English only Web sites lose Hispanics

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=de3588a84e9ccff5

Big News Network.com Saturday 20th August, 2005 (UPI)

U.S. merchants lose tens of billions of dollars in sales a year, because their Web sites are only in English.

Hispanics have $575 billion in purchasing power, reports Forrester magazine and the research company of the same name.

The Hispanic online population grew 43 percent from 2003 to 2004, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, making Hispanics the fastest-growing online group.

Forty-two percent of Hispanics prefer to speak Spanish and 31 percent of Hispanics say they speak as much Spanish as they do English, according to Forrester.

more...

Welcome to a New America...

[Maple]

1. That seems remarkably dumb

of the merchants.

[ugarte]

2. Bilingual's kind of like being bisexual

You increase your chances 100%. You would think merchants would realize that.

[HKTech]

3. Reads like an Advertisement for a

Spanish Language Webdesigner.

Anyhow, you notice there's no evidence of them saying XX Percentage of Hispancs will only shop with Spaninsh Language Websites. Or Spanish language online stores sales have been growing with the increase of Hispanic web useage.

[alarcojon]

4. A new America indeed

even Bush is smart enough to try to court us!

How hard can it be to offer content in Spanish along with English? Why not include other widely spoken languages as well?

Monolingualism is a disease, but it can be cured.

[aquart]

8. Ever heard of the Tower of Babel?

Every other immigrant group has entered this nation and learned the language. And we are the richer for it.

But segmenting and segregating us into separate little linguistic islands, so that we can no longer speak to each other?

Brilliant. Smartest idea ever. And which languages do you propose to print all government and commercial documents in? Spanish, of course. French? Not enough French? Viet Namese? Chinese? Which dialect? Japanese? Laotian? Hindi? Greek? Armenian? Farsi? Russian? Basque? Korean? Italian? Arabic? Hebrew? Polish? Latvian? Lithuanian? Portuguese? Swedish? Welsh? Cornish? Finnish? Dutch? Walloons? Shoshone? Nahuatl? Cherokee? Sioux? Swahili?

Which language will you approve, and which discriminate against?

Come on, let's cure that "disease" of mutual comprehension.

[alarcojon]

11. Take it easy, pal

The thread is about companies helping their bottom line by offering services in Spanish as well as English. Does the thought of that upset you?

Did I say anything about the official language of government being expanded beyond English? Of course I didn't, but it is an interesting assumption on your part.

Which part of "widely spoken languages" didn't you understand? I guess you needed to skip over that part so you could hit me with the old slippery slope argument.

Lastly, you really should look up monolingualism. It means that you speak one language. I am proposing that we should all strive to speak many languages. You might notice that that includes Spanish-speaking immigrants learning English. In fact, for the record, I think that all immigrants to this country should learn English as quickly and as well as they can. But our society would be much richer if monolingual Americans learned to appreciate the languages, and by extension the cultures, of the people we share our cultural space with.

Mine is an argument for greater mutual comprehension, which you have distorted for reasons of your own.

[Robert Oak]

13. LOL that's really true

If the US accomodated every recent immigrant (and this assumes
they are here legally) the road signs would be so long we'd get into accidents trying to find the English translation.

Could you see product labels?

Gee wiz, the US is only the melting pot and pretty much every language
has immigrated here at one time or another.

[Maple]

5. Texas Becomes a Majority-Minority State

EL PASO, Texas (AP) - Texas has become the fourth state to have a non-white majority population, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday, a trend driven by a surging number of Hispanics moving to the state.

According to the population estimates based on the 2000 Census, about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities. In the 2000 Census, minorities made up about 47 percent of the population in the second-largest state.

Texas joins California, New Mexico and Hawaii as states with majority-minority populations - with Hispanics the largest group in every state but Hawaii, where it is Asian-Americans.

Five other states - Maryland, Mississippi, Georgia, New York and Arizona - aren't far behind, with about 40 percent minorities.


http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050811/D8BTJN0O0.html

[DivinBreuvage]

6. I never buy from merchants who can't communicate in Burgundian

Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of stuff :(

[Maple]

7. Dutch people have rights too

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bnpu/hd_bnpu.htm

[DivinBreuvage]

10. So they do, and I love the Dutch, but what has this to do with Burgundian?

As a language it went out about 900 years before the parvenus in your link came on the scene, my pet! It is dead, dead, dead. :cry:

[aquart]

9. Good. You have money in the bank.

Or, if there are no Burgundian banks, at least in your mattress.

[DivinBreuvage]

12. Always important to look on the bright side! Thank you, Aquart! n/t

[Mairead]

14. And the reason for the "grew 43%" is the destructive Hispanic birthrate

During the period 2001-2004, Spanish-culture people accounted for HALF the total US population increase, though representing less than 1/7 of the population. Their 2003 birthrate was 3.6X the non-Spanish-culture birthrate. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/09/national/main700582.shtml)

That's destructive. There's no other word for it, except maybe 'insane'. I think blame for it can be assigned with confidence to the natalist, anti-woman character of RC church dogma, and to the culture of 'machismo' with its lunatic emphasis on getting women pregnant.

We're already well over the earth's natural carrying capacity, sustaining our tightrope act with technology. What happens when we can no longer afford the energy to run sewage treatment, water purification, pumping, garbage removal, etc?

The last thing we need is more human beings!

[SoCalDem]

15. It seems to be a pretty easy "fix"..

There are certainly webmasters/designers who are hispanic.. Why not just build a ",irror" site to the one they already have..only have a Spanish Language button that will take Spanish speakers to the website they can read?

I have visited websites fron foreign countries and some have an English version :shrug: