Thursday, September 14, 2006

Right-wing are pinning all their hopes for their next self-righteousness orgy on the possibility of reconquista -- you know, day laborers forcing everyone in America to speak Spanish at gunpoint -- but, er, it ain't happening:

Immigration no threat to English use in U.S.: study

...A report in the Population and Development Review found that far from threatening the dominance of English, most Latin American immigrants to the United States lose their ability to speak Spanish over the course of a few generations.

The study by sociologists Frank Bean and Ruben Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, and Douglas Massey from Princeton, drew on two surveys investigating adaptation by immigrant communities in California and south Florida.

It concluded that by the third generation, most descendants of immigrants are "linguistically dead" in their mother tongue.

"Based on an analysis of language loss over the generations, the study concludes that English has never been seriously threatened as the dominant language in America, nor is it under threat today," the researchers said.

"Although the generational life expectancy of Spanish is greater among Mexicans in Southern California than other groups, its demise is all but assured by the third generation," it added....


Sorry to disappoint you, Michelle.

An abstract of the study is here; the full study is available as a PDF here.

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