Ethnic Pockets Amid a Vast Fabric of English

Cecilia Miguel cannot even tell you how trapped she feels, how isolated, how battered by forces she does not understand. She is a ghost few ever see or hear. Miguel is a minority within a minority, a non-Spanish speaker in a Spanish-speaking portion of an English-speaking metropolis. She speaks only Q’anjob’al, a Mayan tongue of her native Guatemala.

The tiny, moon-faced woman sews by day in a garment factory and rides the bus back to her $275-a-month apartment in Los Angeles’ Pico-Union area. There she cries at night over her three young girls, placed in a foster home because of a bruised eye that she lacked the language skills to explain.

“I think about this every minute,” a wet-eyed Miguel said through an interpreter, laying out Polaroids of the smiling girls in her tidy room. “I don’t know if they’re going to give them back to me or not. Sometimes I think I’m just going to kill myself.”

Her life is a brutal lesson: Language can break you. Language can box you in, force you down paths you never would have taken. For others it can be a magic portal to wealth, power and attainment.

No other American metropolitan region has so many languages or is so shaped by the dynamics of how we speak. As a result, Southern California is a preeminent model for how people will communicate in the decades to come.

English--rich, supple, irrepressible--is the dominant language of that model, expanding its reach internationally even as it maintains its grip on the city core. Yet, paradoxically, multilingualism is more deeply entrenched than ever, not only globally, but in the Southland.

The combination creates language islands that are increasingly a significant and seemingly permanent feature of the Southern California landscape.

More than 120 tongues are spoken here, from the obscure cadences of Hmong and Q’anjob’al to the more familiar rhythms of Korean, French, Russian and Spanish.

In this vast mix, you can begin to gauge where speech is heading, see languages emerging and languages dying, trace the arcs of change in every sphere of life.

Both here and globally, English is the official language of commerce, dominating worldwide maritime activity and air traffic control. It is the single dominant language of the media, with about one-quarter of all the world’s periodicals and the vast majority of scientific and technical journals published in English.

English is also the international medium of popular song and film--two of Los Angeles’ notable exports--and the default language of at least 75% of all computer Web sites and 95% of all commercial Internet servers.

“English is taking over the world,” said University of Alaska language expert Michael Kraus.

But the very technologies that are bringing cultures together--proliferating television channels, the Internet, and wireless and microwave devices that beam phone calls and newspaper pages through empty space--are shoring up the language islands, enabling speakers of Mandarin or Samoan or Laotian to exist almost wholly unto themselves.

Language islands may never disappear. In a churn that has characterized the region for decades, second- and third-generation immigrants filter into the English-speaking mainstream and are replaced by other immigrants who seek out the islands to be with relatives and friends and find familiar ways of life. To a startling degree the islands remain invisible--even indifferent--to one another.

The Filipino never hears the Persian radio program; it is impossible to tune in without buying a special radio--sold in Iranian boutiques--that uses a computer chip to receive a specially modified frequency. The Persian speaker never enters the Lithuanian church. The Lithuanian and the Hindi speakers take different freeway ramps into cultures divided by tracts and commercial strips and, most of all, how they speak.

There is no way to adequately summarize the islands. Residents of some, such as certain Iranian and Mandarin enclaves, are primarily well-educated and affluent. It is a mistake to assume that non-English speakers are necessarily poor.

Some islands are predominantly bilingual, others dense with citizens--or noncitizens--who speak no English at all.

The islands are both a haven and a prison.

Step back and they almost disappear: You can see men and women who move freely across the landscape, establishing business, cultural and social links to other communities much as nations now must do in the global marketplace. Step close, however, and you can see a tragic number of people who are trapped and alone.

A Challenge for Police, Courts and Schools

Look close enough and you can find the proud, unsmiling face of Yalew Tamrat, a 30-year-old Ethiopian who speaks only his national language of Amharic.

He is a man in the crowd in an Ethiopian community straddling Fairfax Avenue. Most members of the community speak English, but not Tamrat, who immigrated to Los Angeles last year and found work as a cook.

