Page 75 - Essencials of Sociology

48 CHAPTER 2 Culture

Cultural Diversity in the United States

Miami—Continuing Controversy
over Language

Immigration from Cuba and other Spanish-speaking countries
has been so vast that most residents of Miami are Latinos.
Half of Miami’s 400,000 residents have trouble speaking
English. Sixty percent of Miamians speak English at home.
Controversy erupted when a debate among the candidates
for mayor of Miami was held only in Spanish. Many English-
only speakers say that not being able to speak Spanish is a
handicap to getting work. “They should learn Spanish,” some
reply. As Pedro Falcon, an immigrant from Nicaragua, said, English at home, but also speaking German when
“Miami is the capital of Latin America. The population speaks visiting their parents. For the most part, the third gen-
Spanish.” eration knew German only as “that language” that their
This pinpoints the problem, as the English-speakers see grandparents spoke.
it: Miami, they stress, is in the United States, not in Latin The same thing is happening with the Latino immigrants,
America. but at a slower pace. Spanish is
Controversy over immi- being kept alive longer because
grants and language isn’t Mexico borders the United
new. The millions of Germans States, and there is constant
who moved to the United traffic between the countries.
States in the 1800s brought The continuing migration from
their language with them. Not Mexico and other Spanish-
only did they hold religious speaking countries also feeds
services in German but they the language.
also opened schools where If Germany bordered the
the students were taught in United States, there would still
German; published German- be a lot of German spoken
language newspapers; and here.
spoke German at home, in Sources: Based on Kent and Lalasz
the stores, and in the taverns. 2007; Salomon 2008; Costantini
Some of their English-speaking Mural on Calle Ocho in Miami 2011; Nelson 2013.
neighbors didn’t like this one bit.
“Why don’t those Germans assimilate?” they wondered. “Just
whose side would they fight on if we had a war?”
This question was answered with the participation of Ger- For Your Consideration
man Americans in two world wars. It was even a general de- ↑ Do you think that Miami points to the future of the
scended from German immigrants (Eisenhower) who led the United States? Like the grandchildren of the European im-
armed forces that defeated Hitler. migrants who lost the ability to speak their grandparent’s
What happened to all this German language? The native language, when do you think the grandchildren of
first generation of immigrants spoke German almost ex- Mexican and South American immigrants will be unable to
clusively. The second generation assimilated, speaking speak Spanish?

also allows us to establish underlying purposes for our activities. In short, language is the
basis of culture.
Language and Perception: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
In the 1930s, two anthropologists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, were intrigued
when they noticed that the Hopi Indians of the southwestern United States had no
words to distinguish the past, the present, and the future. English, in contrast—as
well as French, Spanish, Swahili, and other languages—carefully distinguishes these
three time frames. From this observation, Sapir and Whorf began to think that words
might be more than labels that people attach to things. Eventually, they concluded that