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Hispanic Market Language Preferences Changing
By Barbara Ferry, Luis Sanchez Saturno, THE NEW MEXICAN - People who fear Latin American immigrants don't assimilate well into the United States and might threaten the country's English-language cultural identity should relax. So says Ruben Rumbaut, a University of California, Irvine sociologist and principal author of a new study on the "life expectancy" of Spanish among Latin American immigrants and their children.
The study published in this month's Population and Development Review found that Spanish tends to disappear among the children and grandchildren of immigrants at rates similar to native languages of other immigrant groups.
The authors studied language-use among Latino immigrants and their descendants in Los Angeles, San Diego and southern Florida. In the second generation, fluency in Spanish was greater for Mexican immigrants than for other Latin American groups and substantially greater than the proportion of Asian immigrants who could speak their native language well.
But by the third generation, only 17 percent of Mexican immigrants could speak fluent Spanish and in the fourth generation, just 5 percent could, the study found.
In terms of daily use, Spanish can be expected to die out within two generations among Mexicans and other Latin Americans, the study concluded. The study found that Spanish dies out among children and grandchildren of immigrants even in areas with huge Latino enclaves.
Source: (C) 2006 The Santa Fe New Mexican.
Ahorre September 17, 2006 05:22 PM