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Login[Art: I added the poll]
I'm Spanish, from Madrid and I didn't know the existence of a place like this until today.
I've decided wrote you to tell you that seem to me very interesting ythat deal to mantain the language of your ancestors.
If you need helt to translate something I can help you.
I'm so sorry, my English is quite bad
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[Art: añadí la encuesta]
Yo soy española, de Madrid y desconocía totalmente la existencia de un lugar como este hasta hoy.
He decidido escribiros para deciros que me parece muy interesante que tratéis de mantener el idioma de vuestros antepasados.
Si necesitáis ayuda para traducir algo puedo ayudaros.
Lo siento mucho, mi ingles es bastante malo
Are contemporary Asturian-Americans totally bilingual?
Moderator: Moderators
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Ron Gonzalez
- Posts: 377
- Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2004 8:08 pm
- asturias_and_me:
Welcome, Elena!
Sure, some of us are bilingual, some more than others. But the majority don't know the language. Is that your question, whether there is anyone here who can speak Spanish/Asturian?
Ron has pretty good abilities in speaking his grandparents' version of Bable, but he tries to hide that fact!
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¡Bienvenida, Elena!
Sí, algunos somos bilingües. Algunos más que otros. Pero la mayoría no saben la lengua. ¿Es tu duda sobre si ya existe alguien allí quien puede hablar en castellano o asturianu?
Ron tiene habilidades bastante buenas en hablar el bable de sus abuelos, ¡pero intenta esconder este hecho!
Sure, some of us are bilingual, some more than others. But the majority don't know the language. Is that your question, whether there is anyone here who can speak Spanish/Asturian?
Ron has pretty good abilities in speaking his grandparents' version of Bable, but he tries to hide that fact!
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¡Bienvenida, Elena!
Sí, algunos somos bilingües. Algunos más que otros. Pero la mayoría no saben la lengua. ¿Es tu duda sobre si ya existe alguien allí quien puede hablar en castellano o asturianu?
Ron tiene habilidades bastante buenas en hablar el bable de sus abuelos, ¡pero intenta esconder este hecho!
Last edited by Art on Tue Jun 17, 2008 5:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ron can tell us more stories, but I do know he was giving his Spanish teacher a hard time by using Asturian words instead of Castilian!
Among the grandchildren of the Asturian-American immigrants, I doubt that many of us are fully bilingual. I'd guess that perhaps 10% of us are partially bilingual. Suronda and Bob learned the language at home. I had to learn it in school and by using it. Many Asturian-Americans never learned any of Asturian or Spanish. Those who participate in this forum are more likely to know the language than are our siblings and cousins who don't participate.
I'll be interested in hearing other's views. In fact, I'll add a poll to your first message so the Americans can easily answer your question.
North Americans, go to the top of the page to answer the poll!
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Ron puede decirnos más historias, ¡pero sé que estaba bromeando con su profesora de español, usando palabras asturianas en lugar de castellanas!
Entre los nietos de los inmigrantes astur-americanos, dudo que muchos de nosotros son completamente bilingües. Me imagino que quizás 10% de nosotros somos parcialmente bilingües. Ron, Suronda, y Bob aprendió el idioma en casa. Yo tuve que aprenderla en la escuela y mediante el uso de la lengua. Muchos astur-americanos nunca aprendieron ni castellano ni asturianu. Es más probable que los que participan en este foro conocen la lengua que nuestros hermanos o primos que no participan.
Me interesará escuchar las opiniones de otros. De hecho, voy a agregar una encuesta a tu primer mensaje para que los estadounidenses pueden fácilmente responder a tu pregunta.
¡Norteamericanos, vayan a la parte superior de la página, para responder a la encuesta!
Among the grandchildren of the Asturian-American immigrants, I doubt that many of us are fully bilingual. I'd guess that perhaps 10% of us are partially bilingual. Suronda and Bob learned the language at home. I had to learn it in school and by using it. Many Asturian-Americans never learned any of Asturian or Spanish. Those who participate in this forum are more likely to know the language than are our siblings and cousins who don't participate.
I'll be interested in hearing other's views. In fact, I'll add a poll to your first message so the Americans can easily answer your question.
North Americans, go to the top of the page to answer the poll!
---------------------
Ron puede decirnos más historias, ¡pero sé que estaba bromeando con su profesora de español, usando palabras asturianas en lugar de castellanas!
Entre los nietos de los inmigrantes astur-americanos, dudo que muchos de nosotros son completamente bilingües. Me imagino que quizás 10% de nosotros somos parcialmente bilingües. Ron, Suronda, y Bob aprendió el idioma en casa. Yo tuve que aprenderla en la escuela y mediante el uso de la lengua. Muchos astur-americanos nunca aprendieron ni castellano ni asturianu. Es más probable que los que participan en este foro conocen la lengua que nuestros hermanos o primos que no participan.
Me interesará escuchar las opiniones de otros. De hecho, voy a agregar una encuesta a tu primer mensaje para que los estadounidenses pueden fácilmente responder a tu pregunta.
¡Norteamericanos, vayan a la parte superior de la página, para responder a la encuesta!
Last edited by Art on Tue Jun 17, 2008 5:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Many folks of my grandparents generation experienced significant discrimination for being Spanish, and that made them less likely to use Spanish outside the home or teach their children Spanish.
They wanted, above all, to be American. That meant (at least in my family's case) that the kids oftentimes were not taught how to speak Spanish (my dad and his siblings can't, for example).
