Immigration no threat to English use in U.S.: study

[deadparrot]

PHOENIX (Reuters) - U.S. citizens concerned that Latino immigrants will have them singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish can rest easy, according to an academic study published on Wednesday.

A report in the Population and Development Review found that far from threatening the dominance of English, most Latin American immigrants to the United States lose their ability to speak Spanish over the course of a few generations.

The study by sociologists Frank Bean and Ruben Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, and Douglas Massey from Princeton, drew on two surveys investigating adaptation by immigrant communities in California and south Florida.

It concluded that by the third generation, most descendants of immigrants are "linguistically dead" in their mother tongue.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060913/ts_nm/immigration_usa_english_dc

[Kutjara]

1. Wayul, ah fur won ahm glayd dem furners ain't....

...gunna mess none wit d'pure beooty a da Inglush langwich.

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. This has been the case...

...since large-scale immigration began a hundred and thirty years ago, with every ethnic group. I never understood the urgency of this issue with some people.

[Xipe Totec]

3. Well, take me, for example

Native born Mexican, 90th percentile GRE verbal scores.

My sons are monolingual English speakers.

And my father was a reverse immigrant, from the USA back to Mexico.

What are they worried about anyway? :shrug:

[Igel]

4. One cannot be 'linguistically dead' in their 'mother tongue.'

Unless by 'mother tongue' is meant 'the language of one's ancestors.' It's as foolish as saying a person never learned "their" culture.

Apparently Gaelic is my 'mother tongue' since my ancestors long before migration to the US undoubtedly spoke it, or perhaps Common Celtic, or maybe Proto-Indo-European, or maybe even Nostratic or even (snicker) Proto-World. Too bad: I've never learned more than a couple of words in my 'mother tongue.'

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. That has been my experience, too

I've met second-generation Americans of German, Latvian, Norwegian, and Japanese descent, and even if they speak their ancestral language, they speak it with what sounds like an American accent. Many, like the American-born children of the Korean sandwich shop owners I knew in Portland, don't speak their ancestral language beyond a few words.)

The reason that there are so many Latinos who appear to be "refusing" to learn English (although the people who complain about such immigrants never explain how they know a particular person's life experiences, such as how long he or she has been in the U.S.).

One thing I know for sure: there are a lot of Americans living in Tokyo who actually do refuse to learn Japanese. Some rely on their spouses or partners to interpret for them. I even knew one family whose children had never learned Japanese, even though they'd come over when the kids were under five, so all they would have had to do was put them in a Japanese kindergarten or daycare center. The parents actually told me that I was wasting my time studying Japanese, because "all you need is a few phrases."

There's also my cousin, who married a German woman while serving in the U.S. military over there and retired to his wife's hometown. He still doesn't speak German, even after nearly thirty years in Germany and does all his socializing with U.S. military types.

These resolutely monolingual Americans are affluent, and therefore lack the excuse that the usually poor and hardworking Latino immigrants (some of whom are illiterate in Spanish) have for not learning the language of their host country.