I’ve hears stories of some Americans telling other people who are speaking a non-English language “This is America, speak English!” even if the conversation has nothing to do with them. Why do they do this?
Because those Americans are entitled, insecure, ignorant, xenophobic assholes.
Just as there are two kind of race, white and political; and there are two kinds of gender, male and political; there also are two kinds of language, English and political.
They are bigoted and racist.
What gets me is when they complain about Spanish, a European language. Where does English come from, you may ask? Oh right! Europe!
So they’re proud of speaking a language that’s not even 'Merican. Learn Navajo, Comanche, or any of the several native American languages, then we’ll talk.
I like your energy!
This is it. The end. Thanks for coming to their Ted Talk.
Thanks for the outro. Ill be performing in more venues in a slice near you.
You will understand why better when you take a look at who they say this to and who they don’t.
This is not something that generally happens to white people speaking some French in the US. It does not raise the ire of this psychology. On the other hand, they love to target brown people speaking Spanish (almost exclusively, in fact). There is, naturally, spillover where white people speaking Spanish or brown people speaking Hindi would get targeted.
As others noted, and as these examples suggest, this is an instance of xenophobia and racism. Language is being used as a proxy, really, and provides a way for these people to unleash the frustrations they have been taught, societally, to have against them. Generally speaking, these are people that will call any brown person that speaks Spanish a “Mexican” regardless of their actual place of birth, where they were raised, or ethnic heritage.
But this is just a surfacr-level analysis. The next question is why they are taught to target people with xenophobia and racism. Why are there institutions of white supremacy? Why are their institutions of anti-immigrant sentiment? How are they materially reinforced? Who gains and who loses?
At a deeper level, these social systems are maintained because they are effective forms of marginalization. In the United States, racial marginalization was honed in the context of the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery, beginning, more or less, as a reaction to the multi-racial Bacon’s Rebellion. In response, the ruling class introduced racially discriminatory policies so that the rebelling groups were divided by race, with black people receiving the worst treatment and the white people (the label being invented for the purposes of these kinds of policies) being told they would receive a better deal (though it was only marginally so and they were still massively mistreated). This same basic play had been repeated and built upon for hundreds of years in the United States. It was used to maintain chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and modern anti-blackness. It was used to prevent Chinese immigrant laborers from becoming full citizens and becoming a stronger political influence in Western states.
It was and is used to maintain the labor underclass of the United States, which also brings us to xenophobia more specifically. The United States functions by ensuring there is a large pool of exploitable labor in the form of undocumented immigrants. It does this at the behest of the ruling class - the owners of businesses - who have much more power to dictate wages and working conditions when it comes to this labor underclass. They make more money and have more control, basically. But this pissed off and pisses off the labor over class, as they have lost these jobs (or sometimes are merely told they lost them even if they never worked them). To deflect blame away from the ruling class for imposing these working conditions wages, the ruling class instead drives focus against the labor underclass itself, as if working that job for poor pay and bad conditions their fault. This cudgel should remind you of Bacon’s Rebellion again: it divides up workers so that rather than struggle together they fight amongst themselves on the basis of race or national origin. The business owners are pleased, having a docile workforce to exploit.
So while racism and xenophobia are themselves horrific and what is behind the "Speak English!’ crowd, it is really just an expression of the society created by this system that, by its very nature , pits workers against business owners while giving business owners outsized power (they are the ruling class, after all).
Another important element to this is imperialism and how imperialist countries carefully control immigration (it used to be basically open borders not that long ago). But I’ll leave that for any follow-up questions you might have.
Sure but I’ve gotta ask: why not write 7 paragraphs of run-on sentences like a true proletarian!?
😂 why waste time say lot word when few meme do trick
Some people are shit
As a kid I worked fast food for a few years, and there was an “English only” on the line where customers could hear. One of our managers was Mexican, and actually enforced this pretty strongly. He once told us about when he went to a Subway and the staff was speaking what he suspected was Hindi, and explained to us all that yeah, it matters sense, you tend to get upset when you can’t understand people. They could be saying anything, making fun of you without your knowing, or whatever.
I tend to just ignore other languages (I’m in Chicagoland, there’s plenty of them) and an of the opinion that lack of exposure is one of the root causes of ethnic (and of other kinds of) intolerance. A lot of Americans live in their little rural bubbles where everything is samey and familiar, dealing with their little isolated lives, away from anyone noticably different than themselves. They’re tribalistic and comfortable there, and don’t like outsiders or change. They vote Republican because “people from the city” are bad, and they’re Democrats.
It’s not a new problem. The root philosophy in the fucking Bible is that “city people are immoral” because its all passed down by oral tradition, and its oldest stories are descended from periods when its creators were nomadic herders. Hospitality for them vs. urban hospitality are very different, and of course anecdotes get mutated through centuries of the telephone game.
TL;DR, lots of people need to meet more kinda of people and it’s been a problem since forever.
I find the type of people that get angry at those that don’t speak English, usually have not a single interesting thing about them so they use English as an excuse to feel superior. It’s funny because the type to get angry at another language, rarely can speak English better than a 4th grade level.
Exactly! I have a friend who said a similar thing to his daughter, who came to him crying because her friends said she was not American enough because she wasn’t white. My friend said “you’re top of the class, excellent at sports, well spoken, well educated and very friendly and polite. They try to attack you for the sake of doing it, they try to find something bad about you, and they get nothing. So what do they resort to? Skin color!” (and yeah, I know this is about language, but it’s pretty much in line with your comment.)
Because anytime someone speaks a foreign language in their presence they must me talking bad about them. After all its what they would do.
