CSU: Immigrants should speak German at home, CDU says LOLwhat ?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

If anyone ever tells me "BUT EUROPE IS MORE LEFT-WING THAN MERICA" ever again, I think I may simply print out this thread and staple it to their face.

[ingemann]

If anyone ever tells me "BUT EUROPE IS MORE LEFT-WING THAN MERICA" ever again, I think I may simply print out this thread and staple it to their face.

Three things:

First; making any conclusion from one thread is ridiculous.

Second; this is not you fault, but talking about Europe as one cultural political construction is even more ridiculous.

Third; defining left and right out from opinion on immigration is really really weird, it would place some objectivists on the left and some socialists on the right. There are left wing, centrist and right wing argument in favour and against immigration and assimilation of minorities. Yes I know liberal mean left left wing in USA, but that doesn't necessary make left wingers liberal other places, and this is really more of communitarian/liberal debate than any kind of right/left debate.

[afleitch]

There is a difference between speaking a native language at home and not being able to speak any other. For many women in particular, their perceived domestic role negates the need not only to speak the countries language at home but to learn it at all. A former work colleague of mine is third generation Asian. His mother is second generation. She cannot speak English. When his baby daughter stopped breathing at home, she could not communicate with the ambulance so had to phone him to call it. He had to make use, very quickly of our office multi-phone to conduct a two way conversation with the emergency crew. In retrospect, he acknowledged that his mother was never encouraged to learn English. Indeed, whenever his father and older brother wished to speak about issues they didn’t want his mum to know about, or even about her, they spoke in English at home which they would do frequently. It was at times, emotionally abusive. His older brother’s wife is from Pakistan and can’t speak English because ‘she doesn’t need to’. Her brother is over here to study it.

It’s all very well to assume that everyone has command of their native and adopted tongue but many do not. Knowing the local language is a very powerful thing and in patriarchal and abusive structures can be used as a wedge to distance women.

[swl]

Sure, but the speed of this transformation depends on the size and status of the language of the host country. If it is a world language like English, what you describe will be the case. Language change happens slower and more reluctantly if the  switch is to a minor language which isn't useful (or of limited use) outside the host country.

True, I have been in the Netherlands for 4 years and I still speak almost no Dutch, because I can survive with my extremely basic level. On the other hand I lived in Italy for six months only and my Italian is better than my Dutch, because no one spoke English there.

Many people move to a new country thinking it will only be for a short-time, and then you happen to stay 10, 20 years or your whole life...

[Lurker]

Sure, but the speed of this transformation depends on the size and status of the language of the host country. If it is a world language like English, what you describe will be the case. Language change happens slower and more reluctantly if the  switch is to a minor language which isn't useful (or of limited use) outside the host country.

True, I have been in the Netherlands for 4 years and I still speak almost no Dutch, because I can survive with my extremely basic level. On the other hand I lived in Italy for six months only and my Italian is better than my Dutch, because no one spoke English there.

Many people move to a new country thinking it will only be for a short-time, and then you happen to stay 10, 20 years or your whole life...

Have you made no attempt to learn the language? I never understood why people would not want to learn the language of the country they live in (unless they're only living there for a few months or so).

[YL]

The problem in Germany is that quite a few second or third generation immigrants are fluent in neither language.

So what do they speak?

[Beezer]

Very poor German. I.e., most of the stuff that foreigners hate (der, die, das, ein, einen, einem etc.) causes major headaches for them as well.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Sure, but the speed of this transformation depends on the size and status of the language of the host country. If it is a world language like English, what you describe will be the case. Language change happens slower and more reluctantly if the  switch is to a minor language which isn't useful (or of limited use) outside the host country.

True, I have been in the Netherlands for 4 years and I still speak almost no Dutch, because I can survive with my extremely basic level. On the other hand I lived in Italy for six months only and my Italian is better than my Dutch, because no one spoke English there.

Many people move to a new country thinking it will only be for a short-time, and then you happen to stay 10, 20 years or your whole life...

