As Puerto Rico moves closer to statehood, questions of language and culture are coming to the fore of the conversation once again.
The United States doesn’t have a national language, and there is no law requiring a territory to switch to English before becoming a state. Puerto Rico already has both English and Spanish as official languages. These concerns are not real issues or obstacles to statehood.
But did you know that bilingualism is good for the brain? The majority of people in the world now speak more than one language. In the United States, the majority of people are monolingual — speaking just one language — but the number of bilingual and multilingual people in the U.S. is increasing.
The 51st state of Puerto Rico might just help the U.S. catch the wave of the future.
3 Responses
I’m spanish speaker. When drafted in the Army I started speaking english learned in PR. as a 2nd language. My grand daughters are bilingual, they learn eng. in TV,video games and at bilingual school.
I learned english in PR. as a 2nd language,and speak it with an accent. My son and his wife speak it better. My grand children are fully bilingual. They lerned it on TV ,video games and at bilingul schools.
Sadly, only half of Puerto Rico speaks English and about 25% is fluent. Why? Because for most day to day activities it is not really a necessity. The ones that know English are mostly young people and they’re leaving the island in search for easy money in the mainland. And the Government should change all classes, except Spanish, to English. Spanish is great but if we’ve been a US Colony for over a century and we still haven’t forgotten Spanish then there’s no way that we’ll forget our language anytime soon.