To: GST who wrote (125829 ) 3/9/2004 4:58:22 PM From: Bilow Read Replies (2) | Respond to Hi GST; Re: "Spanish is more of a "threat" to English than any language regionalism is for China. "Balkanization, Bilingualism, and Comparisons of Languagte Situations at Home and Abroad ...Language shift Veltman demonstrates that language shift to English among Spanish-speakers in the U.S. is very rapid. Second generation Spanish-speakers in the United States tend to make English their preferred personal language. Only some twenty percent of immigrants remain essentially monolingual in Spanish. This shift is especially true for children . Veltman (1989, p. 559) notes that "[a]fter an average period of residence of four years, nearly all [children aged 5 to 9 upon arrival in the US] will speak English on a regular basis and 80% will have adopted English as their usual language." After having been in the country for fourteen years, eighty percent of these children have become English dominant bilinguals. The same occurs to a similar percentage of Spanish-speakers arriving in the United States between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. the increase in the size of the Spanish language group and its various linguistic components depends entirely on continued immigration rather than upon an imagined resistance to the adoption of English." Language prestige Consider, on the other hand, the jobs that have been marked as "hispanophone" in El Paso, Texas: construction, assembly line, janitorial services, yard work, house cleaning, and farm work (Teschner, 1995). In fact, while Hispanics make up only about 9% of the total US population, they comprise 12% of the agricultural work force. In the West and Southwest, this figure is an astonishing 40% (Schick & Schick, 1991). Additionally, less than 2% of business enterprises are owned by Hispanics. brj.asu.edu