Have you made no attempt to learn the language? I never understood why people would not want to learn the language of the country they live in (unless they're only living there for a few months or so).

I agree with you. Although I did the same thing as swl. Spent a year in the Netherlands and learnt, in effect, no Dutch. I feel rather embarrassed about that actually. But it is very easy to do...

[politicus]

Sure, but the speed of this transformation depends on the size and status of the language of the host country. If it is a world language like English, what you describe will be the case. Language change happens slower and more reluctantly if the  switch is to a minor language which isn't useful (or of limited use) outside the host country.

True, I have been in the Netherlands for 4 years and I still speak almost no Dutch, because I can survive with my extremely basic level. On the other hand I lived in Italy for six months only and my Italian is better than my Dutch, because no one spoke English there.

Many people move to a new country thinking it will only be for a short-time, and then you happen to stay 10, 20 years or your whole life...

Have you made no attempt to learn the language? I never understood why people would not want to learn the language of the country they live in (unless they're only living there for a few months or so).

Its mostly a cost/benefit question.

An extreme example: Filipinos and Thais working in Greenland never learn Greenlandic, They can get by using basic English + gestures to begin with and then if they stay more than a couple of years they learn Danish, since most Greenlanders understand at least some basic Danish. Danes in Greenland do the same, even if they stay for decades.
Its a matter of how much time you need to invest and how useful the language is for you, both now and later on.

Greenlandic is one of the hardest languages to learn, it is only understood by 50.000 (+ partially understood by some Canadian Inuits). The investment is simply too big compared to the payoff.

In the case of Germanic languages and Anglophones, the investment in time and effort is much smaller, but the payoff is still relatively limited if everybody speaks English.

[Lurker]

Sure, but the speed of this transformation depends on the size and status of the language of the host country. If it is a world language like English, what you describe will be the case. Language change happens slower and more reluctantly if the  switch is to a minor language which isn't useful (or of limited use) outside the host country.

True, I have been in the Netherlands for 4 years and I still speak almost no Dutch, because I can survive with my extremely basic level. On the other hand I lived in Italy for six months only and my Italian is better than my Dutch, because no one spoke English there.

Many people move to a new country thinking it will only be for a short-time, and then you happen to stay 10, 20 years or your whole life...

Have you made no attempt to learn the language? I never understood why people would not want to learn the language of the country they live in (unless they're only living there for a few months or so).

I agree with you. Although I did the same thing as swl. Spent a year in the Netherlands and learnt, in effect, no Dutch. I feel rather embarrassed about that actually. But it is very easy to do...

Yes - though I understand it's different if you're only planning on staying for a year (particularly if you are studying).
I can't really imagining living in another country for a long time without learning the language though - even if  English was the primary language at my workplace. Just socially and culturally, I would think you lose a lot by not being able to speak the native language.

[Lurker]

Very poor German. I.e., most of the stuff that foreigners hate (der, die, das, ein, einen, einem etc.) causes major headaches for them as well.

Is that really true for third generation immigrants as well?
I wouldn't be surprised that they had their own sociolect/slang - but not knowing basic grammar is a different matter. Something must really have gone wrong in Germany's integration policies.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Sure, but the speed of this transformation depends on the size and status of the language of the host country. If it is a world language like English, what you describe will be the case. Language change happens slower and more reluctantly if the  switch is to a minor language which isn't useful (or of limited use) outside the host country.

True, I have been in the Netherlands for 4 years and I still speak almost no Dutch, because I can survive with my extremely basic level. On the other hand I lived in Italy for six months only and my Italian is better than my Dutch, because no one spoke English there.

Many people move to a new country thinking it will only be for a short-time, and then you happen to stay 10, 20 years or your whole life...

Have you made no attempt to learn the language? I never understood why people would not want to learn the language of the country they live in (unless they're only living there for a few months or so).

I agree with you. Although I did the same thing as swl. Spent a year in the Netherlands and learnt, in effect, no Dutch. I feel rather embarrassed about that actually. But it is very easy to do...

