Language Barrier - Language Barrier and Migration

Language Barrier and Migration

Language barriers also influence migration. Emigrants from a country are far more likely to move to a destination country which speaks the same language as the emigrant's country. Thus, most British emigration has been to Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, most Spanish emigration has been to Latin America, and Portuguese emigration to Brazil. And even if the destination country does not speak the emigrant's language, it is still more likely to receive immigration if it speaks a language related to that of the emigrant. The most obvious example is the great migration of Europeans to the Americas. The United States, with its dominant Germanic English language, attracted primarily immigrants from Northern Europe, where Germanic tongues were spoken or familiar. The most common backgrounds in the United States are German, Irish, and English, and the vast majority of Scandinavian emigrants also moved to the United States (or English-speaking Canada). Southern Europeans, such as Italians, were more likely to move to Latin American countries; today, people of Italian descent are the second-largest ethnic background in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, after Spanish and (in Brazil) Portuguese, but rank fourth in the United States among European groups. In the past decade, Romanians have primarily chosen Italy and Spain as emigration destinations, with Germany, the largest Western European country, ranking a distant third.