OOPS! Wrong language!

[Jamie (K)]

On Friday I was in a restaurant I often go to in a poor Mexican neighborhood of Detroit. In the booth next to me was a family that I thought looked very typical of working-class Mexicans, in their appearance, their clothing, and even the husband's haircut. They spoke to the waitresses in what sounded to me like flawless Mexican Spanish. There was a Mexican singer practicing in the restaurant for several minutes, and the husband and wife appeared to be very moved by the song lyrics and requested songs that they wanted to hear.

I went to the lavatory, and as I came back, the couple's toddler son was staring at me with grave seriousness. I smiled at him, and the father cheerfully told me, "He doesn't speak English. He only understands Bengali."

BENGALI?!

BENGALI?!

The father insisted that the family was from Bangladesh, but I didn't believe him, until he talked some more and I realized his accent in English really was Bengali.

So how did this man and his whole family become "Mexican"? He told me that he'd come to the United States several years ago and somehow landed in a neighborhood we call Mexican Town. There most people speak Spanish, so that's the language he primarily learned. In fact, he had a lot of trouble understanding English: At one point I asked him if most people in Bangladesh are Muslim, or if there are a lot of people belonging to other religions there. He asked me to repeat my question, and when I did, he replied with a smile, "My other wife is still in Bangladesh!"

This is the first time I've ever seen this phenomenon. A man comes to the US, settles in an ethnic ghetto, and learns the language and takes on the culture of that ghetto instead of English. And it's not his own nationality's ghetto! There's a Bengali enclave not far from where we were, but he settled among the Mexicans. Now he's almost indistinguishable from the Mexicans who live around him, but because he learned the "wrong" language, he's stuck working at bad jobs for crummy pay, because he can't speak English well enough to work outside the neighborhood.

[Torsten]

Hi Jamie,

Why do you think this man and his family chose to live in a Mexican neighborhood and to learn primarily Spanish instead of English? I mean, they could have easily surround themselves with English speakers and get exposed to English language media. It's perfectly fine to learn Spanish but why do so in the US and why learn Spanish in the US before you learn English? Somehow this doesn't make much sense, does it?
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[Jamie (K)]

I don't understand it either. The most normal thing for him to do would have been to move to the Bengali neighborhood and begin his integration into American society from there, with the community support of his compatriots. I have a strange feeling that he didn't fit in with the other Bengalis or didn't like their old-world lifestyle, and he moved away from them. The Mexican neighborhood is probably the nearest safe neighborhood where the rents are cheap enough for a new immigrant to afford if he doesn't have money from home. It may be that he liked and felt more comfortable with the Mexicans than he did with the Anglos, so he just integrated there.

I've met another person who went through something like this. She was a Jewish Algerian-French girl who landed in an ESL class in high school with mostly Hispanics, liked them, made friends with them, and learned fluent Spanish before English. However, her case is different, because in a couple of years she did learn English to a very sophisticated level.

[Prezbucky]

I've been embarrassed before, trying to test my Spanish on someone who appeared to be Latino but did not, in fact, speak Spanish.

How embarrassing!
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[Prezbucky]

...at which point I fall all over myself trying to apologize -- I do not want to hurt the person's feelings, or make him/her think I'm a racist who's poking fun, etc.
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[Ns]

[NinaZara]

From my experience, when you are away from your country, mixing with other foreigners gives you some sort of comfort. For instance, only another foreigner can understand another foreigner's feeling of missing home. Also, although they may have come from different countries, they can sometimes see things the same way that differs from the local people.

For example, one thing I noticed about Japanese students, they think it's cool when you get flying colours without 'looking' the effort. I hated it. I am used to the environment where it is natural to surround oneself with books. It is really shocking to me when I learned that they do not want people to know that they do study. Many foreign students can see this too. Foreign students are bookworms because we mainly have to read and revise more merely because we don't fully understand the lectures.

At first I thought, "Wow, these people are really smart." But then my Korean friend told me the truth, that Japanese students do study.

I think, foreigners get each other more than the locals.