Yes - though I understand it's different if you're only planning on staying for a year (particularly if you are studying).
I can't really imagining living in another country for a long time without learning the language though - even if  English was the primary language at my workplace. Just socially and culturally, I would think you lose a lot by not being able to speak the native language.

I completely agree with you - and not just because I would have liked to have avoided the embarrassment of saying repeatedly "I'm sorry, I can't speak Dutch".

[ag]

If anything, forcing people to speak the language they speak badly at home will make their children's speaking it worse. If a child constantly hears spoken language with a strong accent/incorrect grammar, etc., s/he may pick those up. If the "badly-spoken German" transmits across generations, it might be a sign of too much German being spoken at home: it might be a dialect emerging, perhaps, afrikaans-style. In that case, if you care that second-generation kids speak better German, you should, probably, discourage their parents from speaking German in front of them.

[ag]

How did this thread go from encouraging immigrants to speak German as often as they can (not unusual for a center-right big-tent party that polls 50% and wants to keep that level) to Jews ?

If you do not see how, and why any such thread would inevitably get to Jews, you should read up on Austrian history.

And, BTW, I now know why Czechs used to hate Germans so much.

[Tender Branson]

How did this thread go from encouraging immigrants to speak German as often as they can (not unusual for a center-right big-tent party that polls 50% and wants to keep that level) to Jews ?

If you do not see how, and why any such thread would inevitably get to Jews, you should read up on Austrian history.

And, BTW, I now know why Czechs used to hate Germans so much.

Inevitably ? Not really, it was just 1 poster. There's no need to discuss Jewish people in a thread like this which is about encouraging integration and not the historic use of force or purging of a religious group. That's quite the difference. And there's no need to establish a knee-jerk connection to the Holocaust all the time, once a German-party brings up an immigration topic for debate. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong opponent of all Nazi-ism (as you know), but the CSU-debate here is not much different to the debate of other European (or other) center-right parties and they are not attacked with the Nazi-cudgel either. The CSU is a huge party that needs to appeal to a lot of different segments, so it's better to throw the Nazi-cudgel when it involves the parties that are actually the problem and could turn into a real problem: the NPD and the AfD.

[swl]

Have you made no attempt to learn the language? I never understood why people would not want to learn the language of the country they live in (unless they're only living there for a few months or so).

It's not that I don't want, I wish I could speak Dutch but it costs time and money, so I went periodically until I had something better to do. And universities here are very international so it was easy to have a large social network without speaking Dutch.
In Italy they had free but mandatory Italian lessons, here you have to pay and its optional, so...

Also Dutch people are very self-deprecating about their language, they keep talking about how useless and ugly it is. I suggested at my university that they should give free mandatory lessons, but I think they are worried it would harm their international attractiveness.
It's true that many foreign students choose the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, etc specifically because there is no need to learn the local language (see this thread: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=202620.0).

Amusingly, Dutch peoples are quite nice to French, Italians, British, Americans etc who don't speak Dutch, but they resent Germans who do the same. Since they are neighboring countries there are many Germans who come without speaking neither Dutch or English and address them directly in German. Dutchies really hate that.

[ilikeverin]

If anything, forcing people to speak the language they speak badly at home will make their children's speaking it worse. If a child constantly hears spoken language with a strong accent/incorrect grammar, etc., s/he may pick those up. If the "badly-spoken German" transmits across generations, it might be a sign of too much German being spoken at home: it might be a dialect emerging, perhaps, afrikaans-style. In that case, if you care that second-generation kids speak better German, you should, probably, discourage their parents from speaking German in front of them.

No, that's not quite how it works.  Kids are crazy language regularizers.  They take whatever they've given and try to make it systematic.  That's how creoles are formed; kids hear a pidgin (a simple way to communicate between, say, traders), desperately seek any patterns they can, and then turn it into a fully-fledged language of its own.  In a situation where somehow the parents were the only input to the kids, you'd expect the kids to regularize whatever the parents were doing.  It might be different from the standard language (I mean, Tok Pisin definitely isn't English, and as you say Afrikaans is not Dutch), but it wouldn't be "bad" like second language speakers are sometimes "bad" (unsystematically irregular).

