Originally posted by Gaffer
Importnat opint her is that he's not trying to enforce it....he's suggesting it. Enforcing it would be the first step into a George Orwell novel...

How to you quantify maintainence of culture anyway? Does a Pakistani family speaking English at home qualify them as "not-being-Pakistani"? I don't think that it does at all.

I'll give you a real example: my wife is Japanese, who came to the UK as a 13 year old. she is now 29, speaks English with and English accent. She has a western attitude, down to the way she walks, dresses, speaks etc. When they were in the UK, her father spoke english to her at home.

She's 13 when she wenk to the UK, so she basically half-grew up in Japan. That allows her to retain her culture. Had she been 3 then she'd have been likely assimilated.

Different cultures have a different way of thinking; when you start to think in a different way then that's when you lose your cultural identiy (from a minority POV).

And a pakistani family speaking english at home does not qualify as non-pakistani, but its the still a step towards losing their culture

there are two groups: the youngins, and hte older people. you're not going to force a 30 year old to give up his/her cultural identity...you can't even force a 15 year old to really. but a 6, 7 year old (or younger) can really lose his/her cultural idenitty really quickly and that process is expidited very qucikly by speaking a "foreign" language at home.

-C