When Languages Collide : Demographics: As O.C. diversifies, communication grows more complicated. In many workplaces, there’s a rush on to acquire bilingual skills.

At Sunny Hills High, the language barrier was a Berlin wall so thick that it divided parents into wary camps that worried about the power of foreign words instead of the usual PTA concerns about enlisting enough volunteers for the football snack shack.

Korean families hosted parents’ meetings in Korean and duly anointed a leader of the “Korean Family Support Group.” PTA members maintained their usual meeting schedule, wondering why the same agenda was occasionally rerun in Korean for the support group.

Both groups understood well that the history of Sunny Hills was shifting and transforming like the state; that for the first time, white students were a minority and Asians--primarily upper-middle-class Korean families--were the new majority.

Suddenly, the parents were pressed to the wall, forcing them to shatter the language barrier the PTA way: a kaffeeklatsch.

Their uneasy struggle to communicate is a quandary shared by Orange County government institutions, schools and private businesses, which in fits and starts are trying out new accents like beginners in a Berlitz course.

The approaches and effectiveness are as varied as the 25 major languages spoken in Orange County, where one in three of the area’s 2.2 million residents speaks a language other than English.

In the sprawling reaches of the county, hospitals confront the language barrier every day, enlisting instant interpreters with resumes ranging from cafeteria worker to bilingual emergency medical technician. Cities and police departments grope for solutions by offering $50 monthly incentive pay for bilingual employees, on-the-site language classes or basic “Spanish for Gringos.”

In some ways, this new wave of translating requires the delicate diplomacy of a United Nations interpreter. One challenge is to reach non-English speakers across the divide of culture, language and street slang. The other is to assuage English speakers who view such services with an uneasy mix of acceptance and occasionally fear.

“I hear from police officers, firefighters and teachers constantly. Their fear is that their skills are no longer required because they’re not bilingual. The threat is there,” said Sally Peterson, a kindergarten teacher who heads LEAD, a Southern California teacher’s group that promotes the swift English assimilation of immigrants.

In Santa Ana, for instance, the Police Department requires its police recruits to carry a gun, badge, and skills in a second language.

“It’s a badge of honor to say you’re a bilingual officer,” said Jose Vargas, the Santa Ana Police Department’s Hispanic affairs officer. Twenty-five years ago when he was a rookie in Stanton, Vargas said fellow officers were convinced someone had stolen the police radio when they heard his heavy Mexican accent crackle over the airwaves. Later, he said, they sent him to a speech therapist to erase his accent.

The accent survived and now Vargas speaks Spanish with other officers on the beat. “If you are not bilingual,” he said, “you cannot work for the Santa Ana Police Department.”

Still, English remains the dominant language in Orange County, with Spanish speakers numbering more than 400,000, followed in usage by Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. And among the majority of newcomers there is strong recognition that mastery of English leads to improved job prospects.

In a Los Angeles Times poll of 943 Orange County residents, Asian and Latino minorities are more prone to cite language and cultural differences as the elements holding them back. The survey, taken in mid-August, had a margin of error of plus or minus 4%. According to that poll, white residents also blame language differences for slowing the progress of minority groups. In addition, they have qualms about bilingual education, opposing it by 55%.

But as the makeup of the county population shifts, attitudes are also driven by demographics. Today, Asian and Latino groups are growing faster in Orange County than any other demographic group.

Entrepreneurs like “Spanish for Gringos” teacher Bill Harvey senses that people are forced by the numbers to be more tolerant of other languages. He bases that view on the calls and assignments he’s getting within Orange County to teach government and private businesses to reach out--instantly.

“The moods is completely changing. It’s gone from apprehension to eagerness,” Harvey said. A Santa Ana native, Harvey was hired by dozens of local city governments and hospitals. The city of Santa Ana hired him to teach his “Spanish in a Day” classes because they thought English speakers might be more receptive to learning Spanish from a self-described “gringo.” They also thought he could teach the nuances of street slang, an ability that institutions have found--to their dismay--that some bilingual translators lack.

“The No. 1 shift in American mentality is going to be addressing language needs,” said Harvey. “What do the Germans do? What do the French do? They all speak more than one language. Everybody realizes the demographics have changed.”

When Sunny Hills parents gathered for black coffee and ice-breaker conversation, the polite introductions tumbled out in soft accents of Mexico, Egypt, Iran, Korea and Japan.

One mother remembered the German her great-grandparents had not passed to the next generation. The others listened politely, adding wistful chapters of their own about lost languages. A Korean mother confided that she crosses the language divide daily with her children; she speaks to them in Korean and they respond in English.

Other parents revealed that they refused to teach their own languages, fearing it could hinder their children in school.

“We really only spoke Japanese when we didn’t want them to understand,” said parent Sue Nakayama, a native of Japan, whose eldest son has moved to Japan to improve his Japanese skills. The United States is a nation where foreign languages rarely are passed on to grandchildren, according to researchers.

In no other nation are languages abandoned as rapidly as this country, where immigrants follow a standard pattern of losing a mother tongue by the third generation.

Typically, the first generation learns enough English to flourish economically while the second generation speaks the foreign language at home and uses English for work and school. By the third generation, English is the dominant language, according to Alejandro Portes and Richard Schauffler, both Johns Hopkins University researchers studying the English assimilation of the children of immigrants in San Diego and Miami.

