The future of Spanish in the United States

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mentecuerpo
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The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby mentecuerpo » Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:51 pm

The future of Spanish in the United States
According to projections made by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Hispanics in the country will exceed 111 million by 2060. That will mean that 27.5% of the population, almost one in three Americans, will be of Hispanic origin.

Furthermore, the high level of use of Spanish by U.S. Hispanics, whether native or bilingual, together with the slow rate of loss of this language shown by this community over the last forty years (around ten percentage points), indicate that the number of Spanish speakers in the United States will surpass that of Spain in the next decade and that of Colombia in the following decade, which will place the United States as the second Spanish-speaking country in the world, behind only Mexico.

The increase in the Hispanic community will not be solely due to its vegetative growth, but will be closely linked to the influx of immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, something that will depend largely on the decisions taken by the U.S. Administration. Thus, the number of Spanish speakers will also vary depending on the adoption of political measures that favor or impede the entry of immigrants into the country.

In this regard, the U.S. Census itself has made alternative demographic projections that consider three different scenarios: high, low or no immigration. In all of them, the Hispanic population would grow between now and 2060 in both absolute and relative terms. The intensity of this growth varies, however. In a low-immigration scenario, the U.S. Hispanic population would reach 100 million, equivalent to 27% of the total U.S. population, while in a high-immigration scenario it would reach 128 million (29%). On the other hand, in a scenario of zero immigration, the Hispanic community would barely add 16 million people over the next four decades, reaching 78 million, and its relative weight would increase by just over five percentage points: from 18.7% today to 24% in 2060. Figure 30.


Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


El futuro del español en Estados Unidos
Según las proyecciones realizadas por la Oficina del Censo de los Estados Unidos, el número de hispanos del país superará los 111 millones en 2060. Eso supondrá que el 27,5 % de la población, casi uno de cada tres estadounidenses, será de origen hispano.

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.

El aumento de la comunidad hispana no se producirá únicamente por su crecimiento vegetativo, sino que este estará estrechamente ligado a la afluencia de inmigrantes procedentes de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe, algo que dependerá en gran parte de las decisiones que se tomen desde la Administración estadounidense. Así, el número de hablantes de español también variará en función de la adopción de medidas políticas que favorezcan o impidan la entrada de inmigrantes en el país.

En este sentido, el propio Censo de los Estados Unidos ha realizado proyecciones demográficas alternativas que contemplan tres escenarios diferentes: alta inmigración, baja o nula. En todos ellos, la población hispana crecería de aquí a 2060 tanto en términos absolutos como relativos. Varía, sin embargo, la intensidad de ese crecimiento. En un contexto de baja inmigración, la población hispana estadounidense ascendería a los 100 millones de personas, lo que equivaldría al 27 % de la población total del país, mientras que, en un contexto de alta inmigración, esta cifra llegaría a los 128 millones (29 %). Por otra parte, en un escenario de inmigración nula, la comunidad hispana apenas sumaría 16 millones de personas en las próximas cuatro décadas, hasta llegar a los 78 millones, y su peso relativo aumentaría poco más de cinco puntos porcentuales: del 18,7 % actual al 24 % en 2060. Gráfico 30.

Fuente:
https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/anuario ... ic/p04.htm
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:07 pm

A counter perspective:

https://theconversation.com/spanish-use ... tion-85357

The Three-Generation Pattern has a long history in the United States. I have siblings who are currently experiencing it with Spanish, I’m a believer.
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby mentecuerpo » Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:16 am

Lawyer&Mom wrote:A counter perspective:

https://theconversation.com/spanish-use ... tion-85357

The Three-Generation Pattern has a long history in the United States. I have siblings who are currently experiencing it with Spanish, I’m a believer.

Immigration patterns and the language that comes with it change over time for sure.
For example, the Chinese speaker population is increasing in Canada and U.S.A. in modern times.

The German language was popular in the 1800s.
https://bostonlanguage.wordpress.com/20 ... n-the-u-s/

In 1965, U.S. lawmakers changed immigration laws and opened the U.S.A. to the rest of the world.

