Reality Check

Have you ever found yourself needing a translator in your own country with other American citizens? Are our nation's dialects diverging further and further from a single language, and becoming languages of their own?

I will never forget when I was walking through FSU campus and a group of prospective students stopped me to ask some questions. The guy talking to me spoke such thick and fast ebonics, I literally had no idea what he was saying. After asking him to repeat it a couple times, his friend stepped up and said it more slowly and clearly. I felt so horrible when I realized that I actually needed a translator to understand this guy. And we had an entire conversation in front of the whole group of students... through a translator. They were all good sports about it and seemed pretty understanding about my linguistic incompetencies, but I felt pretty ridiculous as I stumbled along through a translator.

One of my classmates in High School was an absolutely brilliant kid. The teacher wasn't there one day (or he had locked himself in his closet to get some work done as he sometimes did). So this student got up at the front of the room and said very clearly and slowly, "Ok class, welcome to learning ebonics with Ovid. Our first word today is Foooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo." And he wrote out Fooo... all the way across the board. "This word is spoken when some acquaintance of yours is acting somewhat unintelligent or irrational. Our next word is Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. You say this... pretty much all the time."
I found it all terribly funny until I learned that they were actually planning to offer an ebonics class as a second language at our high school.   

When I was working for the FWC, I got a nasty letter from a concerned citizen who was absolutely irate that we would print our fishing regulations in Spanish. He ranted on and on about how we were causing our society to fall apart by encouraging foreigners to not have to speak our language and how if people are going to live in our country they had better darn well learn to speak our language.

I still remember how shocked and surprised I was one day when I sat down at a Chinese restaurant and the waitress said in clear, perfect English, "Hi, how are you guys doing today?" Usually we have to wade through the language barrier just to get our order out. I actually did some volunteer work helping a girl from a Chinese restaurant learn English. Neither of us spoke a word of each other's languages, so it was quite an experience.It taught me a lot about just how hard our language is to pick up, and how complicated a language it really is. She genuinely wanted to learn and you could see in her eyes how proud she was to be getting an education in English.

Personally, I have no problem with letting people preserve their unique heritage and language within our country. But I also think there is a certain measure of universal compatibility that needs to be maintained to keep our country functional. There are tiny countries in the world where you can encounter an entirely different language every couple hundred miles. America is one of the biggest countries in the world, yet we all speak (generally) a single language. This makes it possible to trade and function with anyone on our soil. I can fully agree that if you live in a country, for your own sake and for others, you should really learn their language. But I am still reminded that every single American (except the Native Americans) was originally a foreigner. Each of us is most likely descended from an immigrant who had to leave their own country and adopt a new culture, language, and nation as their own.

What are your thoughts on rising and evolving dialects? Do you think they enrich our country and preserve our individuality or do you think they threaten our unity and ability to function as a unified nation? Do you think we should cater to other cultures and write everything in multiple languages for those who can't or just refuse to learn English? Do you think we should work harder to teach our language and culture to others or do you think they should be compelled by necessity to fit into the American mold?