Tamrat’s calm eyes belie the confusion within. The city overpowers him; the American culture bombards him with things beyond his grasp. He shrinks into a bachelor unit he shares in the mid-Wilshire district, losing himself in books. He is reluctant to ask friends for help. He takes the bus to work, leaving early enough to walk--a 45-minute hike--if the bus is full.

Once, thinking he had found a shortcut, Tamrat strode up a ramp onto the Santa Monica Freeway. He walked and walked and never saw a cross street before the police finally picked him up and drove him to his restaurant job.

“I was lost a long time,” he recalls.

Language differences also create an extraordinary challenge. Law enforcement, the courts, schools, hospitals and other public institutions run more slowly and cost more because of language barriers. Tragedies occur.

A few years ago, Los Angeles police officers picked up an elderly Korean man who was lost and could not explain where he lived. He was dropped off far from home in the middle of the night, only to be robbed and beaten. He died soon afterward.

The LAPD stepped up its language training program as a result, but the plain fact is: Language-related problems in Los Angeles are perennial. They run the gamut from racial tensions to gangs and organized crime.

No hospital, court or police department considers it financially prudent to spend money for full-time interpreters of obscure tongues such as Q’anjob’al, Foo Chow or the Philippine language of Zambal.

As a percentage of overall budgets, the price of language diversity may seem relatively modest. There are hidden costs in staff, time and equipment, however, that invariably tighten the squeeze on underfunded agencies.

The vast Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 700,000 students, and they speak 100-plus tongues.

Mailed fliers, documents and even some oral communications are translated by a special unit of 107 full- and part-time employees at a cost of $3 million a year. The unit cannot even come close to meeting the demand for translations, acknowledged director Kleber Palma.

Only a few common languages--Armenian, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese--are translated. But there is always a backlog of work, even though “a good portion of schools probably do not know we exist,” Palma said.

The unit does not dare advertise itself even in-house for fear of the deluge. Many schools simply rely on their own bilingual staff members to interpret for students. Some staffers are qualified, Palma said, and others are not.

The court system is similarly overtaxed. A foundation of democracy, the courts proclaim equal justice for everyone. Yet that ideal has been eroded by a critical shortage of certified interpreters, pushing back trial dates and leaving many matters to uncertified replacements who may not grasp the nuances of tongues such as Pashto and Urdu.

The Judicial Council of California, which sets policy for the courts statewide, just boosted the pay for its certified interpreters to stabilize the pool, but the long-range outlook is bleak. In 20 years the need will double, according to the council’s projections.

Hospital emergency rooms and police agencies end up handling even life-or-death conversations with the aid of a 24-hour translation line created by AT&T.; The network with its paid translators, while vital, is a jury-rigged approach lacking the body language and facial expression of a normal conversation.

For years, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center near Watts maintained its own team of six full-time interpreters who roamed the labyrinth of halls and wards doing nothing but translating.

Budget cuts killed the special unit, but there are still 275 hospital employees--out of about 3,000--who receive bilingual bonus pay, and an additional 254 who are known to have at least some knowledge of languages such as Tagalog and Zulu. Their names are kept in a stapled directory so they can be called upon when needed.

One of the language islands near the medical center is the African American community, some of whose members speak English in a form so different from traditional idioms and grammatical rules that scholars like to call it something else: ebonics. While politicians and language scholars both debate to what extent ebonics can be considered a true language, there is no time at the medical center for such abstract discussions. Instead, interpreters must translate English to English, decoding urban street rap for doctors educated as far across the globe as India, Brazil, China and Ethiopia--or Harvard.

Dr. Tessie Cleveland, who supervises King/Drew’s translator program, remembers an exasperated social worker who called about a parent in the pediatrics ward. “She said, ‘I know this lady’s speaking English. I know she is telling me about her child. But I swear I don’t know what she is talking about.’ ”

“Well,” Cleveland said, “the lady was from Mississippi.”

Wrenching medical situations are far more difficult for Spanish- or Punjabi-speaking patients who wonder constantly what is happening in the daunting environs of an English-speaking ward.

Hospital Translator Conveys Hard Truths

A mother lies motionless on life support. To her children, she appears to be sleeping. King/Drew translator Sonia Escobar, who deals mainly with the fast-growing Latino population, must make sure they understand that she breathes only with the aid of a machine.

