It takes more than a language to unify a nation

[Lynne Murphy]

>From where I'm sitting (in the UK), multiple languages on packages looks
more like the effect of globalization than of minority language rights.
People want to sell their products to as many people/countries as possible,
and smaller companies can't afford to have different packaging for every
country, so in Europe you get the ingredients in 12 or so languages. (Not
on the products of big multinationals or strictly national companies,
though.)  In the US, it may be that some manufacturers are putting Spanish
on their labels not just in order to sell the goods in America, but also to
sell them in Mexico.  (Free trade agreement, and all that.)  I'm not
doubting that a lot of such packaging, especially from big companies, is to
appeal to the US Spanish market, but it could be the case that forcing
companies not to have Spanish on their labels could create more cost for
some than English-only products.

Lynne

--On Monday, February 26, 2007 4:01 pm -0800 "James A. Landau"
<JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote:

> About those multi-lingual labels:
>
> Don't forget that in Canada there is a law (I don't know if it applies to
> all of Canada or only just to Quebec) that consumer products must have
> labels in French.  Hence any vendor in the United States who wants to
> sell his products in Canada must add French to the label, whether or not
> the vendor expects to sell to any significant number of Francophones
> south of the border.
>
> Multilingual labels are nothing new; they are merely more common
> nowadays.  Back in the 1950's the Landau family had a metal Nabisco
> cracker box that we used to store crackers (from any vendor).  Of the
> four sides of the box, three were in English and one was in Spanish.
>
> Hispanic communities in the US differ from 19th century
> non-English-speaking communities in that the 19th century ones consisted
> of immigrants who intended to stay in the States, whereas the Hispanic
> ones of today generally contain a fair number of transients, both legal
> (i.e. green-card) and illegal, who have not (yet?) made the commitment to
> become permanent residents (and hopefully citizens) of the US, and who
> therefore do not feel as much need to learn English as did the people who
> came in through Ellis Island.
>
> Aside---someone should inform Congressman King that the rule about a
> person born in the US automatically being a US citizen is, if I remember
> correctly, due to a Supreme Court ruling and therefore cannot be changed
> by Congress.
>
>     - Jim Landau
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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