However, that assumes that parents are the main arbiter of how children speak, which is also mistaken.  Although parents in Western societies are often the first people who model how to use languages for children, that doesn't mean they determine everything.  This can probably be seen most easily in exceptional circumstances.  There are plenty of cultures around the world where parents hardly talk to children, yet the children learn language just fine... because they have peers and siblings speaking to them instead.  Another exceptional circumstance was the child-rearing habits of the English upper class.  Kids were basically bundled off unceremoniously into the hands of successive lower-class caregivers until they reached an age where they could be shipped off to boarding school.  Parents were encouraged to ignore their children, so the kids' primary caregivers were these lower-class folks, who presumably spoke as such.  And who did they talk like?  Well... their parents.  Because you know who else sounded like their parents?  Their peers.

This is also true in terms of immigration.  My child language acquisition professor in undergrad was a Brazilian by birth.  Her English was good, but she was clearly accented, and some syntactic things in English were challenging for her; as she put it, her input to her daughter "was a deesaster".  Does her daughter also speak accented English?  No, of course not.  Nor does she speak exactly like her dad, who's a native speaker of English, but Canadian.  She talks like her Michigander friends at school.  Cultural spread isn't parent-to-child.  In fact, we'd probably find it kind of alarming if it was.  Imagine if all of us here had the computer skills and attitudes towards technology of our parents.  Would any of us be posting here?  Cultural spread is peer-to-peer; it just happens that there's usually a correlation between the attitudes of one's parents and one's peers.

As such, to the extent that non-Germans in Bavaria speak "worse" German, it's likely just a consequence of the segregation of non-Germans from Germans.  If the immigrant population were located such that the kids of immigrants had "native" German peers, it's likely that they'd become Germans in thought, deed, and speech.  Regardless of what happens at home, once they got out into the world and made some new friends at kindergarten, they'd quickly realize the seemly thing to do would be to speak German just like everyone around them.  Undoubtedly, this tendency towards clustering around the in-group isn't just the result of the attitudes of native Germans; I'm sure self-segregation plays a role, too.  But policies like this ridiculous farce of a proposal certainly do no favors for the ideas that they're supposedly promoting.  The best way to ensure a new group doesn't talk like you is to keep driving home the idea that they're not like you and not one of you.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

If anything, forcing people to speak the language they speak badly at home will make their children's speaking it worse. If a child constantly hears spoken language with a strong accent/incorrect grammar, etc., s/he may pick those up. If the "badly-spoken German" transmits across generations, it might be a sign of too much German being spoken at home: it might be a dialect emerging, perhaps, afrikaans-style. In that case, if you care that second-generation kids speak better German, you should, probably, discourage their parents from speaking German in front of them.

No, that's not quite how it works.  Kids are crazy language regularizers.  They take whatever they've given and try to make it systematic.  That's how creoles are formed; kids hear a pidgin (a simple way to communicate between, say, traders), desperately seek any patterns they can, and then turn it into a fully-fledged language of its own.  In a situation where somehow the parents were the only input to the kids, you'd expect the kids to regularize whatever the parents were doing.  It might be different from the standard language (I mean, Tok Pisin definitely isn't English, and as you say Afrikaans is not Dutch), but it wouldn't be "bad" like second language speakers are sometimes "bad" (unsystematically irregular).

However, that assumes that parents are the main arbiter of how children speak, which is also mistaken.  Although parents in Western societies are often the first people who model how to use languages for children, that doesn't mean they determine everything.  This can probably be seen most easily in exceptional circumstances.  There are plenty of cultures around the world where parents hardly talk to children, yet the children learn language just fine... because they have peers and siblings speaking to them instead.  Another exceptional circumstance was the child-rearing habits of the English upper class.  Kids were basically bundled off unceremoniously into the hands of successive lower-class caregivers until they reached an age where they could be shipped off to boarding school.  Parents were encouraged to ignore their children, so the kids' primary caregivers were these lower-class folks, who presumably spoke as such.  And who did they talk like?  Well... their parents.  Because you know who else sounded like their parents?  Their peers.

