Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California

Abstract

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH generally supports the view that Latin Americans in the United States assimilate linguistically. Studies using data from the US Census and other official statistics (Alba and Nee 2003; see also Alba et al. 2002; Bean and Stevens 2003), as well as investigations based on longitudinal surveys conducted among the children of immigrants (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006), reveal a quick shift to English fluency, if not outright dominance, between the first and second generations. Nevertheless, research on immigrant language retention has been hampered by a lack of data on language use or ability broken down by generation. Surveys that focus on the children of immigrants, by definition, permit only a contrast between first and second generations. Moreover, because the US Census Bureau eliminated the question on parents’ place of birth after 1970, it is no longer possible to distinguish generations using census data, forcing researchers into crude native-born/foreign-born comparisons. In his controversial book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel P. Huntington (2004) argued that the arrival of Latin American immigrants in large numbers during the last three decades of the twentieth century threatens the core of American identity and culture in the twenty-first century. According to Huntington, Latin American immigrants are much less likely to speak English than earlier generations of European immigrants because they all speak a common language; they are regionally concentrated and residentially segregated within Spanish-speaking enclaves; they are less interested in linguistic and cultural assimilation; and they are encouraged in this lack of interest by activists who foment identity politics. He is particularly pessimistic about the prospects of Mexi-