Linguistic Death Stalks California

This study says that like death and taxes, native language death is a certainty in the U.S. DP

By JENNIFER JOHNSON and AARON RUTKOFF

WSJonline.com: DEAD LANGUAGE? A new study by a trio of academics, writing in this month's edition of Population and Development Review, looks at the debate over the perceived failure of English-language assimilation by Spanish-speaking immigrants and their descendents. Their 14-page journal article uses data from language surveys, conducted in Los Angeles and San Diego between 1970 and 2005, to establish "linguistic life expectancies -- the average number of generations a mother tongue can be expected to survive in the U.S. after the arrival of an immigrant."

For the purposes of their study, a person's mother language is considered "dead" if the person believes herself unable to speak it "very well" or if she speaks English at home. The study compared California's Spanish speakers to several Asian and European immigrant groups. The density of the Spanish-speaking population in Southern California allows Mexican immigrants, for example, to continue speaking their mother tongue very well until the third generation -- longer than any other group in the study -- but Spanish still goes extinct thereafter. When measured by language of preference at home, "the survival curves for Mexicans and other Latin American groups look much more like those of Asians and white Europeans."

"Like taxes and biological death," the study concludes, "linguistic death is a sure thing in the U.S., even for Mexicans living in Los Angeles, a city with one of the largest Spanish-speaking urban populations in the world."