(ITA - 2002 - 1a Fase)THE GREAT ENGLISH DIVIDE Ant

(ITA - 2002 - 1a Fase)

THE GREAT ENGLISH DIVIDE

        Antonio Sanz might as well have won
the lottery. In 1965, when the small,
curly-haired Spaniard was 10, an American
professor asked his parents if she might take
the boy to the U.S. and enroll him in public
school. They agreed. America seemed to offer
a brighter future than the dairy farms where
his father worked in the foothills north of
Madrid. Sanz left, but came back to Spain
every summer with stories from Philadelphia
and boxes of New World artifacts: Super
Balls, baseball cards, and Bob Dylan records.
        His real prize, though, was English.
Sanz learned fast, and by senior year he
outscored most of his honors English
classmates in the verbal section of the
Scholastic Aptitude Test. In those days, back
in his hometown of Colmenar Viejo, English
seemed so exotic that kids would stop him on
the street and ask him to say a few
sentences. By the time he graduated from
Hamilton College in Clinton, N. Y., and
moved back to Spain, American companies
there were nearly as excited. He landed in
Procter & Gamble Co.
        Sanz, now 46 and a father of three,
employs his Philadelphia English as an
executive at Vodafone PLC in Madrid. But
something funny has happened to his second
language. These days, English is no longer
special, or odd, or even foreign. In Paris,
Düsseldorf, Madrid, and even in the streets
of Colmenar Viejo, English has put down
roots. “What else can we speak?” Sanz asks.
(...)

Business Week Aug 13, 2001.

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