Monday, November 20, 2006
My bilingual acquaintances
New York is full of people who speak our English but are just as at home in Spanish. I keep meeting them. In the elevator of the building where I'm staying, the other person, a young man, looked as if he could have been Mexican. I asked if he spoke was bilingual. He answered in English, then on the way out volunteered, "I'm from Puerto Rico."
In line at a used book sale at one of the branch libraries, I heard Spanish used intermittently with English behind me. After five minutes I turned around and said something in Spanish. Got in a conversation with the couple in English. Turned out she has been in NYC for 22 years, her partner (Iranian) for "much longer." We talked about Mexico for a long time (the line was slow in moving). The man especially was very uptodate. I enjoyed being able to talk with people who knew something about the country! When we got onto the topic of migration, the man said the reason for the loss of jobs in the Midwest is not Mexicans but the competition from China. I brought up the number of imprisoned or dead journalists in Mexico. He said, Mexico isn't the worst in Latin America. I asked who was. He said Cuba.
The superintendent of the apartment building where I live speaks Spanish with his family but idiomatic unaccented English with the workmen he knows.
Yesterday I came back on the train from Princeton, was sitting across from a darkskinned young man who turned out to have come from Peru when he was twelve, the adopted son of missionary parents. He goes back every four or five years. When I said I'd heard Peruvians speak the purest Spanish in the Western hemisphere, he looked surprised, said he'd never met "anyone else" who knew that. His English was perfect, his courtesy Latin American in style.
I'm deciding New York is an island of polylingualism in our mostly monolingual country. I hear many people speaking languages I don't understand as I walk down the street.
In line at a used book sale at one of the branch libraries, I heard Spanish used intermittently with English behind me. After five minutes I turned around and said something in Spanish. Got in a conversation with the couple in English. Turned out she has been in NYC for 22 years, her partner (Iranian) for "much longer." We talked about Mexico for a long time (the line was slow in moving). The man especially was very uptodate. I enjoyed being able to talk with people who knew something about the country! When we got onto the topic of migration, the man said the reason for the loss of jobs in the Midwest is not Mexicans but the competition from China. I brought up the number of imprisoned or dead journalists in Mexico. He said, Mexico isn't the worst in Latin America. I asked who was. He said Cuba.
The superintendent of the apartment building where I live speaks Spanish with his family but idiomatic unaccented English with the workmen he knows.
Yesterday I came back on the train from Princeton, was sitting across from a darkskinned young man who turned out to have come from Peru when he was twelve, the adopted son of missionary parents. He goes back every four or five years. When I said I'd heard Peruvians speak the purest Spanish in the Western hemisphere, he looked surprised, said he'd never met "anyone else" who knew that. His English was perfect, his courtesy Latin American in style.
I'm deciding New York is an island of polylingualism in our mostly monolingual country. I hear many people speaking languages I don't understand as I walk down the street.
Labels: bilingualism, New York City, NYC street talk, polylingualism, Spanish
