Evaluation of Kirk Semple’s “Immigrants Who Speak Indigenous Languages Encounter Isolation”
As Kirk Semple shows in “Immigrants Who Speak Indigenous Languages Encounter Isolation” many Mexican and Central American immigrants in the U.S. are isolated from their communities because they know neither English nor Spanish. Instead, they are speakers of their hometown native languages—dialects like Mixtec—which make it impossible for them to integrate into either the Spanish communities in the U.S. or into the mainstream English-speaking world of America. This paper will show why there is a need for more services to be provided to these immigrants so that they do not have to live their lives in fear or want.
The biggest problems that immigrants from Central America face are ultimately linguistic—especially if they are from communities in Central America where Spanish (the language that most people expect Latinos to speak) was never adopted. As Semple shows, “these language barriers, combined with widespread illiteracy, have posed significant challenges to their survival, from finding work to gaining access to health care, seeking help from the police, and getting legal redress in the courts” (574). Immigrants who suffer from “linguistic isolation” (Semple 574) have no recourse but to try to pick up a smattering of Spanish so that they can at least manage to fend...
Works Cited
Semple, Kirk. “Immigrants Who Speak Indigenous Languages Encounter Isolation.” In
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