For all the fuss being made and walls being built over issues of immigration the outlook has been pretty dim. And nothing builds communities or tears them apart quite like language. We see it all the time with arguments over Spanish and ESL in the US, but we’re not the only ones fighting over it. In Bolivia, for example, the government is trying to initiate education reforms that require teachers and government employees to speak the indigenous language (i.e. Aymara or Quechua) when in rural indigenous areas…and they’ve had threats of civil war over this and other proposed reforms.
With all this in mind, you can imagine why I was impressed with what I saw on the bus yesterday morning. Over my shoulder I heard two little boys saying, “es-STRAY-ya” over and over, with their mom prompting “es-STRAY-la”. Then they switched to “es-CWAY-la”. They were saying it over and over, so I glanced back to see what was going on and was surprised they were not a Latino family.
“Escuela” in Spanish means “school” and “Estrella” means “star” and though the mom was pronouncing it incorrectly and obviously didn’t speak Spanish, she had a book out and was teaching her young sons the language.
I love that.
2 comments:
And I love you.
I am working hard on my German. I am taking German 1 with the kids and it is so much fun learning a language in the country that it is spoken in.
I don't trust fer'ners, and I don't trust their fer'n languages. You should I have told those people that they are in AMERICA and they need to speak AMERICAN.
Can I have an AMEN?
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