That said, many of the grandkids (like me) of those folks over here became fascinated with their ancestry and learned Spanish from classes, studying in Spain (I did that), etc.
My Spanish is crap now, due to lack of practice, although I can still easily carry on conversations with Spaniards. I miss a heck of a lot when trying to watch Spanish movies, though, for example. I do try to read Spanish newspapers daily (especially sports news sites like Marca and AS), to keep up my mad skillz.
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Muchos de ellos de la generación de mis abuelos tuvieron mucha discriminación por ser español, y por eso no usaron mucho castellano en la calle y no enseñaron la idioma a sus niños.
Ellos quieron, sobre todo, ser estadounidiense. Por eso (en caso de mi familia, es decir) que los niños no hablaron castellano (ni mi padre ni su hermanas pueden, por ejemplo).
Pues, muchos nietos (como yo) de los inmigrantes aquí ahora quieren saber mas de sus historias familiares y aprendieron castellano en clases, estudiando en España (como yo), etc.
Mi castellano ahora es mierda (obviamente) por falta de practicar, aunque todavía puedo conversar con españoles facilmente. No entiendo muchas cosas cuando miro los peliculas en castellano, por ejemplo. Pero leo periodicos españoles cada día (especialmente los esitios del deportes como Marca y AS), para practicar un poco.
They wanted, above all, to be American. That meant (at least in my family's case) that the kids oftentimes were not taught how to speak Spanish (my dad and his siblings can't, for example).
That said, many of the grandkids (like me) of those folks over here became fascinated with their ancestry and learned Spanish from classes, studying in Spain (I did that), etc.
My Spanish is crap now, due to lack of practice, although I can still easily carry on conversations with Spaniards. I miss a heck of a lot when trying to watch Spanish movies, though, for example. I do try to read Spanish newspapers daily (especially sports news sites like Marca and AS), to keep up my mad skillz.
-----------------------------
Muchos de ellos de la generación de mis abuelos tuvieron mucha discriminación por ser español, y por eso no usaron mucho castellano en la calle y no enseñaron la idioma a sus niños.
Ellos quieron, sobre todo, ser estadounidiense. Por eso (en caso de mi familia, es decir) que los niños no hablaron castellano (ni mi padre ni su hermanas pueden, por ejemplo).
Pues, muchos nietos (como yo) de los inmigrantes aquí ahora quieren saber mas de sus historias familiares y aprendieron castellano en clases, estudiando en España (como yo), etc.
Mi castellano ahora es mierda (obviamente) por falta de practicar, aunque todavía puedo conversar con españoles facilmente. No entiendo muchas cosas cuando miro los peliculas en castellano, por ejemplo. Pero leo periodicos españoles cada día (especialmente los esitios del deportes como Marca y AS), para practicar un poco.
My experience obviously differs from that of Ron, Art, Bob or Xose. I'm Asturian-American in a very literal sense; my father is fully Asturian and my mother is fully American (yes, whatever that means). Because it's yet another take on the Asturian-American identity, I thought I'd share it with Elena.
We grew up hearing our grandmother and kids around us speaking Asturian. We were not lucky enough to meet our grandfather, who was killed at the end of the Spanish civil war. So we may have gone overboard with our guelina.
As a child, our parents rented farmhouses during the summers and we usually stayed on farms...with the farmers on the first floor. So it was natural for us to pick up Asturian as opposed to Castilian Spanish. We never attended a Spanish school, so our contact with an academic kind of Castilian Spanish and the conditioning of locals was an immaterial factor for us, far removed from our day-to-day experience.
That makes us kind of freeze, linguistically speaking. My generation in the village has tended to purge Asturian as part of a perceived social aspiration to modernity, obviously a result of their schooling. We, as Americans, however, value that same Asturian identity as a direct link to our grandmother and cousins. Castilian Spanish just does not trigger the same emotional register.
Sometimes things are simple. And this is one such case, however odd it may seem to people in the large cities of today's Asturias...
We grew up hearing our grandmother and kids around us speaking Asturian. We were not lucky enough to meet our grandfather, who was killed at the end of the Spanish civil war. So we may have gone overboard with our guelina.
As a child, our parents rented farmhouses during the summers and we usually stayed on farms...with the farmers on the first floor. So it was natural for us to pick up Asturian as opposed to Castilian Spanish. We never attended a Spanish school, so our contact with an academic kind of Castilian Spanish and the conditioning of locals was an immaterial factor for us, far removed from our day-to-day experience.
That makes us kind of freeze, linguistically speaking. My generation in the village has tended to purge Asturian as part of a perceived social aspiration to modernity, obviously a result of their schooling. We, as Americans, however, value that same Asturian identity as a direct link to our grandmother and cousins. Castilian Spanish just does not trigger the same emotional register.
Sometimes things are simple. And this is one such case, however odd it may seem to people in the large cities of today's Asturias...
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Bob
- Moderator
- Posts: 1774
- Joined: Mon Feb 24, 2003 3:54 am
- Location: Connecticut and Massachusetts
- asturias_and_me:
Castellano and asturianu are both learned languages for me, as are several others. I would strongly urge any anglofalantes/anglohablantes who want to learn asturianu to learn castellano first for the simple reason that the resources just aren't there to jump directly to asturianu from English (with the exception of one small English-Asturian dictionary).
It will be a somewhat lonely experience unless you can travel to Asturias, but well worth the time and effort.
It will be a somewhat lonely experience unless you can travel to Asturias, but well worth the time and effort.