BrainTrust Query: Should associates speak to Hispanics in Spanish?
By David Morse, President & CEO, New American Dimensions, LLC
Comedian Bill Santiago calls it a language with "double the vocabulary, half the grammar." Nobel Prize winning Mexican author Octavio Paz called it "neither good nor bad, but abominable." I'm talking about Spanglish.
Whatever you call it, Spanglish is the language used by a majority of the approximately 18 million people in the U.S. who are proficient in both Spanish and English. And though being bilingual certainly has its advantages, according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times called Biding Their Tongues, it also has its pitfalls - specifically, deciding which language to use, when and with whom.
What should you do, for instance, if you start a conversation in English and you see the other person struggling? Switching to Spanish might be rude, suggesting that the other person is inept in English. Yet completely avoiding Spanish may give the impression that you are standoffish, if you happen to look Hispanic. Not to mention the fact that communications may get garbled.
It's tricky, says Ana Celia Zentella, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and author of the book Growing Up Bilingual. Her research shows that older Latinos sometimes "think they're being lied to" when they encounter younger Latinos who speak English and say they don't know Spanish.
What about English-speakers who may only know a few words of Spanish? Is it better to inject a gracias or hola or just keep it in English?
"There are people who are very touched when there is a genuine approach to them by people who are trying to speak Spanish to communicate and to connect with them," said Ms. Zentella. But you can also offend, she pointed out, by speaking "mock Spanish," which she considers racist - things like no problemo and comprendee?
Discussion Questions: Should Hispanic employees be instructed to speak English or Spanish to customers who appear to be Hispanic? What language should non-Hispanic employees having a smattering of high school Spanish use?
[Author's comment] Studies show that between 80 and 85 percent of third generation
Hispanics do not speak Spanish well. Other studies indicate that even second
generation Hispanics, though bilingual, prefer speaking English.
Maria Carreira, a Cuban-born teacher at California State University at Long Beach, and an expert in the use of Spanish in the U.S., says that bilingual Hispanics often make decisions "in a split second, based on cues such as age, clothing and apparent social status - along with skin, eye and hair color." They will also consider the venue, she said: for instance, is the venue East Los Angeles or Beverly Hills?
Still, the decisions that Hispanics make are often not the right ones. In the article, Ms. Carreira herself laments an incident in which she encountered a blue-eyed person working at a taco stand. Though the man appeared to prefer speaking Spanish, she chose to speak to him in English, simply because of his appearance. She could see he was offended.