Plural Identities

I need you to pin me down

I've not been posting these past two weeks due to preparing for and then being in the US, first Research Triangle Park, Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina (my fourth visit) and then Deerfield, Illinois (both as glamorous as they sound). Yes, I did have my laptop (and free wireless, European hotels take note) but frankly what with jetlag, the time difference and training all day I was only just able to stay awake long enough to check e-mails most evenings, or else having an ice cold beer seemed more important than blogging.

One thing I finally pinpointed on the way out, thanks to an American Airlines stewardess, was a speech pattern which is prevalent in the US, but is likely to have a fingernails scraping on the blackboard effect in the UK.  The air stewardess announced that they were about to start selling duty free on board, and if anyone wanted pay by credit card then "we need you to show another form of ID".  I don't think I am speaking just for myself if I say that when I hear that someone "needs me to" do something, without a please or a conditional tense attached, I immediately want to do the opposite.  A British air stewardess would have said "please could you show another form of ID." 

I asked the various American participants in the training sessions why this speech pattern is so prevalent, and they came to the conclusion that it is because in the US, if you want someone to do something, you have to make sure they understand it is a requirement, otherwise they won't do it.

I tried Googling to see if anyone else has commented on this speech pattern and found that apparently in the film "You, Me and Dupree" there is a line "I need you to do a solid".  I shall remember this each time I hear this kind of request again, and I will no doubt be looking suitably British and constipated in response.

Zero gero

Apologies if this requires some kind of Japanese Windows Media Player download to see it, but if you can, I can recommend this Japanese TV ad featuring some cute frogs (click on the left hand most image　on the page I've linked to), which has some tenuous connection to this blog being about integration and language and stuff but basically is just an ad with cute frogs.

Speak English dammit

I've been mulling over an article by Zia Haider Rahman in the Sunday Times last month where  he states:

The financial cost [of translating official documents into other languages] is bad enough, but there is a wider problem about the confused signals we are sending to immigrant communities. We are telling them they don’t have to learn English, let alone integrate. Worse, by insulating them linguistically we have created communities that are now incubators for Islamo-fascism.

He goes on to talk about Brick Lane in London "where English is a foreign language".  I went there on Wednesday this week, partly for nostalgia as I lived in Bethnal Green for six years but also to visit the revamped Museum of Childhood with my son.  Somewhat depressingly, the area hadn't changed much in the seven years since we moved to Brighton, in the sense that there are still many derelict and collapsing buildings and cheap and tacky shops. The trendification of Hoxton has not spread and the City still seems to stop abruptly at Spitalfields. I would be tempted to say that it is good that it is still an authentically working class area, and still has more spirit to it than Acton which I had the misfortune to walk through a couple of weeks ago, but I think this would rightly be classified as bourgeois "nostalgie de la boue". 

The only change seemed to be that Bethnal Green Road had become more Bengali in terms of the types of shops.  The main signs in the Museum of Childhood were in Bengali and I'm guessing Somali, as well as English but the exhibit descriptions were all in English.

Here in North Carolina I noticed that when I rang the helpline to get my wireless connection working, there was a 'press 2' for Spanish speaking support. As a private sector company I am sure they would say this is just good customer service.

So I wonder if the US government authorities spend much time or money on translating documents into Spanish and it seems that they do.

The statistics quoted on the above page are quite startling:

There are over 20 million people in the U.S who speak English less than “very well.” This includes over 7 million people who classify themselves as speaking English “not well” and 3 million who don’t speak English at all.

The justification for translating documents into Spanish is:

Providing individuals who aren’t yet proficient in English with easy-to-find government information online encourages their participation in and inclusion into American society.

Which is difficult to argue with, but I suppose the question that Zia Haider Rahman's article raises is, when does this kind of assistance stop helping integration and start becoming a hindrance?  As he says, it cannot be right that a Bengali woman who has lived in the UK for 22 years still cannot speak English.  In the US there is an English language test for becoming a US citizen.  Rahman is suggesting that it becomes a compulsory requirement in the UK too, and I'm beginning to think he's right.