The future of Spanish in the United States

Practice your target languages here.
User avatar
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3480
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
x 9315

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:07 pm

I have only one complaint against the Spaniards (in Spain)... they think everyone else's food culture is inferior! :P
3 x

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23093
Contact:

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby rdearman » Mon Nov 29, 2021 8:29 am

The United States doesn't have any official language as far as I am aware.
2 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3480
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
x 9315

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby Le Baron » Mon Nov 29, 2021 1:04 pm

rdearman wrote:The United States doesn't have any official language as far as I am aware.

This is also true for England. In fact for the 'inner circle' of majority native English-speaking countries only Canada has it with de jure status. In Britain taken as a whole though, Welsh is a de jure language (and also English in their parliament, though not in England's parliament!).

Sorry for the diversion, back to Spanish.
0 x

User avatar
iguanamon
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2350
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:14 am
Location: Virgin Islands
Languages: Speaks: English (Native); Spanish (C2); Portuguese (C2); Haitian Creole (C1); Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol (C1); Lesser Antilles French Creole (B2)
Studies: Catalan
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=797
x 14165

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby iguanamon » Mon Nov 29, 2021 2:37 pm

Whenever I go to the States, I almost always go through Miami as my transport hub. If you spend enough time in the airport, you will see that Spanish is an essential and indispensable part of the airport's life. It is almost fully possible to get all services in Spanish- order a meal, get help in an airport store, ask for help from the airlines themselves. Outside the airport, it is quite natural to speak Spanish almost everywhere you want to go. I speak more Spanish in Miami than I do in San Juan, Puerto Rico it seems. If an American learner of Spanish wants to be immersed in the language, spend a couple of weeks in South Florida away from the beach.

Miami, given its high percentage of Spanish-speaking population, is also the US business interface with Latin America. The Spanish-speaking population of the city and the state of Florida are also consistently being reinforced and refreshed by new immigrants from Latin America, and the US Territory of Puerto Rico- where Orlando is becoming the new preferred destination. Puerto Ricans are US citizens and are free to live anywhere they want in the country with full rights of citizenship. They are not immigrants.

Spanish has been a part of what is now the United States for a hundred years before English was ever spoken for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. As longtime Hispanic descendants say along the southern border- "We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us." I expect Spanish to remain an important part of life there for the foreseeable future. Los Angeles, California is also a huge base of Spanish in the US. I don't see Spanish fading away there either.

The three generation assimilation thing is pretty much a given for Spanish-speaking immigrants to the US outside of large urban areas far from the southern border in the interior, where the language is less an integral part of daily life. Big exemptions would be New York City and Boston where Spanish has been a part of those cities for over a hundred years and is being refreshed on a continuous basis.
8 x

User avatar
SpanishInput
Yellow Belt
Posts: 97
Joined: Sun Sep 26, 2021 3:11 pm
Location: Ecuador
Languages: Spanish (N), English (C2), Mandarin (HSK 5)
x 469

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby SpanishInput » Mon Nov 29, 2021 3:04 pm

iguanamon wrote:Big exemptions would be New York City and Boston where Spanish has been a part of those cities for over a hundred years and is being refreshed on a continuous basis.

We used to joke that New York was Ecuador's third largest city, because it supposedly had more Ecuadorians than Cuenca. :lol:

I've also been told that Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, NY, is like a piece of Ecuador in the States:
https://eldiariony.com/2017/12/17/el-ro ... py-hollow/
Someone told me he had the best Ecuadorian food ever in Tarrytown.

In Florida, Hialeah (In the Miami metro area) is a place where you can easily live without speaking a lick of English. This is good if you're learning Spanish, but bad if you're learning English:
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-inte ... l-45583220
5 x

User avatar
mentecuerpo
Blue Belt
Posts: 572
Joined: Sun Jun 23, 2019 6:15 am
Location: El Salvador, Centroamerica, but lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Languages: Spanish (N) English (B2) Italian (A2) German (A1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 18#p155218
x 840

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby mentecuerpo » Sat Dec 18, 2021 9:42 am

There are over 7,000 different languages spoken around the world. While most of the U.S. population speaks either English or Spanish, many additional languages are spoken across the country too.
Here’s what the most commonly spoken language, aside from Spanish and
English, in every state is:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-c ... e-u-s-map/
1 x

User avatar
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3480
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
x 9315

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby Le Baron » Sun Dec 19, 2021 12:52 pm

What's interesting is that despite 3.4m speaking a form of Chinese, the number of 'Chinese-Americans' is above 5m; which indicates the language is declining more than growing. Same for 4m+ people of Filipino origin, but 1.7m speakers of Tagalog. As generations pass they clearly lose speakers. Or it hits a level which doesn't match the number of potential speakers (i.e. people with those origins).

I'd take issue with the article's claim that:
With each new wave of immigrants residing in the country from every part of the globe, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the United States is growing.