It is Escobar’s job to convey an array of hard truths to the people she deals with: positive HIV tests, exams confirming child abuse, the progress of malignant tumors. Once, in the psychiatric ward, she found that nightmare case--a man lost in the system. He was elderly and depressed and refusing to eat.

“They thought he was crazy,” Escobar said. “I went and talked to him. He wasn’t confused or anything--he just didn’t have anybody to speak with.”

Escobar put out a bulletin on a Spanish-language radio station. His family came the next day. They were ecstatic; they had been looking along highways all over the region.

Cecilia Miguel has had her own difficulty at a hospital.

The Maya woman is often mistaken for a Spanish-speaker, even though Q’anjob’al is entirely different. People say things to her in Spanish and she doesn’t understand. Much of the time it doesn’t matter, but two years ago, when she entered the maternity ward to have another baby daughter, the confusion caused a trauma that still haunts her.

Miguel doesn’t know the name of the hospital. All she knows is that she gave birth and the nurses began talking. She managed to understand only a single question: Did she want to see the baby?

Yes, she said. Of course.

So they handed over her stillborn child.

Opportunities of Multilingualism

For some, by contrast, language provides opportunities.

American engineers, intent on launching satellites from the equator, had to devise the means to move rockets to a point south of Hawaii. To accomplish the unusual task of loading rockets onto and off a ship, Sea Launch, a consortium largely funded by Boeing, recruited additional engineers from a nation where rockets have always been assembled and transported horizontally: Russia. Ship-building specialists in Norway were hired to customize the floating launch platform.

The project, which launched its first satellite Oct. 9, was made possible by translators and men such as Bohdan “Bo” Bejmuk, a Boeing vice president and integrated-systems expert who speaks four languages--Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and English--not to mention the technical vernacular of a rocket scientist.

He and innumerable others--from the leaders of major corporations to small-time entrepreneurs--are exploiting their own multilingualism for professional and financial gain.

Bejmuk, the white-bearded, avuncular manager of the project’s home port in Long Beach, spent nearly nine months in St. Petersburg, Russia, overseeing engineers while they outfitted the launch ship with computerized hardware. His linguistic versatility proved especially important as crews rushed to meet deadlines for moving the vessel to Long Beach.

“When things are smooth and easy, the necessity is not so obvious,” he said, “but when there is a requirement to ask for something extraordinary . . . when I wanted people to load in extended shifts . . . you have a much better chance if you do that in their own language.”

Language skills create a connection not just to employees, but also to potential consumers.

Hugo Merida, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Guatemala, jets back and forth between Los Angeles and Central America, developing multimillion-dollar commercial projects. Tito Lagos runs one of the largest Spanish-language Web sites--Mundolatino.com--from spartan offices in Duarte. Greg Krikorian helps corporate clients tap into Southern California’s 350,000-member Armenian market. He helped Wells Fargo Bank set up automated teller machines in Armenia so immigrants here can wire money back home.

“Companies are finding that the general market [here] . . . is not growing as fast as the ethnic communities,” said Bill Imada of Imada Wong Communications, a Los Angeles group that restyles English advertising to reach seven local Asian populations.

Anheuser-Busch is one of Imada’s clients. In the competitive, high-stakes arena of beer sales, Busch developed special staff training programs and marketing tactics to boost sales of Budweiser among Latino and Asian Americans, especially in Los Angeles, the top beer-drinking region for those two groups.

One element of the broad strategy is Andrew Hong, 39, a dapper, Korean-born “special market manager” assigned to cultivate business in an ethnically mixed swath of southeast L.A. County.

Hong speaks English, Korean and Spanish and makes daily rounds of the territory for Triangle Distributing Co., visiting markets and liquor stores. He makes sure they are happy with deliveries and are giving adequate display to Budweiser and other Busch products. He chitchats in Korean one place, Spanish another. He keeps Spanish-language stations on his radio presets to stay current on Latino news and culture--even what foods and entertainers are popular.

Where necessary, he offers tips to merchants on dealing with patrons of other cultures.

“Speaking the language is easy,” he said during one morning circuit. “The difficult part is understanding the different customs and translating that to the retailer.”