"President Johnson signed the Hart–Celler Act into law on October 3, 1965. In opening entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than Northwestern European and Germanic groups, the Act significantly altered immigration demographics in the U.S.[1]"

For now, this is how languages are distributed in the U.S.A. There are 44 languages listed in the article, but I copy the top 20 languages.

English only – 239 million
Spanish – 41 million
Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien) – 3.5 million
Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.7 million
Vietnamese – 1.5 million
Arabic – 1.2 million
French – 1.2 million
Korean – 1.1 million
Russian – 0.94 million
German – 0.92 million
Haitian Creole – 0.87 million
Hindi – 0.86 million
Portuguese – 0.79 million
Italian – 0.58 million
Polish – 0.52 million
Yiddish – 0.51 million
Japanese – 0.46 million
Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 0.42 million
Gujarati – 0.41 million
Telugu – 0.37 million

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages ... ted_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrati ... ct_of_1965
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby slxfb » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:52 am

Very interesting article.

What I would really like to know is what is the true importance of Spanish in the United States.

If it is spoken by 20% of the population, it must be very important. But from a social or economic point of view, is it as important as English in countries like France, Germany or Sweden?

It certainly is not; but I believe, although I am not sure, that it is becoming more and more important in the economic sphere, and it is becoming more and more necessary, although I do not know to what extent.
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby luke » Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:08 pm

Lawyer&Mom wrote:A counter perspective:

https://theconversation.com/spanish-use ... tion-85357

The Three-Generation Pattern has a long history in the United States. I have siblings who are currently experiencing it with Spanish, I’m a believer.

Yeah. Most of my neighbors are Latino. There are often 3 generations living in the same household. The grandparents speak little English and use things like google translate to come up with English words and phrases. The children, their grandchildren, all speak English when they're playing.

I was talking with my next-door neighbor a while back. His grand-daughter is about 11. She doesn't speak Spanish. I said, "hey, it's important so she can talk to her abuelos (him and his wife). He agreed, but that didn't change the facts.

If you are born in the United States, the chances are high that you'll be monolingual.

Another example, but with an Indian co-worker. He wants his son to learn the his native language. They visit India every year. The son starts to pick up on it while they're in India, but when he comes back, he has no interest in the language (even though the parents want him to - to talk with their relatives in India, etc).

I'm curious what the experience of the original poster is.

The children don't see the value proposition.

Oh, and pronunciation. Jorge wants to be called George. Perez must be said in American and without an accent. Same with Rodriguez. Very strong negative feedback when I used pronounced Perez and Rodriguez with a Latino accent to my friends with those apellidos. Third generationers often want to distance themselves from Hispanic roots.
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:35 pm

luke wrote:Oh, and pronunciation. Jorge wants to be called George. Perez must be said in American and without an accent. Same with Rodriguez. Very strong negative feedback when I used pronounced Perez and Rodriguez with a Latino accent to my friends with those apellidos. Third generationers often want to distance themselves from Hispanic roots.
Isn't it more a case of seeing themselves as anglophone-americans rather than distancing themselves from hispanic family roots?
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby luke » Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:21 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
luke wrote:Perez must be said in American and without an accent. Same with Rodriguez. Very strong negative feedback when I used pronounced Perez and Rodriguez with a Latino accent to my friends with those apellidos.
Isn't it more a case of seeing themselves as anglophone-americans rather than distancing themselves from hispanic family roots?

Anglophone-american is part of it.

With those two, Perez didn't like that his name in Spanish meant "lazy". He told me the story of when he was in school and had a Latina teacher who insisted on saying Pérez and he kept insisting back "it's PurREZ". I met him when he was in his late 20s. At that time he wanted to learn Spanish, but it's hard and that wisdom that comes with age hadn't been there when he was a kid. BTW, he loved his dad.

The other fellow surprised me with his odium for Latinos. He didn't want to be identified with that group. He looked Latino, but being born in the U.S., spoke like someone from the USA and was quite offended by any Hispanic pronunciation of his surname. His father happened to be an older man when he was born and was basically ashamed of both his roots and his dad who was old enough to be a grandfather when he was a kid.

Your anglophone-american may be right on when it comes to the kids in my neighborhood.

