The Spanish Monolinguism

There's a tradition between spaniards of speaking no foreign languages for considereing them too difficult to be studied. Even at school it sounds normal that kids asume they will never get a decent English level, maybe because they consider themself as incapables of that, or maybe because there was never good teachers capables of such Herculean task, or for not having an acceptable state support. That culture of monolinguism is ready to end up- Internet has helped the youngest generations to practise their skills by watching their favorites series of the USA and by listening to their own music, even with tools for reading their lyrics and comprenhend their meaning.

Although, the average adult still posses dificulties to have just a begginer level of English, translating few words like 'today', 'Gimme that, please' or 'I don't like that because-'. And it is well seen that behaviur, for during decades the English knowledge has been though innessary and unpopular. Even so, that traditon has ocurred not only with that language- it happenned the same with the French. It was used as school language after the Civil War while Franco's ditadure, and its learning perdured til the modern Spain, when democracy was showing up slowly. But after its imposition during many years there was a francophone tradition, neither at the moment. 

Things are changing nowadays, but the country of Cervantes is still suffering a big deficit of bilingual education. It does not exist exist in other countries like the north of Europe, where the most students speak fluency English since children. So nor happened in Portugal or Italy, demography simillar to us. There the level of English is more significant than here. However, may the problem not be the lack of English in our country- spaniards don't actually speak well English, but they act having incounciusly many United States' costumes imported by its supremacy in the internation markets and Hollywood, but the incapacity or the unwilling for speaking out not in their maternal tongue.

If it is difficult to remove ascient ghosts on how hard other tongues are spaniards popularly use to say, it is practically impossible consider teaching other languages like French, Italian, Russian or Chinese, all of them languagues succesfully demanded in modern times. And for that the spaniards will maintain their deficit, because when they begin looking like their neighbors linguistically they will have started the dash of a second and third foreing languages -in decades it will be normal childen knowing Chinese,  and we will never catch those educational levels.

It's surprising how a country as Spain, strongly decentralized and poliglot at least by its Constitution has such problems. Let´s remember that the catalan, the vasque and the 'galego' are compulsory in their states, but even so, they are not spoken outside there, so the hypothetical good benefits a plurilingual legal system could carry to Spain seems not to be like they expected. It could have been like a modern Swizerland or Canada, but instead of that it turned into something extrange. People of Andalusia or Madrid do not speak catalan, and Valencia's people neither speak vasque. For that it is said currently that such system, not federal nor centralized, is dead. But goverment's pools express that spaniards want to change the politics not renuncing to the 'independent communities' they have now. How are they going to start learning English or another modern languages if they ignore their own national tongues, for sure their best treasures?

The point is, however, that maybe Spain is not mistaken at all. Maybe it is so wrong for all the modern countries to renunce to their national tongues in order to achive bilingual children, whom in most cases suffered great deficits of their natural tongues' skills. Spaniards, intentionally or not, have developed a culture of self proud on their language, the second most speaken worlwide, and they leader, too, a silent oposition to the slow death of multilinguism everywhere. Althought, it seems obviously that that took place with no intention, and the moral perspective of an intended ignorance on English could not shape. Even so, we have to rethink our own critics and stop assuming we are worse than the UK 's or USA's people- maybe they are the ones who even ignored more  beyond their frontiers than us. Maybe we should be critical with ourself as they shoud.