Heritage Language Labor Market Returns: The Importance of Speaker Density at the State Level

Abstract

Vocal public opinion and mainstream media encourage immigrants to adopt English as their new standard of communication in the USA (Volkova et al. 2018), which generates assimilation tension within these communities (International Journal of Multilingualism 15(4):329–348 2018; Online Submission 12(2):65–86 2018). In the context of English-First (EF) movements and resulting difficulties that immigrants face, we investigate the extent to which continuing the use of a heritage language in a predominantly monolingual economy is monetarily beneficial. Using the Public Use Microdata Sets, we find suggestive evidence of a concave relationship between the proportion of a state’s population that speaks a non-majority language in the home and economic outcomes such as income and employment. Our descriptive analysis indicates the existence of benefits of speaking a heritage language for an individual in such an environment, implies that EF movements do not benefit immigrant populations overall, and implies a non-zero population proportion in which benefits to speaking a heritage language are maximized.