Emmanuelle grew up speaking French, according to IMDb. A lot of people in the US speak Spanish, yeah - nationally, there's no 'official' language, but Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language here. Plenty of us don't know enough to say hello or goodbye, but a lot of people do know at least a bit. Ultimately, it really depends on where the person lives and where they go to school that would dictate whether they're likely to have a working knowledge of the language - I'd expect the number to be especially high in a major city or somewhere with a large Spanish-speaking population (like NYC). Two of the characters having some knowledge of the language is certainly within the realm of possibility. I tend to give more leeway where Jo in concerned at this point since the character is new. Her going to Spain for the FBI several years ago makes sense since we know so little about her - a bit convenient for the plot, of course, but then this is CSI:NY. Personally, my main beef with the Lindsay portion of it in this episode was the context and the delivery. Learning Spanish (or teaching your kid to speak it) is never a bad thing, but to me the whole thing just seemed to be shoehorned into the episode as a way to say 'Danny and Lindsay are married and have a kid, remember? And Lindsay is clever!'
The US is one of the only (the only other I can think of is the Vatican) country with no official language. Numerous states do have English as their official language, but in the rest of the country it's de facto. Spanish is the official language in Puerto Rico (although the tax forms and government documents are in Spanish (Spain) rather than the local dialect). In Hawaii, Hawaiian is an official language. Most things that you buy have directions in English, Spanish, often French and sometimes another random language. Where I grew up you don't have to take a foreign language at all, but in high school if you get an advanced diploma (like I did) then you can take 3 years of 1 language or 2 years of 2 languages. The choices were basically Spanish, French, German and Latin. In college if you get a degree in arts (like I did) then you're required to take a language but for a bachelors of science you don't have to. Only recently are they starting to teach another language in elementary school, and here that language is Mandarin Chinese. Each state/county/school system has their own curriculum. Certain parts of the country, particularly places like Florida, Texas, California and the southwest in general have much larger hispanic populations, which also makes since since all those places used to be Spanish territory. Interestingly in Hawaii everything is in English and Japanese, so it does depend on the area where you live. I just find it odd that Danny had no clue his wife knew any Spanish. Surely in NYC they have had suspects or whatnot who spoke Spanish. If they wanted Lindsay to know some Spanish that's fine, she could have taken it in high school/college, but after years to just spring it out of no where?
*enter linguistics student!* - nope, there are many nations that don't have official languages. the uk is one of them (although wales is the exception, as it's officially bilingual, much like canada), obviously the us, australia doesn't - in all these places (and many more) it's de facto. that's just english, and also only a small section of the nations that "are" english, the same goes in many other places, official language imposition is actually the minority. in fact it seems the only places that do have official languages are those where there's been some kind of dispute over what it should be - for instance in wales there was a concerted effort to dredge welsh back up after it'd been all but wiped out by the english, in many us states there's an official drive to promote/negate spanish, in canada etc. oh and in france where they're just really really particular about these things
Definitely the worst in the season so far...C+ for me..The case was so boring I almost fell asleep..This CSI guy from Barcelona irritated me a lot...