This is also true in terms of immigration.  My child language acquisition professor in undergrad was a Brazilian by birth.  Her English was good, but she was clearly accented, and some syntactic things in English were challenging for her; as she put it, her input to her daughter "was a deesaster".  Does her daughter also speak accented English?  No, of course not.  Nor does she speak exactly like her dad, who's a native speaker of English, but Canadian.  She talks like her Michigander friends at school.  Cultural spread isn't parent-to-child.  In fact, we'd probably find it kind of alarming if it was.  Imagine if all of us here had the computer skills and attitudes towards technology of our parents.  Would any of us be posting here?  Cultural spread is peer-to-peer; it just happens that there's usually a correlation between the attitudes of one's parents and one's peers.

As such, to the extent that non-Germans in Bavaria speak "worse" German, it's likely just a consequence of the segregation of non-Germans from Germans.  If the immigrant population were located such that the kids of immigrants had "native" German peers, it's likely that they'd become Germans in thought, deed, and speech.  Regardless of what happens at home, once they got out into the world and made some new friends at kindergarten, they'd quickly realize the seemly thing to do would be to speak German just like everyone around them.  Undoubtedly, this tendency towards clustering around the in-group isn't just the result of the attitudes of native Germans; I'm sure self-segregation plays a role, too.  But policies like this ridiculous farce of a proposal certainly do no favors for the ideas that they're supposedly promoting.  The best way to ensure a new group doesn't talk like you is to keep driving home the idea that they're not like you and not one of you.

This is a great post!

Example of segregation/self-segregation impacting the language acquisition of immigrants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicano_English

In Southern California, Mexican immigrants and long-time Mexican-Americans were segregated from Anglos for over a century. Californios lived in their own colonias and Mexican immigrants were segregated in these communities. As you'd expect, Spanish remained the dominant language in these communities. This resulted in the creation of a unique English dialect that sounds like the Spanish-accented English of a newly arrived immigrant to the outside observer. Regardless of the ubiquitous presence of homogeneously Mexican neighborhoods in cities throughout the country, this dialect only exists in Orange County.

[YL]

Very poor German. I.e., most of the stuff that foreigners hate (der, die, das, ein, einen, einem etc.) causes major headaches for them as well.

Is that really true for third generation immigrants as well?
I wouldn't be surprised that they had their own sociolect/slang - but not knowing basic grammar is a different matter. Something must really have gone wrong in Germany's integration policies.

I assume we're actually talking about a dialect of German spoken in immigrant communities which lacks some features of the standard, a bit like Chicano English.

[ag]

Naturally, children do not speak the same way their parents do. But being exposed on a consistent basis to a parent, who insists on speaking with the child in a heavily accented/ grammatically awkward English/German/Russian does help to transmit those features - not in an unchanged way, but noticeably (exactly what the Germans here complain about).

In Mexico speaking a foreign/European language has prestige. So, in most mixed Russian/Mexican families I know children (including by now grown-up children) do speak passable Russian. This Russian tends to be a lot better if either only one parent (usually the mother) speaks it, or if both parents are Russian. However, there are some families where the Mexican spouse can, actually, speak Russian as well (if, say, a guy studied in Russia and came back with a Russian wife) - and I have noticed that the children then have a much heavier accent in their Russian: they unconsciously copy their dads.

Admittedly, in this case we are dealing with the environment in which kids barely hear any Russian except that from their parents. But that, actually, allows us to isolate the effect of having a parent speak "bad Russian" to the child. It does nothing to improve how the child speaks the language - it, actually, hurts.

So, when the complaint comes that kids, who grew up in Germany, make typical "foreign" mistakes, I am pretty confident that they have picked up those mistakes, hearing their elders (parents, neighbors, etc.) making them. It would have been much better if the only German they were exposed to were that of the school/the TV/the German street. That would give them more than enough exposure to learn the language - correctly.

