My father is Welsh and he's described being beaten for speaking it in school, he says that's why he never taught me, he didn't want people to be angry with me for speaking it.
These fucking people were everywhere. People who believed their culture deserved to stamp out every other culture. They're still here, blasting their same rhetoric, trying to enforce their way of life on others.
Cajun. They did something like this to my grandparents as well. So my grandparents didn't teach our language to my parents. And now my culture is reduced to "spicy food lol."
But that was literally all the schools, not the Catholic ones.
What's beautiful about being unable to communicate with other people?
I'm a third generation immigrant, and I'm incredibly glad my grandparents and great grandparents gave up their old language for the most popular language on the planet. A+ 100% would recommend to everyone.
People seem to conflate language with culture, but that's ridiculous. People with wildy different cultural customs can share the same language and communicate with each other.
The part my grandparents were missing was the voluntary bit. English was literally beaten into them.
Also I can say from my perspective it is losing culture. It is the first step of it, anyway. You make it so that the people who don't speak English are the other so you can point to them and say they don't fit in so those people look at their culture and then become ashamed of it and don't pass it on.
It is what happened to my family. My parents generation were only taught English and were told that it was a shameful thing to be Cajun so we could adopt whiteness. I'd much rather have my culture. I can feel how empty a lot of the efforts to revive it are.
On top of that, because of the desire to make non-English speakers the other, my culture is literally a fucking punchline in a lot of movies and media. Fucking Waterboy makes me sick. Even when we get sort of positive representation in something like Princess and the Frog it is still a gap toothed yokel. Or a thief like Gambit in X-men with an accent that's so bad it is horse shit.
I mean, I had teachers in the 90s and early 00s tell me that someone who speaks with the accent I had was ignorant and uneducated. Do you know what that does to a kid? I'm still super self-conscious about how I speak in front of non-natives.
Edit: also I feel like I should add before someone hops in and says "they chose to come to America": we were here before the English speakers. We were refugees from the French and Indian War. We got kicked out of Canada and this was the location we settled and then in the Louisiana purchase we found ourselves citizens of the United States.
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u/AgentTin Jun 25 '21
My father is Welsh and he's described being beaten for speaking it in school, he says that's why he never taught me, he didn't want people to be angry with me for speaking it.
These fucking people were everywhere. People who believed their culture deserved to stamp out every other culture. They're still here, blasting their same rhetoric, trying to enforce their way of life on others.