A Misguided Language Barrier: Who We Should Focus on Communicating With

Before I begin this rant, I’d like everyone to know and recognize that I am NOT racist in any shape or form. I would greatly appreciate that no one will even say that I am. That would be lying ladies and gentlemen. Now with that said, on with the rant!

There is one problem here in the good old US of A that deeply bothers me – the language barrier that is commonly found between many of our citizens. Why is this? Well, it’s very simple. This is because some masses of people coming to the US speaking languages other than English decided not to learn it. I’m not ragging on anyone that is just visiting our country. If a group of foreigners are just visiting the US for a week and use a translator, that’s fine, but when foreigners come to live here, not knowing or even bothering to learn English, well, that is a problem. I was under the impression that the US was founded by ENGLISH speaking people, not Spanish, Italian, Polish, German, or any other foreign language. English was the language this country was founded on and there should be absolutely NO debates about what our primary language should be!

It’s gotten so bad here that our schools are requiring students to take a foreign language class. Well, that’s all fine and dandy if every student in the USA is planning to travel to a foreign country. The point I’m trying to make is that, other than our primary language being English, is that we Americans should be concerned with learning one specific language other than English…

Sign Language!

The problem with society is that there is a great mass of people that do not realize how important it is to learn Sign Language. Maybe it’s because they don’t have experience with the deaf. I mean, I didn’t even realize it greatly until I started college, where in at least one of my classes, there is an interpreter needed for that one deaf student in the class. According to some statistics I found, there are over 20 million people in America alone that are deaf/hard of hearing, and over half of them use Sign Language to communicate. Okay, so they can communicate with each other, but how would they know what non-deaf people are saying? The same way we know what a Spanish or Italian person is saying – we learn the language or use a translator (who I might point out had to actually learn sign language).

So here’s my main point, the citizens of the USA should be more focused on learning to communicate with deaf people rather than foreigners speaking a different language. I’m not saying that learning other languages is not important, but learning Sign Language is just a little more important because deaf people are incapable of hearing these other languages, so there is no point in them learning to speak them. I think there should be some kind of respect between everyone in the world to learn the country’s primary language if they are going to live there, and that the people of the country should be focused on learning the language used to communicate with those who can’t hear.

Well, that’s all that’s on my mind. I wish more people read this…

Until my next rant! (:

-Tabby