Bilingualism in Puerto Rico

If I apply all the information gathered from the different articles to the Puerto Rican society, I would say that Puerto Rico is a monolingual society. The issue of the English language, has been used as a tool for a political playground, where the citizens are being used as hand string puppets. If you can’t translate it into the other language, then it could disqualify you as a balanced bilingual.

Colin Baker, the author of “Definitions and Distinction” tries to define it as the “ownership of two languages” and mentions that it is not as simple as it seems, since there are many factors that determine and classify the level of Bilingualism or that “ownership”.

One way a person can overcome this “hurdle ” (surface bilingualism) is by a total immersion in the language. Spanish is the vernacular language, and although English has been imposed on us, and has been declared as an “official language” but we are still far away from that bilingual reality. The concept is too abstract or mentalistic to be studied by the scientific method, or any other branch of science that can “measure things” by quantity , weight, or height. As we have discussed in class, this all comes down to a Power struggle, (to who’s more economically potent). Like for example you want to express something in one language, “like a common phrase that describes a certain situation” that simply doesn’t exist in the other. I consider that now that we have more access to the English Language through cable t. , we might eventually “open up” to the idea that English is not the Enemy, but a tool that can be translated into power in our hands. There has been feeling of rejection, from both nations due to our ethnicity, culture, dialect, geographical aspect, etc. As I have observed closely, there is a tendency of making fun of ourselves, criticizing our own people and rejecting the “unknown”, and this may be a clue that there is not only an inferiority complex, but an identity crisis issue due to our political circumstances and our cultural history. I see the lack of interest in English as an act of resistance to the United States, and a way to “safeguard” our culture, that is rooted on the language itself.