Policy Considerations for Promoting Heritage, Community, and Native American Languages

Abstract

From a public policy perspective, the promotion of heritage, community, and Native American languages in the United States poses a number of challenges. Historically, the maintenance and promotion of heritage languages has largely been left to the resources and desires of language minority communities. Throughout much of U.S. history, given the dominance and spread of English, there has been a three-generation shift to English, as was observed by Veltman during the 1980s (Veltman, 1983). The typical pattern among immigrant language minorities until fairly recently has been that the first generation acquired some English but remained dominant in the native tongue; the second generation became bilingual but often had more developed literacy skills in English; and the third generation tended to be English speaking with little functional ability in the language of the grandparents. More recently, however, there is some evidence that the shift to English is occurring even more rapidly among some immigrant populations. Veltman (2000) noted a more rapid shift, wherein “the rates of language shift to English are so high that all minority languages are routinely abandoned, depriving the United States of one type of human resource that may be economically and politically desirable both to maintain and develop” (p. 58). Further evidence of rapid language shift has also been noted by Portes and Rumbaut (2001, 2005, 2006) and by the Pew Hispanic Center (2004). The situation is aptly summarized by Rumbaut (2009), who concludes,The death of languages in the United States is not only an empirical fact, but part of a global process of “language death” . . . [A] foreign language represents a scarce resource in a global economy; immigrants’ efforts to maintain that part of their cultural heritage and to pass it on to their children certainly seem worth supporting. Indeed the United States finds itselfenmeshed in global economic competition . . . [t]he second generation, now growing up in many American cities could fulfill such a need.