And it's not endemic to Latinos. I'm third-generation. My grandparents were born in Europe. My parents learned only English and same with me. (Those grandparents moved to the USA as children or teens).
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Nov 28, 2021 5:34 pm

luke wrote:Your anglophone-american may be right on when it comes to the kids in my neighborhood.

And it's not endemic to Latinos. I'm third-generation. My grandparents were born in Europe. My parents learned only English and same with me. (Those grandparents moved to the USA as children or teens).
I've got a vague memory of a paper on WW2 era refugees to the UK where accent and identity were linked. The hypothesis was that immigrants below a certain age considered their peer group to be local british children and identified with them rather than with their notional countrymen within the immigrant community.
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 28, 2021 8:30 pm

What mentecuerpo says further up about Chinese in Canada (and we can add any language of newer immigrant groups anywhere) hinges on how closed the immigrant community is to the general culture. How much the culture people bring with them is maintained as a community. So you see that the old German communities in the U.S. have not dissipated linguistically merely because the kids got lazy, but because the Germans in certain areas fully became part of the mainstream population and the language of the mainstream was English.

Though I like languages myself, I don't think speaking more than one language in most cases is actually functional unless you live in a place where not doing so impedes wider communication. It's pretty much been shown that trying to implement it legally doesn't work, because for the vast majority communication is a means to an end, not a pleasure or a hobby. The majority want the easiest and most functional route to being able to communicate in the society in which they live.

So called 'heritage' languages are only a problem where the requirement just recedes. I have direct experience of it. Of living in an anglophone society with a French speaking mother who despaired at the fact both languages weren't totally equal for me. I only had to listen to her, or her sisters and the odd friend, and maybe reply a bit - but talk to my father and everyone else in English. Contrast this with a Polish friend of mine who went home at night and had his mother, father, older brother and grandparents all communicating in Polish. He needed to know it. There's a tension for immigrants who don't want to disadvantage their children by landing them with an accent or holding them back from peers, so they encourage the host country's language. This happened to my wife. Then later the same parents lament that their children don't know the heritage language....this is happening to a lot of Chinese people.
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Re: The future of Spanish in the United States

Postby SpanishInput » Sun Nov 28, 2021 9:28 pm

luke wrote:The children, their grandchildren, all speak English when they're playing.


I think I'll add my two cents here. First, even though I don't live in the US, I dream of a day when the Spanish language gains some kind of legal recognition/protection there. This might help combat the prejudice against speaking it.

In Belgium, less than 1% of the population speak German as their first language, and yet German is one of the official languages. The US has a much stronger case for making Spanish an official language. Hispanic heritage is everywhere in the US, even on place names, and the US has a Spanish-speaking territory: Puerto Rico.

Second, I do have a family member in the States who has stopped encouraging her children to speak Spanish. My cousin in the west coast was told that raising her kid as a bilingual will somehow hamper his development. I wonder if those experts have ever heard about other parts of the world, such as China, where kids might be raised as trilingual (one Cantonese parent, one Hakka-speaking parent and Mandarin in school).

Third, even though Spanish might not be an asset for most people outside of the medical field, I believe learning another language is not just valuable because of the language itself, but because it opens your mind to other ways of thinking. It even allows you to see your first language from a different perspective, and to better understand the struggle of foreigners trying to learn it.

Fourth, did you know the US has its own Spanish academy? :geek:

As a footnote, when I was in a hotel in Dallas, many of the staff spoke Spanish, but they all used English with me unless I specifically asked them if they spoke Spanish. They told me it's the hotel's policy that they speak English with everyone, even if they look Hispanic, unless the customer requests them to speak Spanish. I later understood why when I started to find Hispanics with zero ability to speak Spanish.

Edit: Have you guys ever heard of Hispanophobia? It's the hate/fear of things related to Spain or the Spanish language. It's related to the "Black legend" of Spanish cruelty in the Americas. In a nutshell, countries that were jealous of Spain's power started to spread horrible things about Spaniards. Some were distortions, some were completely made up. In reality, some indigenous people fought on the side of the Spaniards because they had better conditions with them than with the pro-independence revolutionaries. Search "Navidad negra" for an example.

Hispanophobia today takes several forms: Hate of Spain, justifying intervention in the former Spanish colonies by saying the Spaniards were evil, dislike of people speaking Spanish, etc.
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