LOSING THE LANGUAGE
U.S-born Latinos losing the language over time is nothing new. According to Hispanic News‘ study, the grandchildren of immigrants are likely to speak only English. By the third generation, only 17 percent speak Spanish fluently and by the fourth generation, it drops to 5 percent. I am fourth-generation Mexican-American, so these statistics make perfect sense to me. “The United States is a language graveyard,” said Rubén G. Rumbaut, a University of California-Irvine sociology professor and co-author of the study, “Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California”. “The shift (toward English only) is rapid, and it’s essentially complete by the third generation,” he says.
