La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for August 14, 2022

Americans also spoke Swedish, Dutch, French, and German when first getting colonized last I remember. (And, wow, a 20-year-old strip when you see the final panel’s copyright.)

Vaca Lalo ? Enjoy !

Went to work the polls in Florida, after flight, finding hotel room, settling in, I had to attend orientation. Dead tired, and had to listen to the speaker say a sentence, then wait while it was repeated in Spanish. Floridian sitting next to me said that was how all public meetings had to be handled in Florida, since so many people didn’t speak English. It made a half hour meeting into an hour long meeting and was so mind bogglingly annoying and I doubt that anyone really got much out of it. At least, that explains why Florida is such a mess. Half of the people can’t communicate with the other half. If you are planning to live in a country, you have a responsibility to learn to communicate with the general population. My grandfather taught himself English, while saving money for the trip, and spoke it well enough to make it through an interview and get the job the first week off the boat. All of our ancestors did it, even the earliest one. If you can’t be bothered to do that, it’s your problem and the rest of us shouldn’t have to accommodate you.

Guy is speaking Inglañol. Lots of English with plenty of Spanish thrown in.

English is an amalgam of many other languages.

¿Cual?

This is America, speak American.

Remove “in God we Trust” from money and put back e pluribus unum – out of many, one.

Puerto Ricans are American citizens from birth. I’d say that makes America a de facto bilingual nation. Much as Canada is. By the way, that means that there are NO Puerto Rican immigrants in the US. Those who move to the mainland from la isla are just moving around the country.

New artist? The characters are drawn differently.

If Americans took a closer look at our “Language” they would find out to their collective dismay that it is mostly a mishmash of other languages and that whether they like it or not we all know a bit of Spanish, French, Gaelic, Italian, German, Latin, Native American, Hebrew, Arabic and even Indo-European! And yes, of course the one for which it’s named… English!

In Florida, the native language is Seminole.

English will continue to be the dominant language in Western culture precisely because it “eats other languages for lunch”. “Spanglish” is a description for overlapping language usage and not really a specific dialect. New York Puerto Rican Spanglish is very different from Los Angeles barrio Spanglish.

France has an official policy of preserving the “purity” of the language, resulting in an official language that is stilted, bulky and often incomprehensible in its circumvention of adopted words from other languages.

People need to communicate in the language that works for them.

If you worry about your employees secretly making fun of you, don’t worry; they do, but so do the English-speaking ones. :)

Mr. Alcaraz, I love La Cucaracha, but Spanglish is not the unofficial language. Maybe in LA, but come up to the Delta, Vallejo and Stockton and you’ll hear Tagalog, the language of the Philippines. There are neighborhoods in Santa Rosa where you’ll hear Eritrean. In Bayside and Flushing in NYC it will be Korean (a big change in my life time). There are dozens of languages from all over the world spoken in the USA.

Cuco would probably say that, but all due respect, Spanish speakers are not the only immigrants.

In what world does it make sense to not learn a second language and be exactly like the immigrants you seem to hate so much. It seems like if you expect them to learn a second language you should lead by example!

English is not some superior language. In fact, it is phonetically ridiculous and difficult to learn because so many words are homonyms and homophones. If I were to choose a language for everyone to know, English wouldn’t have made the top ten. Nevertheless, it is the common language that most citizens of the USA speak. No one is required to learn it if they don’t feel the need to do so. However, if they make that choice not to learn it, they are the ones who should be inconvenienced by that choice, not the rest of us.

Happen to agree with Diane Lee above, even being one o’ them Flaming Libs.

Bilingual in people is good, very good.

Bilingual in countries, not so much. It encourages Little Havanas and the equivalents in all major cities and separatist movements. It is not good to encourage, not force, immigrants to learn the language, along with some of the culture (works both ways), and civic laws and responsibilities. It also encourages and facilitates separatist movements and enclaves.

There should be NO requirements for bi- and multi-lingual ballots. I am all for making it easy to vote, but minimal requirements are fine. NO ONE is disenfranchised by english only ballots. And, contracts should be english only.

Note: I have NO problem with individual businesses/corporations advertising, hiring bilinguals, etc., as part of their business practices, ESPECIALLY having hospitals and medical practitioners having personnel who can communicate with their clients. Govt. agencies, too.

Yeah,. By GoG my grandpa got of the boat and learned English fluently in two days before he left Ellis Island.

Making a language official doesn’t ban other languages, but only requires that certain things are done in that language. Usually this means government communication has to be in English. It might mean that all contracts have to be in English as well. It might mean that signs in shops or commercial organisations must also be in English. But often that is it. It doesn’t force people to speak or use the official language for other purposes. It doesn’t ban non-English language versions of official documents, contracts and signs from existing.

In fact, you can make more than one language official. Many countries require that all government communication occur in all official languages. So they should set the rule. English as the official language, and any area where more than x% of people speak a language as their first language, then the official documents should also be in that language.