French,why should you learn it?
Learning Spanish has become quite controversial, mainly because of the large number of Spanish speaking immigrant who are entering the U.S. illegally. (that we know of) in recent year it has jumped drastically. Some think illegal immigration would get worse if Americans learn to speak Spanish. The common belief is that if they were forced to learn to speak English to survive in society the immigration issue would rapidly evaporate on its own.
The simple fact of the matter is that Americans are extremely arrogant when it comes to their language. That English is very much a universal language has caused them to go into a slow descent into complacency. Nearly every other nation around the globe demands that its youth learn in school to speak (at the very least) English and their native language; you actually would discover, if you visited a European grade school, that the students there spend a lot of time learning to perfect their own language and to speak the languages of the countries that border them.
In order to interact with neighbors, both at home and abroad, anyone studying in France also learned to speak both French and English along with knowing the fundamentals of Italian, German and Spanish, ensuring their being able to fit into the workforce.
Americans haven’t had to do this because almost every foreign country teaches English to its students. It is not difficult to find someone who speaks English anywhere you go in a foreign country. In essence, learning your neighbors’ language is a practice that has been dispensed with. By rights Americans should learn to speak both French and Spanish, in order to give them a leg up on doing business with their closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada; however, this has been spurned in the arrogant belief that anyone wishing to have any interaction, whether it be for financial or personal gain, in the United States must learn to speak English in order to do so, as English is the language of America.
Until just a few years ago, US citizens didn’t even think of the United States as having an “official” language. The United States is a blend of peoples, and its first settlers traveled here speaking every tongue from every corner of the globe. Indeed, in many areas of the U.S., this is more than obvious.
The second language of Louisiana is considered to be French, likewise in the South West and Florida Spanish is the other offical language. Throughout much of the mid-west, textbooks were printed in the German language until World War II, when a national disgust with anything German, on the heels of Hitler’s siege of terror, caused these textbooks to be reprinted in English, while the German language gradually was pushed away into oblivion.
In view of the diversity of languages in the United States’ history, it is difficult to fathom where their aversion to the Spanish language’s presence stems from.