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This study examined patterns of language adaptation by over 5,000 secondgeneration students in south Florida and southern California. It found that among most immigrant nationalities, knowledge of and preference for English is nearly universal, that only a minority remain fluent in their parents' languages, and there are wide variations among immigrant groups in the extent of their retention of these languages. The authors used multivariate and multilevel analyses to identify the principal factors accounting for variation in foreign language maintenance and bilingualism They found that a number of variables emerged as significant predictors, but these variables do not account for differences among immigrant nationalities, such as between children of Asian and Hispanic backgrounds, that become even more sharply delineated. The reasons for this divergence are explored and their policy implications are discussed.
The controversy over immigration to the United States frequently centers on the effects that the mass of newcomers will have on the continuing dominance of English. From different ideological quarters, opponents of immigration have raised alarm about the linguistic fragmentation that the present flow of immigrants can create and the attendant dangers of increasing ethnic militancy and conflict. A national movement, U.S. English, has championed a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the land and has persuaded voters in several states to pass declarations to that effect (Crawford 1992; Riley 1998). Yet, the question can be approached from another angle. As Lieberson, Dalto, and Johnston (1975) showed, the United States is a veritable cemetery of foreign languages, in that knowledge of the mother tongues of hundreds of immigrant groups has rarely lasted past the third generation. In no other country that these authors studied has the process of language assimilation and the shift to monolingualism been so swift.
Fishman (1966) and Veltman (1983) described the structure of this linguistic shift as a three-generation process. That is, the immigrant generation learns as much English as it can but speaks the mother tongue at home; the second generation may speak the mother tongue at home but shifts to unaccented English at school and in the workplace; by the third generation, English becomes the home language, and effective knowledge of the parental tongue disappears. The pressure exerted by native-born Americans on the...