It takes weeks to visit all 1,500 accounts in a distribution area stretching from Whittier through Lynwood to Compton.

At Don’s Deli in Commerce, owner-cashier Diane Kline runs a family enterprise her father started 28 years ago. Her father, who spoke Chinese, and her mother, who spoke Spanish, were oddities in what was then a predominantly Anglo community.

Now Diane, who speaks only English, is an oddity in an island of Spanish speakers.

“Sometimes they get mad and say, ‘This is a Spanish community, and you should know Spanish,’ ” she said. “I feel like saying, ‘You should learn English.’ But we’ve been here so long we have a really good relationship with all the local people.”

The clientele at her shop tends to be more educated and bilingual than at Gage Liquor a block away, where the clerk, Carlos Leon, speaks only broken English. Gage attracts first-generation Latino Americans.

Hong lobbied the store’s Korean owner to scale down his long work shifts and hire Latino help.

“I said, ‘Give [Leon] a job at the counter--not in the back, not mopping floors,’ ” Hong said. “People will come in and see a familiar face. There might be a trust issue, but sooner or later [the owner has] to trust somebody.”

The Pull of Inward and Outward Forces

Tension is common to all the language islands.

Pulling one way is the desire to join the mainstream, embracing new ways of life and economic opportunity. The opposing impulse is to retreat inward into shared language, culture and values.

The inward force being the more protective, it fosters the deepest emotions. It is a powerful sense of unity that functions beyond the galaxy of the mainstream in sometimes inspiring ways.

Ramin Afra was going to die.

An Iranian immigrant, only 37 and employed as a photographer, but sick with a bad liver, he needed a transplant. He did not have adequate medical insurance to cover bills that would far exceed $100,000.

His story came to the attention of KRSI, Radio Iran, a station that broadcasts in Persian in Los Angeles and other major cities in a national network. Although KRSI’s studios are on Wilshire Boulevard, no one receives the programming but Persian speakers. The special radios with the computer chip to pick up the signal’s modified frequency are available for $50 or $60 in shops catering to Iranians.

KRSI decided to schedule a fund-raising telethon. Jaam-a JamTelevision, a local Iranian outlet, also took part, as did Iranian newspapers and Javanan magazine, an international news and entertainment publication with 2 million readers and U.S. offices in Calabasas.

In only days the Persian-speaking community raised $150,000 to pay for Afra’s transplant.

Hearing Afra’s story, fearing for him, sending in your check, or feeling guilty because you didn’t, are part of the experience of being a Persian-speaker in Los Angeles, a thread in the vast web that draws a community together.

You can feel the same pull in countless ways in any number of communities: watching Japanese-language videos, hearing Armenian news broadcasts, engaging in the ethnocentric repartee at meetings of the Baltic American Freedom League or the Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce. You can feel it reading the columns of the Korea Central Daily, packed every issue with 100 pages of news about “Little Seoul,” as L.A. is called, and about Seoul itself, where a section of the paper is written and laid out before being transmitted here by satellite.

The inward force can make you forget the mainstream, especially if you are new here and speak no English. Time, however, favors the outward force. The pull of better jobs, homes, the beach life, Hollywood movies, rap music, museums, fast food, mixed peer groups--all exert an influence toward the mainstream.

The pull is strongest on the young, creating an uneasy torque in families where cherished customs are falling into disregard and children cannot communicate with their grandparents.

The Hurs are such a family.

Tony Hur and his wife, Young Mi, spent some time in the United States before moving here permanently three years ago, but neither is comfortable in English. Tony speaks it adequately, Young Mi not at all.

Their sons--Chris, 11, and Benjamin, 8--are already drifting to the other side of a language barrier.

They speak English perfectly but have already forgotten much of their native Korean; Benjamin doesn’t speak it at all, although he can still understand when it is spoken to him.

The parents agonize over the language gulf. They fret over what it might mean for their boys as they reach adulthood in a community where most elders still speak Korean and expect to be treated with the respect due them in their culture.

Tony is so committed to a strong English-language education for his sons that the family rents a $1,500-a-month apartment in Beverly Hills, where the boys attend school, rather than live for half the cost in Koreatown.