[ag]

Inevitably ? Not really, it was just 1 poster. There's no need to discuss Jewish people in a thread like this which is about encouraging integration and not the historic use of force or purging of a religious group. That's quite the difference. And there's no need to establish a knee-jerk connection to the Holocaust all the time, once a German-party brings up an immigration topic for debate. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong opponent of all Nazi-ism (as you know), but the CSU-debate here is not much different to the debate of other European (or other) center-right parties and they are not attacked with the Nazi-cudgel either. The CSU is a huge party that needs to appeal to a lot of different segments, so it's better to throw the Nazi-cudgel when it involves the parties that are actually the problem and could turn into a real problem: the NPD and the AfD.

My problem is not with the CSU. It is with you. Or, more generally, with the attitude, that people speaking a foreign language at home is somehow threatening - or, in any case, bad or prejudicial. This is exactly what underlay the anti-Jewish persecution over the centuries - I am not talking Nazis, I am, mostly, talking before Nazis. Not Adolf Hitler so much, as Karl Lueger (to make it even more Austrian - and Christian Social). Of course, that underlying antisemitism is what made Hitler possible - but I do not hate it merely because of Hitler.

Hitler, actually, made this attitude indecent in good society - when applied to my fellow tribesmen. But other minorities do not have that protection. Well, that makes me sick. Or, put it another way, you make me sick.

[Oak Hills]

In Mexico speaking a foreign/European language has prestige. So, in most mixed Russian/Mexican families I know children (including by now grown-up children) do speak passable Russian. This Russian tends to be a lot better if either only one parent (usually the mother) speaks it, or if both parents are Russian. However, there are some families where the Mexican spouse can, actually, speak Russian as well (if, say, a guy studied in Russia and came back with a Russian wife) - and I have noticed that the children then have a much heavier accent in their Russian: they unconsciously copy their dads.

I know this is a little off-topic, but I'm curious: How large is the Russian community in Mexico?  I remember finding it unusual when I found out you were a Russian living in Mexico.  I wouldn't think that there'd be very many of those.

[ag]

In Mexico speaking a foreign/European language has prestige. So, in most mixed Russian/Mexican families I know children (including by now grown-up children) do speak passable Russian. This Russian tends to be a lot better if either only one parent (usually the mother) speaks it, or if both parents are Russian. However, there are some families where the Mexican spouse can, actually, speak Russian as well (if, say, a guy studied in Russia and came back with a Russian wife) - and I have noticed that the children then have a much heavier accent in their Russian: they unconsciously copy their dads.

I know this is a little off-topic, but I'm curious: How large is the Russian community in Mexico?  I remember finding it unusual when I found out you were a Russian living in Mexico.  I wouldn't think that there'd be very many of those.

Not many. But, if you are a Russian, you will wind up knowing a few

[ingemann]

Very poor German. I.e., most of the stuff that foreigners hate (der, die, das, ein, einen, einem etc.) causes major headaches for them as well.

Is that really true for third generation immigrants as well?
I wouldn't be surprised that they had their own sociolect/slang - but not knowing basic grammar is a different matter. Something must really have gone wrong in Germany's integration policies.

I have meet plenty of second generation immigrants in Denmark, who don't know "en/et", so I wouldn't be surprised that if 2G in Germany have the same problem with gender in German. Gender in language rarely make sense and you really need close interaction with native speakers in your childhood to truly learn it.

[Хahar 🤔]

অবাক লাগে আমার কত কিছু এ সাদারা বুঝে না। ওদের মনে পুরা দুনিয়া একই মত। ওদের মনে সবাই টাকা-আলা সাদা।

With that aside, obviously this is patently absurd, and it rests, as ag points out, on the absurd and xenophobic idea that multilingualism is somehow inferior to monolingualism. Naturally the only people expounding it are people from monolingual backgrounds who are unable to comprehend speaking a different language at home than outside. The fact that I speak Bengali at home is my own initiative, but I would resent my parents deeply if they hadn't afforded me the opportunity.