Fear… At the bottom of it is always fear
Sorry, as a Greek-American (currently in Greece), I disagree with most of the people here. When you’re part of a new country, you need to be able to do your business with the authorities in the official language. For that, some level of understanding the native language is required. In fact, to get any passport from any country, you need to have a B1-level understanding of that country’s language. So yes, being in a country, you need to know the basics. And if you don’t, then make sure you learn the basics within 6 months, in order to be able to live there without issues. I don’t see that as xenophobia, I see it as common sense.
I moved to Greece from the US this year with my French husband. He doesn’t speak Greek. I can tell you, it has been a nightmare for him doing paperwork, and I need to go with him EVERYWHERE in any government office in order to get setup. It wasn’t pretty in the first few months, he was full of anxiety and he wouldn’t leave the house without me.
Also, I worked in Germany in my youth, for a few months. I couldn’t understand most of what was said (although I could pick up a few words, but certainly couldn’t speak back). It was a nightmare. There were no free programs back then to learn the language, and so I went there without any preparation. Today, I wouldn’t have done it that way. I would first learn the language in some basic form (today there are apps to do that), and then move there.
Do you expect a couple of foreigners visiting America together to speak English to each other while they are in the US?
We’re talking about people living there, not tourists.
Do you expect two people from the same country who moved to the US and live in the US to speak English to each other?
To each other, of course not. But to others, yes.
Homie, stop making shit up. Noone is giving grief to tourists for not speaking the native language of the country they are visiting.
Do you expect two people from the same country who moved to the US and live in the US to speak English to each other?
What??? Are you responding to the correct person?
USA does not have an official language.
Legally, yes. But you’re going to have a bad time if you don’t speak at least some English.
A friend of mine moved to LA from Germany to work for his German company. German was an option for the test at the DMV. He said the test was gibberish so he turned it in for an English test.
No, and I do not agree with the above poster, but we’re aided in that most of our forms are in both English and Spanish, the two most common native tongues of people who live here.
Ignorance. The US doesn’t even have an official language lol
They are ignorant, taught hate, and told incorrectly that English is the official language of the United States, but in reality the United States doesn’t have an official language. In fact before WW1 there where so many German speaking Americans that spme cities had German spelled street names, and German festivals.
Because in America we believe strongly in our rights: specifically the right to tell people they don’t have the right to speak any language they want. It’s called freedom man!
Very few people have that opinion.
americans dont seem to understand there is an entire world outside of their country
American here, who has spent about a decade living in various countries around the world.
The biggest problem with my fellow Americans is that we’re raised in an isolated country, which only borders two other countries (Canada and Mexico). And our country is so massive, probably 90% of Americans don’t live anywhere near either country border.
Crossing borders is a big deal too; it’s not like Europe where you can be driving and suddenly see a sign welcoming you to a new country. There are checkpoints, blockades, passports, regular inspections, etc. Especially since 9/11 happened, our borders have become even more locked down. Plus, going anywhere else requires expensive plane tickets to fly over the oceans.
This leads to most Americans having no social interactions with foreigners most of the time. We’re fully ingrained in our own culture bubble and we don’t get a lot of interaction with other cultures, outside of stereotypes through pop culture.
Combine this with the fact that we’re taught from childhood that we’re the “greatest nation on Earth,” and you get an entire culture of entitled, narcissistic jerks who think the American way is the best way.
Our education has been failing for decades now, thanks to politicians on both sides of the aisle realizing that we’re more easily manipulated if we’re less educated. So there’s this race to the bottom, where we’re being fed lies and embellishments about how great America is and how we’re this amazing country that the rest of the world looks up to and admires.
With this entitled world view, it makes Americans scared when foreigners come to our country because we only know of their culture through stereotypes and we fear their culture taking over our “amazing and most perfect country.” Just as we’ve stepped into other countries and spread our own democracy, we’re afraid other nations will attempt to do the same to us.
It doesn’t help that we have an entire political party who maintains their voter base through fear mongering about foreigners taking our jobs, stealing our women, and destroying our “great culture” for their “backwards and corrupt” values. It’s complete lunacy, but to the average American who has no regular contact with the outside world, it seems plausible.
So yeah, a lot of Americans get uncomfortable when foreigners speak their native language around us instead of English. They tend to find it rude at best, and offensive/dangerous at worst. And some of the worst Americans travel abroad and expect everyone to essentially worship the ground they walk on, so they get offended when other people don’t know or speak English. It’s a really messed up world view, but it’s hard to change when we live such isolated lives.
They also often brand something as “best in the world” when in reality it’s US only. And they are literally 4.2% the population of the entire world.
miss universe pageant?
the world series?
:)
It can be easy to forget about the rest of the world from a linguistically viewpoint. You can go over 4,300 miles from the tip of Florida to Wainwright, Alaska and never leave a predominantly English speaking region. Then worldwide, English has a billion second language speakers, so many places will have someone around who speaks English.
This is amazingly true. That foreign metric system…
I do not give 2 shits about people speaking foreign languages out in the ether for the most part. Having said that, there are 2 instances I can think of that grind my gears.
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You order an Uber, and the guy who’s driving is on the phone with someone, and is speaking another language with them the whole time. This is more just for the fact that this is shitty customer service for someone who works on tips to an extent. For whatever reason, this seems to only be an issue with foreign speaking people. My guess is maybe they’re talking to family back home? I certainly don’t tip those people who are doing it, but I don’t care enough to call them out on it either.
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As a poker player, they have rules about speaking English only at the table. This prevents collusion. I will absolutely call people out for English only at the table especially when there is a live hand going on.
For the first point really no matter what language they are using on the phone it’s bad service regardless. There already have been enough studies that says talking on a phone do still distract you from driving and makes it more dangerous.
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