But he is clearly pained by his sons’ disdain for Korean ways. They want to watch MTV and “The X-Files.”

Tony tries to stop them from watching violent American TV programs and from spending all their time on the phone. He tries to maintain their native language and culture by sending them to private Korean classes during the summer--an effort of only marginal success.

Chris is blunt in his assessment of Korean school: “It’s boring!”

Tony and Young Mi address the boys in Korean at home, but when they don’t understand, Tony resorts to English.

“I want them to study hard,” Tony said, “but they think their parents are different from American parents.”

He teaches them to bow to their elders, but the children don’t see the point.

“Why can’t you just say hi?” Chris complains.

Tony winces. “He’s too Americanized. The older people don’t like that. He’ll have to deal with Koreans. Maybe he’s going to be a doctor. In Koreatown, he’ll have to speak Korean.”

The generation gap has created a cottage industry of language teachers: people teaching foreign tongues in L.A. so that children can talk with their elders.

“[It is] the only way we can have a good relationship with them,” said Shirin Nooravi, an Iranian parent who teaches Persian classes in Westwood and the San Fernando Valley and hosts a children’s radio show on KRSI.

Her classrooms are filled with the likes of 10-year-old Sharukh Dinshah, who has toiled for a year and a half and is still learning to print words in the Persian alphabet, and 17-year-old Raspina Jannesar, who studies Persian even while her Persian-speaking mother learns English.

Language is so bound up with culture that rifts in one become rifts in the other.

Darya Riyahi, who is fluent in both languages at 18, resents her father’s strict Iranian values; she uses the language barrier as a shield.

“I don’t really communicate with him,” she said. “My dad tries to learn English. He can speak, but he can’t really express what’s on his mind.”

In Koreatown there is a term for young people--not necessarily teens--who are beyond their parents’ immigrant isolationism and not quite fully assimilated in the manner of the second or third generation. They call themselves the “1.5 generation”--the “1.5ers”--a thin slice of culture that arises from this place on the map.

In Korean-tinged English, they express a world view born of immigrant roots and American sensibilities. They feel as alien in Seoul as in Redondo Beach.

The Passkey That Opens Any Door

In churches, in night classes, in living rooms and in public schools, immigrants by the thousands labor to learn English. It is the gold passkey that opens any door. Learning English means more than better jobs and a better understanding of the world around you; it means a voice in that world.

“Political power,” says one Korean businessman, “means voting, which means citizenship, which means English.”

But the American dream is often too much for one lifetime. Only after decades do significant numbers of immigrants move into positions of wealth and influence.

A woman like Ana Jurado never gets there. Fleeing the violence of El Salvador, she came here in 1972 knowing only Spanish and worked in the sweatshops. She had a son and was arrested two months later for not having papers.

Thrown in jail, she cried hysterically when her baby was shipped off like a CARE package to her homeland. Eventually, she was deported too but stubbornly returned with her family a few seasons later, settling down in the relative calm of South-Central Los Angeles.

It was 13 years before Jurado could find time between baby-sitting and cutting hair and being a mother to take English classes. In time she became a citizen, but her life would be, by some measures, inconsequential except for the springboard she has given her children.

Her oldest son is 26 now; the boy shipped temporarily back to El Salvador has grown into a sophisticated young intellectual who learned English by the fourth grade. Randy Jurado Ertll went on to attend Occidental College, avidly interested in the political power of ethnic enclaves. He currently works organizing candidate forums and registering immigrants to vote on behalf of the California League of Conservation Voters.

“There’s hundreds of languages . . . [and] I don’t think they’re well represented,” said Ertll, who is part of a wave of activists and minority elected officials bringing unprecedented clout to non-English-speaking communities, both regionally and statewide.

The rise of Latino political involvement is well documented. Latinos represent a potent bloc in Sacramento. Other groups now follow that model. The mayors of Artesia, Carson and Cerritos all hail from foreign shores--Portugal, the Philippines and Taiwan, respectively.

Inevitably, the expanding language islands force change upon the mainstream--sometimes in new laws about housing and immigration, sometimes in a thing as simple as the look of a city street.

