{"id":54641,"date":"2013-04-03T11:30:53","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T16:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=54641"},"modified":"2013-10-31T04:20:15","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T09:20:15","slug":"the-stigma-of-immigrant-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/04\/03\/the-stigma-of-immigrant-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stigma of Immigrant Languages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Asian-Nation<\/a>\u00a0and Racialicious<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Photo by Lulu Vision (Flickr\/Creative Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As an undergraduate majoring in linguistics, I was fascinated with the concept of endangered languages. Colonization, genocide, globalization, and nation-building projects have killed off untold numbers of languages.\u00a0As linguist K. David Harrison (my undergrad advisor) tells NPR<\/a>, speakers of stigmatized or otherwise less-favored languages are pressured to abandon their native tongue for the dominant language of the nation and the market (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n

The decision to give up one language or to abandon a language is not usually a free decision. It\u2019s often coerced by politics, by market forces, by the educational system in a country, by a larger, more dominant group telling them that their language is\u00a0backwards and obsolete and worthless<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These same pressures are at work in immigrant-receiving countries like the United States, where young immigrants and children of immigrants are quickly abandoning their parents\u2019 language in favor of English.<\/p>\n

Immigrant languages\u00a0in the United States generally do not survive beyond the second generation.\u00a0In his study of European immigrants, Fishman (1965)<\/a> found that the first generation uses the heritage language fluently and in all domains, while the second generation only speaks it with the first generation at home and in limited outside contexts. As English is now the language with which they are most comfortable, members of the second generation tend to speak English to their children, and their children have extremely limited abilities in their heritage language, if any. Later studies (L\u00f3pez 1996<\/a> and Portes and Schauffler 1996<\/a> among them) have shown this three-generation trend in children of Latin American and Asian immigrants, as well.<\/p>\n

The languages that most immigrants to the U.S. speak are hardly endangered. A second-generation Korean American might not speak Korean well, and will not be speaking that language to her children, but Korean is not going to disappear anytime soon — there are 66.3 million speakers (Ethnologue<\/a>)! Compare that with the\u00a0Chulym<\/a>\u00a0language of Siberia, which has less than 25.<\/p>\n

Even if they\u2019re not\u00a0endangered<\/em>\u00a0per se, I would argue that they are\u00a0in danger<\/em>. While attitudes towards non-English languages in the U.S. seem to be improving, at least among wealthier and better educated people in some more diverse cities and suburbs, the stigma of speaking a non-English language still exists.<\/p>\n

How many of you have:<\/p>\n