Hispanic Jobs

Is speaking Spanish acceptable in your office?

The LatPro office may not qualify as a case study in the debate on whether speaking Spanish in the office is divisive or not. After all, it is our business.

From an English-only employee, I do not find Spanish in the workplace threatening at all. Some contend that cliques form and adversely affect the business or that people are talking about the non-bilinguals right in front of them. If that is the case, then there are other issues in your company that you need to address. For example, people tend to find people they enjoy spending time with and form office cliques around many things that have zero to do with language—conversation at lunch, they like to talk sports (go Phillies), they enjoy American Idol, or whatever. So why the problem with Spanish speaking at work? And if there is gossiping in Spanish at the office, that is a problem. But you’ve got to work in a company where employees respect one another and trust them to be professionals, so work on it if that’s an issue—it has less to do with the language than you think.

My advice to my fellow non-bilinguals (otherwise known as monolinguals or Americans in a joke an Argentinian friend told me): Either learn Spanish OR use the opportunity to take a break. Both at work and at home, for me, Spanish conversation is actually a relief. It means that the person or people speaking are not talking to me and I can tune them out—kind’ve a mini-at-the-office-work-vacation where I can focus on other tasks.

What do you think about it? How does your office handle it?

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