Change was apparent in Monterey Park in the early 1980s, most conspicuously in Chinese-language signs sprouting like summer dandelions. Some longtime white residents, locked in a vision of what the town was and should be, did not like it one bit.

They drove down the venerable business quarter of Garvey Avenue and found themselves suddenly unable to tell a flower shop from a hardware store. The Paris Cafe, a popular spot for kaffeeklatsches, became a noodle house.

The angriest spawned a backlash, circulating petitions to demand a law mandating signs in English only. Months and months of tension and debate led to a compromise ordinance, in 1985, requiring signs in Chinese script to also display English words or at least Roman-style lettering so Anglos could pronounce the Chinese names.

The measure defused some of the animosity--years later, Monterey Park is a mainly peaceable place--but the community of the past is no more.

Steady streams of Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking immigrants, along with lesser numbers of Vietnamese and English-speaking Japanese, turned this town of more than 60,000 into the first city on the U.S. mainland with an Asian majority--57%, compared to 31% Latino and only 12% white.

In such a thriving enclave, many Chinese--especially older immigrants--are able to live year in and year out without having to concern themselves with English. There are Mandarin and Cantonese newspapers and cable outlets and an extensive catalog of Chinese-language literature at the public library.

Even here, however, the outward force is clearly evident.

On a rack in the same library are instructional videos to help deal with everyday situations in English. Titles include: “Asking Directions,” “Getting a Ticket” and “Pot Luck Picnic.” In a nearby back room, women from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Guangzhou stare at their English course books.

They yearn to know English just as immigrants to America yearned 200 years ago. English remains one of the unseen filters that separate those who function well here from those who scrape and struggle--the haves from the have-nots. You can see it in the schools, see it in wage statistics, see it in the class divisions that color our boutiques and restaurants and neighborhoods.

You can even see it on a dusty street corner in North Hollywood, where laborers gather after dawn.

The scene is always the same: about 100 men huddled at outdoor tables, waiting for contractors to drive up and offer $7-an-hour work.

The jobs are doled out by lottery: English speakers put their tickets in one jar, non-English speakers in another. The odds here, as everywhere, favor the English speakers; every contractor wants one or more per crew. Those who speak only Spanish or Q’anjob’al or Quiche (another language of Guatemala) may wait all day--even two or three--for a few precious dollars to pay the rent on cheap shared apartments.

Twice a week, the unlucky fill the idle hours by crowding into a narrow white trailer, where a snow-haired, 77-year-old volunteer named Paul Wangsness teaches classes in English.

He calls it la idioma de la calle--the language of the street--the most elemental phrases for tasks such as loading cartons or scraping asbestos. Wangsness steps to a drawing board and writes out “WILL” and “WHEEL.”

“So if I say, ‘Take the tire,’ I’m talking about this kind of ‘wheel,’ ” he tells the rows of inquiring faces. “If I say, ‘Will you take this junk?’ I’m talking about this kind of ‘will.’ ”

Watching him teach, drilling home commands like “wet down the dirt” and “use the coarse sandpaper,” you can feel the enormous challenge these men face, the hard work ahead.

“You have to listen,” Wangsness says emphatically. “Escuchar.”

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A Towering Babble

Language experts say that the world’s most widely spoken languages are English and Chinese.

*

World’s Top 10 Languages (native speakers)

1. Mandarin Chinese: 726 million

2. English: 427 million*

3. Spanish: 266 million

4. Hindi: 182 million

5. Arabic: 181 million

6. Portuguese: 165 million

7. Bengali: 162 million

8. Russian: 158 million

9. Japanese: 124 million

10. German: 121 million

*

English as first language: 427 million*

English as second language: 350 million

Countries where English is most-taught language: 100

Countries where English has some official status: 70, more than any other language.

