Chinese American - Language

Language

Chinese, mostly of the Cantonese variety, is the third most-spoken language in the United States, almost completely spoken within Chinese American populations and by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, especially in California. Over 2 million Americans speak some variety of Chinese, with Mandarin Chinese becoming increasingly more common due to immigration from mainland China and Taiwan.

In New York City at least, although Mandarin is spoken as a native language among only ten percent of Chinese speakers, it is used as a secondary dialect among the greatest number of them and is on its way to replace Cantonese as their lingua franca. In addition, the immigration from Fujian is creating an increasingly large number of Min speakers. Wu Chinese, a Chinese language previously unheard of in the United States, is now spoken by a minority of recent Chinese immigrants, who hail from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai.

Although Chinese Americans grow up learning English, some teach their children Chinese for a variety of reasons: preservation of an ancient civilization, preservation of a unique identity, pride in their cultural ancestry, desire for easy communication with them and other relatives, and the perception that Chinese will be a very useful language as China's economic strength increases. Cantonese, historically the language of most Chinese immigrants, is the third most widely spoken non-English language in the United States.