When I got back from my linguistics class on Monday, I fired up my computer and settled down to read my daily New York Times headlines. And maybe it was because I was still wearing my "linguist hat" that this article about the launch of a Spanish-language newspaper in Texas just completely rubbed me the wrong way. O how does this article irritate me? Let me count the ways…

First of all, the title: A Texas Paper Bets on Español, Not Assimilation. What? How inflammatory is that? How is it that the publication of a Spanish-language newspaper can be equated with a rejection of "assimilation" by the Hispanic community in Texas? Here’s a news brief for the idiot who came up with that headline: there’s no contradiction between wanting to read a newspaper in your mother tongue and wanting to be "assimilated" into a culture with a different dominant language. Trust me, I know. For the six years I lived in Germany, I scoured the libraries, book stores and magazine racks for every piece of English writing I could get my hands on. That didn’t prevent me from also reading German, speaking German, hanging out with German people or becoming part of German society. And I didn’t read English books and papers because I was refusing to be "assimilated" (can you tell I hate that term? What are we - Borg?) - I read them because reading in my mother tongue appealed to that part of me that has been unalterably shaped by the English-dominated culture in which I was raised. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Aside from issues of identity, however, there’s a very practical reason why someone might want to read a Spanish-language newspaper: it’s entirely possible to be functional, or even orally fluent, in a foreign language, but not be able to read it very easily. A Spanish-language newspaper will not just appeal to new immigrants who aren’t yet familiar with English, it will appeal to people who can speak English very well but who still have trouble reading it. It can be hard to read a foreign-language newspaper - really hard. So seeking out news (or sports scores, or local gossip, or whatever) from a source which you can easily understand is perfectly legitimate. "Assimilation", or the lack thereof, has nothing to do with it.

Moving on to the opening paragraphs of the article, we hear that this Spanish newspaper, Rumbo, is a step towards countering "a century and a half of Anglo dominance" in Texas. Now, nowhere in the article does anyone involved in the publication of Rumbo or any other Spanish newspaper in America give even the slightest hint that such publications are an attempt to "stick it to the Anglos". For pity’s sake, Rumbo was founded by a former editor and the former LA bureau chief of the The Wall Street Journal - hardly a bastion of pro-minority militancy. To be honest, the driving force behind the whole venture appears to be economics: the Hispanic population is growing, and the founders of Rumbo are hoping to sell a lot of newspapers, period. So insinuating that Rumbo is some sort of tool of cultural warfare seems extremely inappropriate to me, particularly when the topic is as volatile a one as Spanish-speakers in America.

One of the most sadly uninformed comments, however, comes not from the author of the NYT article, but rather from the publisher of the (English-language) San Antonio Express-News, who expressed his shock at the launch of a Spanish-only newspaper in San Antonio by saying, "When we brought in our focus groups to study the Hispanic market, we thought it [the Hispanic-focus newspaper] should be directed at their culture not their language."

I know it’s unfair of me to get up on my postgrad linguistics horse and get all over this guy’s case, so I’m just going to gently ask: where do you draw the line between language and culture? I’ll tell you my answer to that question: you don’t. There is no line. I know I’m getting all Whorfian, but there’s simply no getting around the fact that language is an inherent part of a culture - in fact, language may be what makes a culture what it is. So a Spanish-language newspaper in Texas is not directed at the Spanish language per se - it’s directed at the culture that that language encodes. There’s simply no clear separation between the two.

Now, I’m aware that this language/culture argument is thrown around by people opposed to any use of Spanish in the United States - the thinking being that if Spanish-speakers don’t completely give up their native language (and, by association, their native culture), then they can never truly become a part of American culture. Well, that’s a load of (ahem) baloney. It’s perfectly possible to straddle languages and cultures, to maintain an allegiance to a traditional "microculture", if you will, while also identifying with a dominant "macroculture" - i.e. you can identify yourself as Texan, but also identify yourself as American. Language isn’t an obstacle to this. Are the Italian-speaking people in Switzerland less Swiss than the German-speaking ones? And who’s more Belgian, the Flemish speakers or the French speakers? Different cultural identities don’t have to be in conflict with each other and don’t have to rule each other out - and that’s not just wishful thinking, that’s the reality in countless multilingual and multicultural communities and countries around the world.

Okay, so the NYT article has kind of served as a springboard for a more general rant on language and identity - and I haven’t even scratched the surface of everything that can and should be said about the topic. It’s just that so much nonsense is spouted about minority languages, and the "dangers" of bilingualism, and the need for "assimilation", and I really wish people could take a more sensitive, reasoned approach to what is, I freely admit, a difficult area. It’s not easy to navigate languages and cultures, particularly when politics and economics are playing as large a part in the scenario as heritage and identity. But it certainly doesn’t help the situation when you have an article like this one, which seems to have completely missed the point of why a Spanish-language newspaper might be desired even by "assimilated" Hispanic people in Texas, and which therefore subtly contributes to promoting the notion of "one language good, two languages bad" - a notion to which I clearly do not subscribe.