Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Woohoo! Assimilation is Alive and Well

U.S. citizens concerned that Latino immigrants will have them singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish can rest easy, according to an academic study published on Wednesday.

A report in the Population and Development Review found that far from threatening the dominance of English, most Latin American immigrants to the United States lose their ability to speak Spanish over the course of a few generations.

The study by sociologists Frank Bean and Ruben Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, and Douglas Massey from Princeton, drew on two surveys investigating adaptation by immigrant communities in California and south Florida.

It concluded that by the third generation, most descendants of immigrants are "linguistically dead" in their mother tongue.

Truthfully, I haven't been terribly worried about this. At one time, really, I was. Now...not at all. After reading history and participating discussions, I found a model that people throw around for other reasons, but actually somewhat fits here: Rome started as a Latin speaking state +/- 700 BC. It ended as a Greek speaking state in 1453 AD. Approximately half that time was speaking primarily each. If America survives as a state until 3758 AD, then even as a Spanish speaking nation, we would have had a good, long life as a people.

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