There's a strong drive in the U.S. to adopt 'American ways of life' and speaking English as the means of communication. Same for a lot of other countries really. So that other cultural backgrounds are pocketed into 'communities' like Chinatowns and the Polish social club, thus the languages are isolated to those environments.

Despite the bilingual instruction programmes in some US schools - in places with high numbers of Latin American students who are classified as 'English learners' - the plan and strategy is to make these functional in English, rather than simply offering a liberal arts approach to education. And this is with the U.S.'s largest second language. Proposition 227 was only overturned quite recently and even the succeeding law is geared more towards monolingual teaching or a path to speed up English acquisition.

I think the surrounding majority language culture has a big influence on diaspora languages.
3 x

User avatar
luke
Brown Belt
Posts: 1243
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2015 9:09 pm
Languages: English (N). Spanish (intermediate), Esperanto (B1), French (intermediate but rusting)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16948
x 3629

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby luke » Wed Jan 26, 2022 11:59 pm

One delightful thing about the Latino kids in the neighborhood is they play outside together, like I did when growing up a long time ago.

Another nice generalization about the Latinos in the neighborhood is they're all off to work every morning. That also reminds me of the grown-ups when I was growing up.

My neighborhood is about 80-90% Latino, mostly 1st (abuleos y padres), 2nd (padres y chicos), and 3rd (muchachos) generation immigrants.
1 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

User avatar
zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
x 7028
Contact:

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jan 27, 2022 12:50 am

iguanamon wrote:The three-generation assimilation thing is pretty much a given for Spanish-speaking immigrants to the US outside of large urban areas far from the southern border in the interior, where the language is less an integral part of daily life. Big exemptions would be New York City and Boston where Spanish has been a part of those cities for over a hundred years and is being refreshed on a continuous basis.

And the entire West Coast where you can't through a stone without hitting a Spanish speaker. I just ran a start-up fundraising session with 150 people and the session was held in Spanish.

Le Baron wrote:I think the surrounding majority language culture has a big influence on diaspora languages.


Statistically speaking, the three-gen assimilation was(?) probably the norm but certainly not the fatal conclusion. The outliers are not as rare as one would think and the surrounding community majority language(s) does highly influence the continuity of 'heritage' languages.

I'm that 'outlier' immigrant - moved from Mexico at 10 to the US - fully bilingual (white-passing), continued my immigration path so that today, even though I'm sitting in the US writing this, I'm 'just' a Mexican citizen. My children speak Spanish but not at a level that makes them the likeliest candidates to transmit the language to the 3rd gen but they will... along with French, German, and a love of languages. Simply because immigrants are not a socio-economic homogeneous group. Immigrants like me do not face language disdain, we have strong ties to our home countries and the means to assure cultural bridges. We and our children travel and build relations with the culture to the point that this social phenomenon has been given a name - "3rd culture".

The news and media tend to focus on undocumented immigration but the reality is that the economics of a large subset of immigrants has shifted and this may affect the future of the 3-gen assimilation thing. among my friends here I see a lot of 3rd and 4th gen (India, Iran, etc) where the relationship to languages is very different than it was 30 or 40 years ago when I first came.

The number of cultural resources for Spanish speakers has just boomed over the last 20 years - there are over 1000 Spanish-speaking stations in the US and it's a $1B industry. And growing.
7 x
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar

zgriptsuroica
Yellow Belt
Posts: 98
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 9:52 pm
Languages: English (N), French (Advanced, especially reading), Spanish (Advanced), Brazilian Portuguese (Advanced), Japanese (beginner), Icelandic (just starting)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17372
x 346

Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby zgriptsuroica » Mon Jan 31, 2022 9:10 am

mentecuerpo wrote:Asimismo, el alto grado de empleo del español por parte de los hispanos estadounidenses, ya sean nativos o bilingües, unido al ritmo lento de pérdida de esta lengua que muestra dicha comunidad en los últimos cuarenta años (alrededor de diez puntos porcentuales), indican que el número de hablantes de español de los Estados Unidos superará al de España en la próxima década y al de Colombia en la siguiente, lo que situará a Estados Unidos como el segundo país hispanohablante del mundo, solo por detrás de México.


But we've already been the country with the second largest Spanish speaking population for some time now. Here's a BBC article from 2018. I think there's just some confusion of terminology with some places citing Census data as saying there's only 43 million native speakers and 12 million others who are bilingual, while others use the census language of 43 million people who speak it at home as their primary language. Without such qualifications, the US has long had more Spanish speakers than anywhere bar Mexico.

People who want to try and fight its rising influence are picking a losing battle, but it's important to point out that Spanish is not uniformly distributed. Even in areas where you can get by fine in Spanish, you might have vastly different access to some resources than others. In NYC, there's a single Spanish language bookstore remaining, discounting the myriad librerías cristianas that are all over. Book selection in the municipal libraries is spotty, at best. On the other hand, I've heard Miami actually has a decent amount of bookstores and solid representation in the library offerings in Spanish.
1 x
Genki I: 0 / 12


Return to “Multilingual Room”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests