Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California

摘要

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH generally supports the view that Latin Americans in the United States assimilate linguistically. Studies using data from the US Census and other official statistics (Alba and Nee 2003; see also Alba et al. 2002; Bean and Stevens 2003), as well as investigations based on longitudinal surveys conducted among the children of immigrants (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006), reveal a quick shift to English fluency, if not outright dominance, between the first and second generations. Nevertheless, research on immigrant language retention has been hampered by a lack of data on language use or ability broken down by generation. Surveys that focus on the children of immigrants, by definition, permit only a contrast between first and second generations. Moreover, because the US Census Bureau eliminated the question on parents' place of birth after 1970, it is no longer possible to distinguish generations using census data, forcing researchers into crude native-born/foreign-born comparisons.