Their research showed that regardless of nationality, the preference for English was overwhelming among immigrant children the longer they lived in the United States and the higher the level of parent education.

“Only in places where immigrant groups concentrate and manage to sustain a diversified economic and cultural presence will their languages survive past the first generation,” according to Schauffler. “Even these enclaves, in all probability, will be engulfed by the force of language.”

With constant waves of immigration, he said, a foreign language flourishes.

In Orange County, the fresh demand for bilingual services has prompted hospitals like Western Medical Center-Santa Ana to launch an extensive campaign to reach out to Spanish-speaking patients, whose children make up more than 85% of the hospital newborns.

To court Spanish-speaking patients, tortilla and beans were added to the hospital breakfast menu. Religious statues and holy cards appeared on the gift shop shelves while hospital volunteers enrolled in required Spanish classes. They enlarged a waiting room to make space for visits from extended families. Hospital administrators also tapped bilingual volunteers from any hospital department to provide translations for nurses and physicians.

Even so, they encountered communication glitches common to other institutions learning by trial and error. They discovered that relatives are not always reliable interpreters because patients may not be able to speak freely in front of their family. Volunteers, who lacked formal medical training, also had weaknesses. They didn’t know the medical jargon and they lacked the skills to recognize underlying psychological disturbances that could be the source of physical problems.

“That system of translation led to misunderstandings,” said Wendy Beesley, who supervises the emergency room. “We could treat something differently than what the patient thought he was getting. There were more misunderstandings of the symptoms. Some of the medical jargon isn’t directly transferable in both languages.”

The hospital then hired bilingual emergency medical technicians who knew how to offer comfort in Spanish along with a blood-pressure check and a bandage.

Other Orange County police departments and hospitals have tried subscribing to an instant over-the-phone translator service offered by AT&T.; Their list of subscribers has lately expanded to mortgage companies and car rental agencies, partly based on the pitch that its native speakers can understand the idioms and slang that may elude translators trained on textbooks.

For example, they note that a textbook-trained translator may not understand the meaning of the Vietnamese expression, “the crazy dog bites thin hedges,” a saying that a police dispatcher may want to know.

It means: “When pushed to the limit, a person may react irrationally.”

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For almost 90 minutes, the mothers and fathers of Sunny Hills High have chatted about language and culture, circling the issue that really troubles them. Wafia Shoukry tries. Years ago, she said, a Korean mother barred her child from playing with her daughter.

“I felt depressed about what was happening and I went to my daughter’s school,” Shoukry said. “I saw a large number of Korean students and I started to realize the problem. My daughter felt she was different than everyone else.” The sprawling campus of Sunny Hills High once was more fabled for its famous alumnus, rock singer Jackson Browne. But in the last three years the school has acquired a reputation for its fast-changing student population. As affluent Korean families settled in the tranquil, leafy neighborhoods of Fullerton, Asians became the dominant ethnic group with Koreans accounting for more than 25% of the student body.

Long before that shift, some parents started noticing subtle changes in school rituals that caused them to wonder whether the school was a melting pot or boiling soup.

When the school band trooped aboard two buses, one mother noticed that students divided into the buses along ethnic lines.

In the campus parking lot, Korean students staked spots for their cars in the same area every day, prompting some of the white students to fear their cars would be scraped with keys. Parents privately complained that the Korean students were too studious and some mistakenly believed the PTA had split into one group for Koreans and the other for remaining parents.

Even those parents who understood the need for the Korean support group--and its Korean translation of school information--felt cut off from the Korean parents. They could share smiles, but not the same language.

And many of the Korean mothers, who worked at home, felt isolated because they couldn’t communicate to school officials in English.

Then in October, an incident happened that evoked all the simmering prejudices about a changing Sunny Hills, the fears about ethnic tensions and gang activities, the nostalgic memories of a homogenous high school. Two white students claimed they were slashed by people from other ethnic groups while on campus.

It wasn’t true. The new principal, Loring Davies, discovered the students had purposely cut themselves in a bid for transfers out of the school.

Nobody spoke of this particular incident during the PTA kaffeeklatsch, instead debating the need for the Korean translation enclosed in the PTA newsletter. For some parents, this one-page sheet symbolized the wall.

“No other ethnic group is getting that. This doesn’t help them to assimilate. They don’t learn to speak English,” said the Egyptian mother, Shoukry. “This,” she said, “is about power.”

For a moment, faces flush in the circle. Then another mother quickly volunteers the PTA for English tutoring services, an idea that a Korean mother had also suggested.

“This is going to take time,” said PTA president Karen Broumand as the kaffeeklatsch conversation faded to an end.

“There’s an expression in Korean,” said Young Lee, the nurse who heads the Korean family support group. “When you begin, the work is already done 50%. Beginning is very important.”

Changing Ethnicity

Whites are no longer the predominant group in the Sunny Hills High School student body. Asians and whites are now about equally represented.

1992 1993 White 47% 44% Asian 40% 45% Latino 9% 8% Other 4% 3%

Source: Fullerton Union High School District

Researched by DOREEN CARVAJAL / Los Angeles Times