bitter-girl :: musings

In case you were wondering why I was blogging in German yesterday, your answer can be found here. The English version of my post is located here.

From the Blogging in Tongues Against Ohio HB 477 site:

Ohio House Bill 477 seeks to make English the official language of Ohio. You can find legislative information about HB 477 here.

Blogging in Tongues opposes HB 477 for the reasons noted in our posts (here in English and at our home blogs in foreign languages).

The bill has passed the House but the State Senate committee involved is not scheduled to meet before the Senate schedule indicates summer recess will start. Here is a list of the Senate committee members to contact about your feelings on the bill.

The participating blogs have a combined readership of well-over 10,000 unique visitors daily.

Which blogs? Here are links to all of them, and the languages they were blogging in for the project.

• American Pink Collar (French)
• Bad American (Polish)
• bitter-girl :: musings (German)
• Blogesque (Korean)
• Blue Bexley (Dutch)
• Blue Ohioan (Korean)
• Bring Ohio Home (Czech)
• Bring Ohio Home (German)
• Buckeye State Blog (Italian)
• Glass City Jungle (Hungarian)
• Gloria Ferris (Spanish)
• Ohio Daily Blog (Croatian)
• Pho’s Akron Pages (Vietnamese)
• Plunderbund (Redneck)
• Rowsey Blog (Spanish)
• The Chief Source (Spanish) at The Point
• The Daily Bellwether (French)
• Tim Ferris (French)
• Writes Like She Talks (Portuguese)

As someone who trained to go into the foreign service, interned for the State Department in Germany, held an ultra-competitive Defense Department-funded strategic languages fellowship in the Czech Republic and who isn’t — in my own opinion, anyway — a complete ass, I know full well the benefits of multilingualism. My first real job out of college at a software company didn’t come knocking at my door because of my mad computer skillz, it came because I spoke multiple foreign languages well enough to help support the European clients who were using our product. In fact, I took the phone call from my dorm in Prague and had the job in hand before I even landed back in the USA!

The reason I ended up on the Berlin Wall (literally) New Year’s Eve 1999 and rang in the new millennium with bottles of champagne there instead of in South Euclid, Ohio? Because the firm for which I was consulting needed to get a mission-critical piece of Y2K-fixing hardware through customs at Frankfurt airport and figured that, speaking German, I’d have a much easier time talking my way out of a jam if one happened.

My language abilities have been nothing but a help, a CV-booster and an opportunity to have a different perspective on the world. I find the English-only movement to be incredibly xenophobic, short-sighted and — let’s be brutally honest — astonishingly stupid given Ohio’s declining economy. When I read that a German solar power firm was considering Cleveland for major investment, the first thing I thought is “wow, interesting job, I should see if they’re hiring for anything good.” You know what? I can pretty much guarantee that firm would be 100% more likely to hire me than someone who only speaks English.

It’s time to face reality. We live in a global economy. Hell, if I had the time and money right now, I’d be lining up somewhere to learn Mandarin Chinese. I look at a show like Firefly or the movie version, Serenity and I think “yup, that’s probably on its way soon enough, start studying now.” (Everyone is English/Chinese bilingual in the future Joss Whedon envisioned, from the highest level of society on down). Embrace the future, don’t cling to exclusionary behavior. It’s not helping us become more competitive, that’s for sure. I think about a conversation I had with my future mother-in-law recently. She’s Hungarian, so’s her husband, and my boyfriend is fully bilingual. She stops mid-sentence and says, very seriously, that she has one request if we have children…

(that we raise them Catholic? yeah, she brought that up, too…let’s not go there)

What gave her Serious Face as she said it? “You’ll let them learn Hungarian, right?”

“Let”? Hell, I’m the one who’s been lecturing Tamas about the value of teaching them Hungarian AND the other languages I speak / possibly sending them to the German-language school on the west side, etc etc. When my kids are taking the jobs from yours someday, think back on this.

Also: YEAH.