Thread: Native languages fade as immigrants' children embrace U.S.

Native languages in valley fade as immigrants' children embrace U.S. culture
IMMIGRANTS SEEKING TO PROTECT CULTURES
By Mike Swift
Mercury News
Article Launched: 01/12/2008 01:43:01 AM PST

It's Sunday morning at Gunderson High in San Jose, and hundreds of Asian children and teenagers throng into language classes that even spill into the hallways.

They're learning English, right?

In fact, they're American kids who speak English with a Northern California accent who have come to the Van Lang Vietnamese Language & Culture School because their immigrant parents want them to learn Vietnamese. They are among a growing number of immigrant parents enrolling their children in Vietnamese, Hindi and Spanish classes, in an effort to preserve their culture against the all-powerful pull of English.

While some Americans fear the country is becoming a collection of ethnic tribes lacking a common language because immigrants aren't learning English, immigrants have a different perspective, looking at their own children. Many believe their kids are adopting English at such a rapid rate that American culture is erasing all foreign languages imported to its shores.

Statistics drive home that point, demonstrating the truth behind America's reputation among linguists as a "graveyard of languages."

Even given the 5 million resident immigrants who have arrived in California since 1990, a significantly higher share of children and teenagers in immigrant families speak English fluently now than two decades ago, a Mercury News analysis of Census Bureau data shows.

In 1990, just 57 percent of California kids - ages 5 through 17 - in Spanish-speaking households spoke English fluently. Now, 74 percent speak English fluently. That number is nearly the same in families who speak an Asian language.
Bilingualism is on the rise; a decreasing share of California households speak only English. But a recent national study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that while fewer than one in four Latino immigrants are fluent in English, 88 percent of their U.S.-born children are fluent.

The question isn't whether the children of today's immigrants will speak English when they grow up, linguists and experts in language assimilation say. It's whether those children - and the children of those children - will even understand the languages their parents and grandparents brought to America.

Van Lang has grown from a circle of 10 students in a San Jose garage in 1982 to about 1,100 students today - with a waiting list.

At the India Community Center in Milpitas, language director Madhu Aggarwal has seen a surge in the number of parents interested in Indian language classes and worried that their children are losing touch with Indian culture.

Young Californians who grew up in non-English-speaking households say the ubiquity of English - on TV, in school, spoken by friends - means they inevitably make the switch to English.

Vietnamese was 14-year-old Thu Quynh Phan's first language, but after she started public school, she quickly became English-dominant. "Everywhere around you, you hear English," said Thu, who lives in Gilroy. After seven years of classes at Van Lang, Thu speaks Vietnamese "pretty well."

Sandhini Agarwal, 6, is taking Hindi in afternoon classes at the Palo Alto International School of the Peninsula. But in class, when Sandhini and other children speak between Hindi exercises, it's in American-accented English.

"Oh wow! Cool!" Sandhini bursts out when classmate Calvin Grewal, 7, shows her a person he made out of dough.

Raghav Rajvanshy, 12, of Fremont remembers speaking some Hindi when he was small, but he lost it as he got older. Though Raghav is studying Hindi now, he generally speaks only English to friends, even to members of families who speak Hindi.

"Say you were talking about Harry Potter or something - it would be hard to talk about that in Hindi because there are lot of words, like 'sorcerers' and stuff, that you can't really translate," Raghav explained.

Every foreign language in California, including Spanish, is on a pathway to "linguistic death" by a family's third generation in the United States, said Rubén Rumbaut, a sociologist at University of California-Irvine who studies linguistic assimilation.

Based on a multigenerational study of Southern California immigrants, Rumbaut plotted "linguistic life expectancies" for Spanish, Asian and European languages in California. While Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans preserved their Spanish longer than Koreans, Vietnamese and Filipinos preserved their mother tongues, no foreign language survived far beyond the third generation.

"Like taxes and biological death, linguistic death seems to be a sure thing in the United States, even for Mexicans living in Los Angeles, a city with one of the largest Spanish-speaking urban populations in the world," Rumbaut concluded in a 2006 article.

California's linguistic picture varies by age. Census data shows that adults - particularly Latinos - are not making strides toward English fluency - perhaps one reason for the perception that immigrants aren't trying to learn English.

Some argue that perception is unfair because so many immigrants arrived as adults, when it's much more difficult to learn a language because of the brain's developmental changes after puberty.

"Age at arrival is the single most important determinant of English fluency among immigrants," Rumbaut said.

It took about three generations, linguists say, for immigrants to become English-dominant communities during the last great immigration wave, at the turn of the 20th century. But English has a political and cultural charisma today that it didn't have a century ago, meaning immigrants are more likely to arrive knowing some English.

"The globalization of culture makes English a dominant language," said John Moore, a linguist at the University of California-San Diego, who noted that "a majority of the ads on Spanish-language media are systems for learning English."

Bay Area immigrant parents increasingly want to teach the language of their native countries to their American-born children, language instructors say.

"I think the second and third-generation parents, they are in between," said Aggarwal, who hopes to launch Hindi classes in four Bay Area public school districts this fall. "They don't speak the language fluently, but they feel it's essential to preserve the culture."

At the Catholic Diocese of San Jose, religious instructors have noted that some Spanish-speaking parents choose to enroll their English-speaking children in Spanish religious classes as one means of preserving family Spanish.

"The kids who we know cannot really follow in Spanish, we give them an English bible," said Joseph Khanh, director of religious education for the English and Spanish community at the St. Patrick Proto-Cathedral.

The Van Lang school, parents and teachers say, is about preserving Vietnamese identity along with the language.

"We want our kids to know who they are," said Tuan Phuoc Le, the school's director.

Don Nguyen of Santa Clara brings his two teenage daughters to Van Lang because he and his wife want to preserve the best things in Vietnamese culture amid the American culture shaping his daughters.

"They are born here, but at least they have to understand the source of their parents - the originality of their parents - and also the traditions," Nguyen said.

One recent Sunday, in a class of students ages 5 and 6, children were learning the Vietnamese alphabet and the language's basic sounds. In a classroom filled with high school students, the instruction was entirely in conversational Vietnamese as teacher Son Canh Duong explained that the literal phrase for "driving a horse" in English translates to "selling a horse" in Vietnamese.

When a visitor entered the classroom, students stood and recited a welcome - a gesture of respect.

Le said some of his students seek more than language.

Recently, some U.S.-born college-aged Vietnamese have come to him with little or no knowledge of the language, but a hunger to reconnect to their heritage.

"They told me," he said, "that they are lost."

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Contact Mike Swift at mswift@mercurynews.com or (40 271-3648.
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_7952 ... ck_check=1

They are SUPPOSED to learn English and have that as their first language if they become naturalized here. Same thing happened in my family. I don't speak more than a few words in any of my ancestral languages and if I want more, I have to make an effort to learn. That's what it means to be an American. Sorry.

This one hasn't been posted in a while and I will post it again for the benefit of any newer visitors and onlookers:

[quote]“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American. … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. … We have room for but one language here and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.â€