Thread: CA-43% in state speak other than English at home

43% in state speak other than English at home
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(09-22) 19:50 PDT -- San Francisco resident Carlos Dimaano, 50, a recent immigrant from the Philippines, speaks English in his job at a community center. But when he goes home to cook dinner for his 88-year-old father, the two lapse into their native Tagalog.

The men are among the almost 43 percent of Californians who speak a language other than English at home, a proportion far higher than in any other state in the country, according to census figures released today. Speaking another language at home doesn't mean they don't also speak English in the home.

But Dimaano, who immigrated just a year ago, is also among the 1 in 5 Californians who feel they don't speak English "very well."

By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of U.S. residents overall speak another language at home, and fewer than 9 percent classify themselves as limited English speakers, the Census Bureau said.

The Bay Area, with its large number of immigrants, has about the same proportion of limited English speakers as the state overall, the census figures show. For some experts, that is cause for concern. For others, it is a source of regional strength.

"It's very disturbing when 1 in 5 people is not communicating in the common language," said Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "Culturally, it creates a sort of tribalism. This country doesn't have a predominant race or religion; it just has values. That's a very thin bond. We have shared values and a shared Constitution; we also have to have a shared culture and language."

When immigrants congregate in enclaves, they have a harder time learning English and becoming fully American, said Hanson, author of the book "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming."

"It's time to go back to the melting pot, control the borders and let assimilation, integration and intermarriage work," he said.

It's not that immigrants don't want to integrate - it's that they need more opportunities to learn English, said Jin Sook Lee, an assistant professor of education at UC Santa Barbara, who remembers the oversubscribed English-as-a-second-language classes she used to teach at community college.

But she also doesn't believe California's diversity of languages is something to fear.

"The fact that people speak a different language in their homes is one of the most untapped resources in our country," Lee said. "With globalization in economics and politics, we need language competence. These speakers have a great potential to fill out this language gap in our society."

More than most other parts of the country, California and the Bay Area must tackle the challenges - and could reap the benefits - of linguistic diversity, experts say.

"In California, we have a lot more recent immigrants. ... It's dramatic," said Russell Rumberger, director of the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute. "Our state is totally dependent on immigrants. But that's not to say it doesn't present challenges, teaching people English and integrating them into the country."

Largest proportion
California has the largest proportion of immigrant residents in the country, at 27 percent of the population, the census figures show. But that lead is beginning to shrink as more immigrants settle in the South and Midwest, said Michael Fix, co-director of the National Center for Immigrant Integration Policy at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

"In California, the direction is toward more settled immigrants and a second generation and increasing language proficiency among the foreign-born," Fix said. "The share of people who speak Spanish at home who speak English as well has risen over time. So instead of the worrisome story about (a lack of) cohesion, there's a positive story here. ... The share of new immigrant arrivals in California is going down, so that's giving a chance for immigrants to integrate."

California has long debated how to teach children who are English learners. In 1998, the state's voters approved Proposition 227, which mandated that English learners master the language through intensive, short-term instruction - usually lasting a year - rather than taking bilingual classes throughout their time in school.

Essential skill
Learning English is an essential skill for immigrants and their children, both for their personal success and for the good of the nation, said Tomás Jiménez, an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

"To borrow a non-English phrase, English is the lingua franca of the United States," said Jiménez, who also teaches sociology at Stanford University. "There are folks on the right who want people to speak only English, and there are folks on the left who think it's unimportant. We shouldn't be stamping out people's languages, but English should be additive. There are some legitimate concerns on both sides."

Government could do more to make English classes available to adults and help them integrate into society, Jiménez said. He pointed to Santa Clara County's Office of Human Relations, which promotes citizenship, English and leadership among immigrants, as a good example.

The Bay Area is unusual in California because it has immigrants from so many Asian countries, as well as the Latin American immigrants who tend to predominate in Southern California. Many of them are also highly educated.

Dimaano credits the college education he got in the Philippines with helping him grasp English more quickly. But he added that his father, who studied only through the sixth grade, has done an even better job mastering English.

"He's always reading books and magazines," Dimaano said. "He's better than me."

Lee pointed out that many of the Californians who don't speak English well are, like Dimaano's father, elderly. And many of those who speak another language at home are, like herself, also fluent in English.

"I speak Korean at home 100 percent of the time, and I do it because I want my children to become bilingual," she said. "But they also speak English perfectly."



E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 132R7P.DTL

"To borrow a non-English phrase, English is the lingua franca of the United States," said Jiménez, who also teaches sociology at Stanford University. "There are folks on the right who want people to speak only English, and there are folks on the left who think it's unimportant. We shouldn't be stamping out people's languages, but English should be additive. There are some legitimate concerns on both sides."

I don't care what language you speak at home, but in the working world and in public it should be ENGLISH ONLY! The ONLY ones who have a problem with this are latinos, WHY is that?

"To borrow a non-English phrase, English is the lingua franca of the United States," said Jiménez, who also teaches sociology at Stanford University. "There are folks on the right who want people to speak only English, and there are folks on the left who think it's unimportant. We shouldn't be stamping out people's languages, but English should be additive. There are some legitimate concerns on both sides."

Our government does not want assimilation for some reason.