The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by Wilson Charles Reagan Montgomery Michael Johnson Ellen

Author:Wilson, Charles Reagan, Montgomery, Michael, Johnson, Ellen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2007-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND SHIFT.

Recent years have witnessed attempts to make English the official language at both state and national levels. Proponents of official English argue that new immigrants, particularly Latinos, are less willing to learn English than previous generations of immigrants. However, this belief is not borne out by data from large-scale studies. For example, in 2002 the Pew Hispanic Research Center surveyed a well-stratified sample of the U.S. Latino adult population. The survey results showed that 61 percent of U.S.-born respondents considered themselves to be English-dominant, and 35 percent considered themselves bilingual. Fully 78 percent of third-generation and later respondents considered themselves English-dominant, and only 22 percent considered themselves bilingual.

Information from large-scale surveys is confirmed by ethnographic work in Texas communities. For example, a recent study of language use in Mexican-descent families in Texas and California was able to locate very few children of U.S.-born mothers who had developed substantial productive ability in Spanish. In the absence of major changes in language policy, particularly language in education policy, bilingualism in most Latino communities in the South, as in other parts of the country, is likely to remain a transitory phenomenon. Indeed, some scholars who advocate providing all children with the opportunity to become bilingual argue that the danger is not that children of immigrants will fail to learn English. Rather, the danger is that they will fail to develop their heritage language and that, as a consequence, communication between parents and children will suffer and the United States as a whole will have lost an important linguistic resource. Middle-class Cuban Americans in Florida, however, appear to be an exception to the general pattern. A 1996 study of Cuban American families in Miami found that middle-class mothers associated their children’s success with competence in Spanish, while working-class mothers associated success with ability in English.

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