*estimates vary

*

TALKING IN CLASS

Schools in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties with the most languages spoken by students not proficient in English:

*--*

High School County Languages Spoken Fountain Valley Orange 26 El Camino Real Los Angeles 24 Arcadia Los Angeles 24 Moreno Valley Riverside 23 La Sierra Orange 23 Redlands San Bernardino 22

*--*

*

Languages spoken by at least 1,000 students in the five-county area who are not proficient in English:

*--*

Language Speakers Spanish 753,505 Vietnamese 20,563 Korean 12,463 Armenian 12,021 Cantonese 9,014 (Cambodian) 7,169 Mandarin 6,550 Tagalog (Pilipino) 6,474 Arabic 2,857 Japanese 2,630 Farsi (Persian) 2,490 Russian 2,189 Thai 1,205 Lao 1,138 Urdu 1,000

*--*

*

SAY WHAT?

A dozen ways to say “I don’t understand” in Southern California:

Arabic (men): Mish fahem

Arabic (women): Mish fahmeh

Armenian: Yes chem huskenur

Chinese (Cantonese): Ngoh m-ming

Chinese (Mandarin): Wo bu dong

Farsi: Man ne’me’ fah’mam

Japanese: Wakarimasen

Korean: Juh-neun eehae-haji mot haget-ssum-nida

Russian: Ya nye ponimayu

Spanish: No comprendo

Vietnamese: Toi khong hieu

Yiddish: Ikh veys nikht

*

THE OFFICIAL WORD

California is the most linguistically diverse state in the nation, with more than 200 languages and innumerable dialects.

* The Los Angeles Police Department has officers who speak 60 languages and several dialects. Some are fluent in American Sign Language, Lithuanian, Finnish, Romanian, Urdu or Yugoslavian, in addition to more common local languages such as Spanish and Korean.

* The secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar of voters print voter registration documents in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Tagalog and Korean.

* The state Department of Motor Vehicles translates documents into 30 languages, including Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Polish and Tongan.

*

Number of Spanish-language documents: 216

Number of foreign-language publcations: 295

Number of bilingual staff: 1,400

*

The courts hear testimony in more than 100 languages, from Afghani to Zapotec.

Number of full-workday equivalents served by interpreters in California trial courts in fiscal 1998-99: 193,909

Number of full-workday equivalents served by interpreters in Los Angeles Superior and Municipal courts in fiscal 1998-99: 91,600

Number of certified Spanish interpreters contracted with Los Angeles County: 370

Number of certified interpreters in other languages contracted with Los Angeles County: 30

*

Sources: California Dept. of Education Language Census; Los Angeles Police Dept.; Judicial Council of California; California secretary of state; Los Angeles County registrar of voters; California Dept. of Motor Vehicles; U.S. Census Bureau; “English as a Global Language,” by David Crystal; The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language; “The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way,” by Bill Bryson; Web site https://www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/understa.htm

Researched by DOUG SMITH and NONA YATES/Los Angeles Times

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The Landscape of Speech: Diversity Spreads . . .

The diversity of languages in Southern California has exploded, with more than 120 now spoken in the region. In 1981, 139 schools had 10 or more languages spoken by students not fluent in English. By 1999, that number had grown more than fivefold, to 792 schools--one in four in the five-county area, a Times computer analysis of state Education Department data shows.

. . . as Languages Cluster

Language groups concentrated in distinct neighborhoods are transforming the social landscape of Southern California--Russian in West Hollywood, Farsi in Beverly Hills, Mission Viejo and Laguna Niguel, Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley, Khmer in Long Beach. Armenian speakers, clustering in the Glendale area, are the most concentrated language population. By contrast, Korean speakers, while numerous, are widely dispersed across the region. One of the least linguistically diverse parts of the region is the central part of Los Angeles County, in which the foreign language predominantly spoken is Spanish.

*

Source: California Dept. of Education

Data analysis by DOUG SMITH / Los Angeles Times

About This Series

Islands of distinct languages dot the Southern California landscape, shaping our society. Islands of nerve cells in the brain control how we speak. The world’s endangered languages are isolated islands ever in peril of being overwhelmed. This series explores how language shapes our world and the new discoveries that shape our understanding of language.

Today: Southern California’s present may be the world’s linguistic future: English dominant, but coexisting with scores of other tongues.

Monday: New research on how the brain handles language guides the surgeon’s knife to save life and speech.

Tuesday: More than 3,000 languages worldwide are in danger of disappearing, but dogged supporters are bringing some back from the brink.