As I’ve mentioned several times before on this here back porch of mine, there are few topics that can compare with multi-language societies. This one guarantees a rant of epic proportions, every single time.
You see, nothing divides a society more quickly than being unable to communicate with each other. It’s cute when you’re a tourist; it’s hell when you’re at home and are forced to deal with someone who can’t (or won’t) speak your language.
Trust me: I know whereof I speak, having grown up in a nominally-bilingual country where speakers of either language hated or despised the others, all set in a multilingual society of no fewer than six other languages (English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho, Ndebele, Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga, Tswana, Swazi). And then let’s add Portuguese, Greek and Italian, with a few others such as Hindi and related Indian languages.
And everyone hated everyone else, most often because they simply couldn’t communicate with each other. The Black tribes were remarkably multilingual, in that each tribe had at least a passing / conversational knowledge of about four other African languages, and of necessity most spoke English. (Understandably enough, they refused to speak Afrikaans because they — rightly — regarded the Dutch derivative as the language of the Oppressor.) As for the Whites… well, they were mostly hopeless. (My father, born an Afrikaner, was way out of the norm because he spoke English, German, Zulu and Sotho fluently. Most Afrikaners spoke English begrudgingly and badly, and hardly any other than farmers spoke an African language. This was also true of most English-speaking South Africans, who likewise spoke Afrikaans begrudgingly and badly, and no Black languages.)
I won’t even go near the topic of Yiddish and the Jews.
So you can imagine my response when I came across this priceless little piece of fuckery:
The Denver school district is among the first in the country to adopt a “language justice” policy as a “long term goal.”
The district would encourage non-English speaking students to be able to use their native language to learn as opposed to being educated in English, which advocates say is oppressive and rooted in racism.
Denver schools had about 90,250 students in 2022 with 35,000 multilingual learners with home languages other than English. The district has 200 languages spoken across the district, with Spanish as the home language for the majority of those.
The district included a draft of an equity document that includes a policy statement on “language justice.” It was included in the Nov. 16 school board agenda. The document includes this definition for “language justice”: “The notion of respecting every individual’s fundamental language rights – to be able to communicate, understand, and be understood in the language in which they prefer and feel most articulate and powerful.”
This is not going to end well. As with all idiotic nonsense of this type, it starts off with the noblest of intentions (albeit wrong-headed), but the end result is going to be a population of alienated people refusing to speak to each other in anything but their home language. And hating each other in consequence.
You heard it here first.
I taught chemical engineering at a university for a little over a decade. I taught in English, as did every other engineering, math, and science prof on my campus. By downgrading the English skills of the Denver students, they are downgrading their probability of being able to stay up with their competition in serious college classes. (A serious class is defined by an engineering prof as organic chemistry or any course with a calculus prerequisite. All junior and senior year engineering courses have a calculus prerequisite.) Nearly all the topics required for engineering degrees are really, really hard for students to understand if taught in the native language of the students; if the students are trying to learn the language in which they are being taught, learning is nearly impossible.
The English requirement was so pervasive that we lost a prof from our department who was recruited to teach thermodynamics in South Korea because he could do it in English.
My ideological forebears figured out the folly of this nonsense at Babel, literally thousands of years ago.
It’s a myth, but it illustrates the point: Even God cannot find a better way of sabotaging a major project, than to introduce a multiplicity of languages.
Once again, I’ll not be participating.
But I will be shunning.
Don’t know about Africa, but here is South Texas it’s also a thing for wetbacks to speak enough English to get by when it’s in their favor, but all of a sudden they don’t understand or speak a word when that’s in their favor too. So you want to create friction between groups, there’s that.
I’ve also heard from my bilingual friends that most of them also speak Spanish extremely poorly too. My Puerto Rican neighbor can do that My Fair Lady thing where she can, over the phone, mind you, tell where some wetback is from based on their accent.
Finally, you know how wetbacks and cue balls are similar? The harder you hit them, the more English you get out of them!
My last software project team consisted of 1 Pakistani, 1 Russian, 1 Bulgarian, 1 Japanese, 1 Chinese, 1 Dot Indian, and 1 American. Weekly required team meetings were a waste of a good hour. Everyone had to wait for the written versions of the team notes to learn what was going on even though the meeting was theoretically conducted in English, the supposed one common language. The only reason we finished the project successfully was that we each had our own silo of responsibility. Good luck to the group that has to do the upgrades and future enhancements. My documentation is all in English and comments embedded in the code. The others I’m not so sure about. Not my problem anymore.
How long before Ebonics is counted as one of the native languages, and the teachers/schools are required to teach in it.
Also, testing in the native language(s), with “adjustments” made for the “White Bias” of the exams. It will have the effect of making the student’s grade meaningless. Then enter college and try to complete.
Some students’ grades are already meaningless (I’ll let you guess to which demographic this applies). I work in a junior college in Texas, and some of the “work” I see the students producing would make me wonder how they graduated from Elementary School if I didn’t already know.
“…is going to be a population of alienated people refusing to speak to each other…”
This is the other shoe dropping. TPTB started the alienation of any communication affection with the manufactured Lockdown over a manipulated cold virus bio-weapon coupled to their asinine edicts; 6ft rule, masks, and EVERYBODY PANIC Chicken Little bravo sierra to keep people from interacting, or worse, see their dying elderly. Disparate languages only furthers their demented societal destruction.
CD you’re absolutely right. I went through engineering school. That is a tough curriculum.
English or out. Enough is enough. Assimilate to the culture you’re joining or return to your fourth rate shit hole of a country that you fled. Maybe you’ll take up arms and change your government in your native land to suit you.
JQ
It’s as if they want to keep people divided and alienated. They are more concerned with appearing equitable than focusing on outcomes.
All part of the “class struggle”, Comrade.
Its already not going well here in Denver.
Now, if I got any more white, I’d be translucent. So when I pull up to a drive through, give my order to the person on the speaker who barely speaks English and pull up to the window to get someone who only speaks Spanish, I know civil breakdown is imminent. And forget working the trades here if you don’t speak Spanish unless you like working alone.
It isn’t surprising this notion of “language justice”. Since the goal of Social Justice is the deconstruction of society, getting rid of unity through language is a logical hegemonic power that must be destroyed in order to further the cause of cultural deconstruction. Because the reality is that here in Denver 200 smaller groups each in their own lingual cul de sac is far easier to oppress than one group that all speak one language well enough to resist.
For the Social Justice Warrior, ‘e pluribus unum’ is a very real problem whereas ‘e unum pluribus’ is a means unto their destructive ends.
Multi-lingual societies have never been successful unless controlled by a highly authoritarian dictatorship which exerts its will through deadly force.
“Language justice” is the factions that some of our founders warned about.
Ideas that are so idiotic only an academic could have come up with them.
Yes, Post-Modernism is just that idiotic, and comes from academic frauds.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Spanish the language spoken by the original colonizing oppressors of the New World?
Was Columbus Bi-Lingual?
Hater.
Yes – I don’t believe he sold his plan to the Spanish queen and commanded Spanish sailors in Italian.
“…nothing divides a society more quickly than being unable to communicate with each other…”
That’s the objective. It’s a feature, not a bug. The OG Marxists fractured their society along class lines; this is just a logical progression. Language, ethnicity, gender, reality. Trans the kids & confiscate them from parents who disagree. If you object to gay porn in school libraries, you’re literally Hitler. Will Thomas & his shlong were the U of Penn’s Female Athlete of the year. They WANT us at each others’ throats, the better to step in and mediate (read: regulate/control/suppress/subdue/step on/eradicate).
What he said in large capital letters.
Aquí se habla Inglés.