent in America, maybe I would’ve studied one of those instead of Japanese. I hope the government decides on official languages, because if kids of future generations are going to do well, it seems fairly obvious that they’re going to have to learn languages other than English, and they’ll have to start young.
As a linguist, it’s difficult (for me, at least) to take a position on this one. Did you see the thing in the news about the guy with the sign on his store that says, “This is America! Order in English!”? As a country largely settled and grown by immigrants, I’m not sure that the “English Only” movement, as simplifying as it may be, will “cure” the issue of multiple languages. Can we talk about tolerance and not allow other languages- as bothersome as it may seem?
I guess I wasn’t really clear as to what I meant. I’m not proposing English as the only language of the country, I’m just saying it’d be nice if we had an official language or languages. It just seems impractical to me at this point, and slightly humorous, to get multiple instruction booklets when I buy something.