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来源于《约翰逊》语言专栏
Mother tongues
母语
Forcing immigrants to learn English can be counter-productive
强迫移民学英语可能适得其反
Lev Golinkin left Soviet Ukraine as a nine-year-old in1990.With assistance from HIAS, a Jewish organisation that helps refugees, his family made its way to Indiana. In America, not having English felt “like having a massive stroke, only instead of being sent to the hospital and getting help you have to go out and get a job.” His experience suggests immigrants don’t have to be told how important it is to speak the language of a new country: they are more painfully aware of it than natives can ever know.
1990年，9岁的列弗·戈林金离开了苏联统治下的乌克兰。在帮助难民的犹太组织HIAS的帮助下，他的家人来到了印第安纳州。在美国，不懂英语“就像患了严重的中风，只是你不得不出去找工作，而不必被送进医院接受治疗”。他的经历表明，移民不必要被告知讲一个新国家的语言有多重要：移民比当地人更加痛苦地认识到这一点。
Yet they are often assumed to need coercion. On May16th, for example, Donald Trump vowed to ensure that immigrants to America learn English and pass a civics exam before arriving.
但是人们通常认为移民讲本地语言需要被强制执行。例如，5月16日，唐纳德·特朗普发誓要确保移民到美国之前要先学习英语，并通过公民考试。
Such strictures might seem to serve national cohesion. In fact, the wrong policies and tone do the reverse, as Vicky Fouka of StanfordUniversity found in a study of German-Americans living a century ago. With its large Germanimmigrant population, Ohiowas the first of several states to permit teaching in German alongside English. By 1900 some 4% of elementary-school pupils in America were taught at least partly in German. After the first worldwar anti-German sentiment led to the end of those programmes and, in Ohio and Indiana, even to a ban on teaching German as a foreign language to young children.
这样的限制似乎有利于国家团结。事实上，正如斯坦福大学的维基·弗卡在对生活在一个世纪前的德裔美国人的研究中所发现的那样，错误的政策和论调适得其反。俄亥俄州有大量的德国移民人口，是第一个允许用德语和英语教学的州。到1900年，美国大约4%的小学生至少部分使用德语授课。第一次世界大战之后，反德情绪导致了这些项目结束，在俄亥俄州和印第安纳州，甚至禁止将德语作为外语教授给幼儿。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
