Spanish Language in The United States - Future of Spanish in The United States

Future of Spanish in The United States

Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic/racial minority in the United States. Continual immigration and prevalent Spanish-language mass media (such as Univisión, Telemundo, and Azteca América) support the Spanish-speaking populations to assimilate much slower than others. Moreover, because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, it is common for many American manufacturers to use multilingual product labeling using English, French and Spanish. Besides the businesses that always have catered to Hispanophone immigrants, a small, but increasing, number of mainstream American retailers now advertise bilingually in Spanish-speaking areas and offer bilingual, English-Spanish customer services. One common indicator of such businesses is Se Habla Espanol which means "Spanish is Spoken".

The State of the Union Addresses and other presidential speeches are translated to Spanish, following the precedent set by the Bill Clinton administration. Official Spanish translations are available at Whitehouse.gov. Moreover, non-Hispanic politicians fluent in Spanish speak in Spanish to Hispanic majority constituencies. There are 500 Spanish newspapers, 152 magazines, and 205 publishers in the United States; magazine and local television advertising expenditures for the Hispanic market have increased much from 1999 to 2003, with growth of 58 percent and 43 percent, respectively.

This guarantees Spanish's survival in the United States, yet, historically, the immigrant's original languages tend to disappear or become reduced through generational assimilation. Spanish disappeared in several countries and U.S. territories during the 20th century, notably in the Pacific Island countries of Guam, Micronesia, Palau, the Northern Marianas islands, and the Marshall Islands. In the Philippines, it is spoken by a minority of the population (only around 3,000,000).

The English-only movement seeks to establish English as the sole official language of the United States. Generally, they exert political public pressure upon Hispanophone immigrants to learn English and speak it publicly; as universities, business, and the professions use English, there is much social pressure to learn English for upward socio-economic mobility.

Generally, Hispanic Americans (13.4% of the 2002 population) are bilingual to a degree. A Simmons Market Research survey recorded that 19 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population speak only Spanish, 9.0 percent speak only English, 55 percent have limited English proficiency, and 17 percent are fully English-Spanish bilingual.

Intergenerational transmission of Spanish is a more accurate indicator of Spanish's future in the United States than raw statistical numbers of Hispanophone immigrants. Although Latin American immigrants hold varying English proficiency levels, almost all second-generation Hispanic Americans speak English, yet about 50 percent speak Spanish at home. Two-thirds of third-generation Mexican Americans speak only English at home.

Calvin Veltman undertook, for the National Center for Education Statistics and for the Hispanic Policy Development Project, the most complete study of English language adoption by Hispanophone immigrants. Mr Veltman's language shift studies document high bilingualism rates and subsequent adoption of English as the preferred language of Hispanics, particularly by the young and the native-born. The complete set of these studies' demographic projections postulates the near-complete assimilation of a given Hispanophone immigrant cohort within two generations. Although his study based itself upon a large 1976 sample from the Bureau of the Census (which has not been repeated), data from the 1990 Census tend to confirm the great Anglicization of the U.S. Hispanic population.