Although I don’t know where she picked up her pronunciation accent.

[caption id=“attachment_6459” align=“aligncenter” width=“527”] Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]

Nobody that I personally know was truly raised bilingual. My parents purposely taught me English first. Whatever Spanish I knew before learning it in third grade was picked up from visiting my grandparents. It was mostly limited to asking for food items and very generalized expressions of my state of being. Danielle was taught Vietnamese and learned English in preschool. Pretty much all of our cousins were raised with one language or the other as the primary language spoken at home. My house was pretty much only English unless my parents were trying to talk about something we kids weren’t supposed to understand. Danielle’s parents came to the US at a much older age than my parents (nearly twice as old) so English is laborious to them - they can understand it well enough to only be tripped up by the most esoteric of expressions (eg “like water off a duck’s back”), but can’t express complex ideas eloquently in English. Or, to put it another way, my father-in-law loves to tell jokes - he almost never tells any in English.

Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.

I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent.  And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness as in the US.  All I can do is view these songs through the perspective of an American.  The song that sparked this article is by La Banda Gorda and is called “El Negro Pega Con Todo” which means “black matches with everything”.  I’d heard it before, but I was listening a little more closely to the introduction this time around.

One awesome thing that is easy to notice in free/libre software is how international it is.  While proprietary software is mainly based out of the US - Windows/OSX - free/libre software comes from all over the place. Mandriva is based out of Brazil and France.  SUSE was originally developed in Germany.  Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Gnome, was born in Mexico.  Choqok, the best KDE-native microblogging software is created by an Iranian.  So something that Linux has always done better than Windows is support more languages. Microsoft has to pay to create language translations so they have to make a market analysis about which languages to support (and it still doesn’t cover non-Microsoft programs)  With Linux, it’s all volunteer work (or paid by companies that care about localization) and if the programs are written correctly for KDE and Gnome, they will all be able to take advantage of the translation work for their program.  “Save” should probably translate well across all well-written programs.  I think this is one of the reason why all the regions of Spain have their own Linux distros.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I would guess that Windows probably only comes out in Castillian (official or regular Spanish) and not in Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, etc