BBC team ends US Spanish journey

[TechBear_Seattle]

This is a pretty interesting story and provides yet another example of the foreign media giving proof to the lies of the American media.

BBC team ends US Spanish journey
Over the past two weeks, Jose Baig and Carlos Ceresole from the Spanish American service of the BBC travelled from the east to the west coast of the US, speaking only Spanish.

Their aim was to get a flavour of life among Spanish speakers in the country.

Jose Baig reflects on some of their experiences:

You are in a town in Florida and you decide to check who speaks Spanish there. Easy enough, you would think. How many people do you think you need to ask?

It took us 16 people and 50 minutes to find someone who spoke Spanish, as a second language.

The article continues at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6943980.stm

[knowledgeispwr]

1. Interesting story, thanks.

They may have had an easier time finding a Spanish-speaker in Florida had they trekked across a more southern part of the state, heh.

The story looks interesting and I'm going to check out their blog.

The article reminded me how las Academias de la Lengua Española (official institutes of the Spanish language) are touting that the growth of Spanish in the US and about how there will be supposedly 100 million Hispanic Spanish-speakers in the US by 2050, plus more non-Hispanic Spanish-speakers. I think they (along with the reactionary English Only crowd) are underestimating how much immigrants' grandkids tend to become monolingual English-speakers in the US.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. That gibes with my experience

When I lived in a small town in Oregon that had a lot of Latino residents, most of the very recent immigrants and the migrant workers spoke only Spanish, although there was a high-profile murder case in which the defendant, a migrant worker, spoke only Mixtec, a Native American language.

The second generation, however, spoke English without an accent.

The Spanish professors at the college where I taught reported getting students with Spanish names (as Spanish as Armando Perez) who were studying the language in college because they'd never spoken it to any significant degree at home.