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Immigrant parents struggle to keep their children bilingual
"Sorry," he answered her, in English. Berges, an immigrant from Peru, is growing accustomed to such conversations with her son. She is struggling to raise him to speak English and Spanish fluently, which might not seem like a big challenge in the city with the highest proportion of Latinos in Massachusetts. But researchers say Berges and immigrant parents nationwide are confronting a difficult truth: Their children are losing their languages. According to research presented to Congress in May, even the children of immigrants prefer to speak English by the time they are adults. Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, and his team of researchers looked at 5,700 adults in their 20s and 30s in Southern California from different generations to see how long their language survived. A key finding centered on 1,900 American-born children of immigrants. The shift toward English among them was swift: While 87 percent grew up speaking another language at home, only 34 percent said they spoke it well by adulthood. And nearly 70 percent said they preferred to speak English. "English wins, and it does so in short order," said Rumbaut, who presented his findings to the US House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration in May. "What we're talking about is a real phenomenon." It is difficult for children to sustain their parents' languages amid the tidal wave of American pop culture, including movies and television, coupled with societal pressure to speak only English. Most schools and communities do little to preserve bilingualism, Rumbaut said. Even bilingual education programs, which Massachusetts voters dismantled in 2002, were commonly designed to help students make the transition to English-only classrooms. Generations of immigrants have seen their languages fade, but Rumbaut said the cost is higher now as businesses expand overseas, the United States is more diverse, and national security agencies are clamoring for people who speak foreign languages. The children themselves are losing a skill that could give them an edge in the job market. The erosion of language cuts across all backgrounds, Rumbaut said. In his study, less than 25 percent of the US-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese immigrants said they spoke their parents' languages well. Chinese is one of the languages President Bush declared a priority for national security last year. Spanish was found to survive longer, largely because Southern California is a high-immigrant area and Spanish is ubiquitous on television and radio and in newspapers. Still, gaps emerged. Almost all second-generation Mexican- Americans were raised speaking Spanish, but only 60 percent spoke it well by early adulthood, and half preferred English. By the third generation, barely 10 percent spoke Spanish well, according to the study; almost all preferred English.
Posted by: Steve White 2007-07-23 |
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