It’s true: The majority of Coloradans are monolingual.
Some of my readers don’t believe it. Several contacted me to dispute a statement I made in last Tuesday’s column.
In it, I suggested that demonstrators taking part in Monday’s march should avoid chanting in Spanish.
I had said that foreign flags and use of Spanish would make many people view the march as a sign that immigrants do not want to assimilate.
I wrote that many Americans “don’t understand that a majority of the marchers are bilingual but prefer communicating in their dominant language. How could they understand, considering most of them are monolingual?”
Several readers were incensed.
One sent me this in an e-mail: “Oh, most of our country is bilingual, what high school didn’t require a second language, maybe we all didn’t feel like taking Spanish!”
A caller left this voice mail message: “It is ridiculous to say that most Americans do not speak any other languages. That is not true. Some of us are quite bilingual. Just because it’s not Spanish doesn’t mean we don’t speak other languages.”
But the statistics speak for themselves.
According to the 2000 Census, which offers the most recent data available relating to languages spoken in the state:
Only 4.8 percent of white people in the state speak more than one language. The rest, 95.2 percent, reported on their census forms that they speak only English.
Of those who speak another language, 60 percent of them (88,000 in all) are recent immigrants from Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Poland and other European countries.
When you do the math, it shakes down to this: About 2 percent of the native Caucasian population in Colorado speaks more than one language fluently.
Among blacks, the bilingual rate is 7.4 percent. The rest, 92.6 percent, speak only English. (It includes people who arrived here from African countries.)
For Asian-Americans, the bilingual rate is 71.7 percent and 28.3 percent speak only English. Obviously, their rate is higher because many have arrived in recent decades from Asia.
And among Latinos the bilingual rate is 55.8 percent, while 44.1 percent can speak only English.
I crunched other figures to find out how many Latinos in the state cannot speak English: 7 percent, or 45,800 people. Obviously, those immigrants need to learn English.
For anyone who has ever tried learning a second language, especially as an adult, you know how hard it is.
I don’t blame Americans for being monolingual, whether the native language is English, Spanish or Vietnamese. How could I be when I grew up struggling to speak Spanish, the native language of my parents?
I’m fluent now, but only because I spent three months in a language immersion program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I practice whenever I can, because I realize I am losing fluency.
More of us would be fluent if our society valued other languages.
In most public schools, children are not taught a second language in elementary school, despite research that proves it is easier for children to absorb a foreign language at that age and that learning a foreign language does not impede a child from mastering English.
In fact, a 2003 study conducted by a Dartmouth College researcher found that bilingual children have stronger cognitive skills than monolingual children. A 14-year study at George Mason University, also released in 2003, concluded that bilingual children outperformed monolingual children on standardized tests.
Two years in high school isn’t enough to become fluent. In a global economy, it behooves all Americans to be multilingual, just as long as we all speak a common language: English.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays in Scene and Sundays in Style. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
