Thread: The English language is under assault.

America, the world's greatest melting pot, is struggling to maintain its identity. Hospitals are so overwhelmed with patients who cannot speak English they're paying millions of dollars for translators who speak dozens of languages.

Schools that once taught math, science and sentence structure now have to teach English first. Even entire court proceedings in this country are now conducted without a word of English spoken or written.

The English language is under assault.

This is an excerpt from a segment on Lou Dobbs. To make a point I used the free program at this site,

http://www.freetranslation.com/

and sent this to Sen. McCain and Kyl. ( the following is an abbreviated version of what I sent, I went to this site http://www.diversityalliance.org/docs/a ... inter.html , copied and pasted 4 paragraphs).

Die USA debattieren auf Amnestie für große Anzahl illegaler Einwanderer, als mit die Besprechung über Einwanderungsgrundsatz im Allgemeinen, haben fokussiert hauptsächlich auf wirtschaftlichen Ausgaben: die Kosten und die Vorteile der Einwanderung zu Geschäft und Verbrauchern ........Mexikaner-Amerikanerelite und ihr Gebrauch der Basismobilisierung in diesem Land können schließlich die kulturelle und politische Landschaft vom Amerikanisch Südwesten, und tatsächlich die ganzen Vereinigten Staaten verändern.

Ihre Bemerkungen bitte.( Your comments please) )

I'm not holding my breath waiting for a reply as I haven't received a reply to previous questions, but it will be interesting if they do.

Great idea, gearhead!! That should send them reeling.

I was just getting ready to go to Lou's site and post that whole segment on the language. I hope you don't mind.

Here is the whole transcipt for the segment on the English language on Lou Dobbs' program last night:

The English language is under assault.

Christine Romans reports.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): "New York Presbyterian speaks your language." The new slogan of a hospital system pledging its workers will speak any of the 200 languages spoken in New York City through 58 on-site interpreters and telephone translators from the emergency room to checkups to cancer treatments.

The hospital would not grant us an interview or disclose the cost of the program. But immigrant advocacy groups hailed the move.

ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN, NEW YORK STATE SENATE: The ability to communicate with your doctor is a matter of life or death. (SPEAKING SPANISH)

ROMANS: Advocacy groups have long demanded immigrants legal or illegal get services in their own language. It is, after all, federal law. And of course New York is a city where many longtime immigrants still speak little or no English.

But this trend is happening now all over the country.

The Census Bureau reports only 50 percent of Mexican immigrants speak English; 69 percent of Koreans; 78 percent of Russians. At this cash-strapped hospital in Florida, translation services cost almost a million dollars a year.

In Arizona, because so many students don't speak English, 160,000 of them, a federal judge has threatened to yank the state's highway funding and graduate those students from high school anyway.

In Dallas, such a large percentage of immigrant parents don't speak English. Some principals are now required to learn Spanish to communicate with them. Language experts say all these examples show immigrants are not learning English.

MAURO MUJICA, U.S. ENGLISH: We are a nation that has always had immigrants and huge numbers, and they were always assimilated quickly because we didn't have this incredibly stupid policies of trying to do everything for everybody in whatever language they want. They have no incentive to learn the language of the country, and they do not assimilate.

ROMANS: In our schools, hospitals, driver's license bureaus and our courts, business is conducted in dozens of languages, but increasingly Spanish.

ROMANS: We are often told that this is now a multilingual country, and that somehow advocating English as the common language is racist. To that, language and sociology and immigration experts scoff. They say the problem is that too many families are not multilingual. They speak no English at all, only their native language.

Twelve million families, 12 million households in this country are what the Census Bureau calls linguistically isolated. That means they can't correspond outside of their native language at all.

DOBBS: And cannot be assimilated into our society. It's an extraordinary problem which we have been documenting on this broadcast for three years, and there is still a political correctness that overwhelms so many people that they lose sight of what's happening within this country. And the fact is it is some -- take these multicultural approaches and multilingual approaches, they are, in point of fact, penalizing the very people that they should be wanting to help to learn English.

ROMANS: The bottom line, it's been proven over and over again that language assimilation leads to economic assimilation. And right now for Mexican immigrants who have got a third generation who under- perform other immigrant groups, and that, experts say, including the Dallas Fed number (ph) report last year, that is because of the language problem.

DOBBS: A Federal Reserve report on assimilation that most people really want to ignore in this country.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Christine Romans.

It just dawned on me, if I want a response I should have sent it in Espanol.

That might just be one way to get through to them, start sending questions in Spanish and if they say anything just say "I'm preparing for the future".

No, gearhead---I like the German better. I will NEVER stoop so low that I would communicate with ANYONE in SPANISH. I swear, I would learn Chinese or Russian before I would use SPANISH- the language I already know!