03-19-2013, 01:46 PM | #1 |
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Top Languages Spoken in the US
This handy dandy figure from the US Census Bureau shows you the relative ranks of the top 17 languages in the United States (aside from English) in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010.
Some things I noted from this:
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03-19-2013, 02:32 PM | #2 | |
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For the Russians, while the fall of the Soviet Union certainly played a part in people being a bit more open about speaking it, Russians in general have no problem speaking English in the United States. In fact, the stereotypical Russian accent is supposedly quite rare, as many can speak accent-less to an untrained ear. I have several Russians in various Chemistry classes who knew each other and got to hear them discuss this from time to time - some spoke at home just to maintain the language, but most of them completely moved on to English. What I suspect - Russian has more or less been spoken at the same rate from 1980-2010, but from 1980/1990, admitting one spoke Russian was probably not something one would want to admit, so I think the poll might under-represent the true speakers.
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03-19-2013, 02:56 PM | #3 | |
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2. Just because many Russian immigrants speak English well doesn't mean relative shit. That is to say, the same things goes for Japanese, Persian, Serbian, etc. 3. Your cultural thing is grasping at straws to explain perceived trends. The huge honking elephant in the room staring you down is Spanish. Latin American culture is just as European-influenced as American culture is, both historically and in modern times. Japanese culture is night-and-day different from American culture in so many ways yet you don't see all that many Japanese foreign nationals in America who speak next to no English. 4. If it weren't for the sentence following this one -- "In fact, the stereotypical Russian accent is supposedly quite rare, as many can speak accent-less to an untrained ear" -- I would think you'd never met a Russian in your entire life. Many second-generation Russians have absolutely no accent, but it is rare for a first-generation Russian to have not even the faintest trace of one. My high school friend had an accent, well into college and probably even to this day. (He moved over circa 2001 and I last saw him in person circa 2005.) What you say in your next sentence -- "I have several Russians in various Chemistry classes who knew each other and got to hear them discuss this from time to time - some spoke at home just to maintain the language, but most of them completely moved on to English" -- baffles me because the Russians I have known have always broken into Russian when chatting with each other. (The two boys did, as did the two girls.) It's the same with almost any foreign youth: they run into one of their fellow expats and the urge to talk in the mother language is just too strong, not to mention natively convenient. 5. Your theory about the spike being a bunch of US-born Americans who were too scared to admit they knew Russian because of McCarthyism is completely absurd. In 2000, we had 340,175 Russian-born Americans. Compare this against 347,540 Japanese-born Americans. (Pretty much identical.) Or 283,225 Iranian-born Americans. (The whole of the Iranian Exodus to the United States is only four-fifths that of the number of Russians who left for America.) Or 212,430 Brazilian-born and 203,120 Portuguese-born Americans (who together should account for most of the Portuguese-speaking chunk of Americans). It's pretty clear what happened here, Doppel. The people reporting they spoke Russian in 2000 weren't Americans with Ruskie interests: they were Russians themselves. EDIT: For Point #5, I think I may have misunderstood you. Were you originally insinuating that we already had a bunch of Russian foreign nationals in the 1980s and that these Russians denied being able to speak Russian because they worried about being spied on by the government? While I admit that this is possible, I don't think it's very probable: as stated previously, most Russians I have known have had hints of accents. It would invite only more suspicion if you were to lie to a U.S. Census Bureau officer about your household only speaking English despite your obvious Russian accent; you would be better off in that situation to simply admit that you guys are in fact a bilingual family. When you have nothing to hide, you don't act like you do have something to hide. That's just shooting yourself in the foot. But sure, I'll admit it's quite possible that we didn't see an immigration spike between 1980 and 2000. I'm looking for the numbers still and as yet haven't found them.
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Last edited by Talon87; 03-19-2013 at 03:07 PM. |
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03-19-2013, 04:27 PM | #4 |
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I wish they had Mandarin and/or whatever variant the people who speak Chinese are. While I'm sure that 80%+ of that overall Chinese category is Mandarin, it still changes the statistic.
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03-19-2013, 07:41 PM | #5 | ||||||
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It's just my personal perception, but I think being able to blend in with a crowd makes it easier for one to ditch a cultural identity. It has to be cherished and preserved to stay alive in the United States if one doesn't live in a homogenous community where it's prevalent. I think what's happening with Yiddish is a great example. Quote:
I don't have sources at my finger-tips, but I'd wager the number of communities in the US where people speak only one European language and no English is greatly out-numbered by the groups who speak Spanish, but no English, even when you adjust for population. A big component is poverty, with a perpetuating loop where poverty prevents one from acquiring the tools/resources to assimilate into the mainstream United States to solve poverty, but Spanish is the only other language I know of correlated with poverty. Whites and blacks are the only other demographic strongly associated with it and they speak English. Quote:
A note that I think I'm really bad at distinguishing accents. If someone talks funny, I don't really pick it up as that person being a foreigner, I just interpret it as a different speaking style. I personally feel I myself speak English poorly, for some reason, but I feel my Japanese and Spanish (through exposure?) sounds pretty good for a foreign tongue. But not my Visayan. When my mother wanted to be a hit at parties, she'd encourage me to speak, because it sounds "fanny". Quote:
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03-19-2013, 08:20 PM | #6 |
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On your Polish-Russian bit, I don't have any comment. Mostly because I'm not really sure what point you're trying to prove by forcing a link between the two (because of the CCCP) when the U.S. Census Bureau's language figure makes it abundantly clear that Polish dropped off relative to other languages from 1980 to 2010 whereas Russian rose relative to them over that same time period. Clearly Poles and Russians don't parallel each other always.
On your bit about Russian Americans blending in amongst native-born Americans because of shared Caucasian ethnicity, that's not at all what we're talking about here though. You said that Russians didn't preserve their language because they assimilated into our culture more easily because of Caucasian ethnicity, and I'm saying that the Japanese Americans fly in the face of your theory pretty hard. They're non-Caucasian, and by golly do they speak English. Even the 1st generation babushkas speak at least some English, and I mean more than "I happy" or "Me hungry", I mean good enough to deal with clientele if they have to. (See: the Japanese grandma I know here in town. Her spoken English is broken but it's plenty good enough to help her daughter run a store! And her listening comprehension in English is certainly higher than my own none-too-shabby listening comprehension is in Japanese, I can tell you that! This Japanese grandma ... is probably the least English-fluent Japanese person I've ever met in person. Every other Japanese American person I've met speaks from very well on up to native-born fluency equivalent. Japanese grad students excepted from this as they're not American citizens and indeed their English could be pretty weak. ^^; ) On your bit about me not being able to make the analogy with Latin America, you have a point about Latin America = half-European half-Mesoamerican whereas USA+CAN = full European because we didn't hybridize with the natives at all. But still. I'd say that even in spite of this difference in ethnocultural heritage between the two regions, northern North America and the rest of Latin America have a hell of a lot more in common than northern North Americans have in common with Viets, Chinese, Arabs, so on and so forth. As for the mystery of the Russian speakers and the 1980s U.S. censuses, I think you've pretty much solved it for us. That spike in speakers from 1990 to 2000 that I reported correlates very cleanly with the same spike in Russian immigrants shown in your table. You've got roughly 400,000, and I said there were roughly 300,000 Russian speakers according to the 2010 U.S. Census. I have a hard time believing that those 300,000 Russian speakers aren't 99% of them from your 400,000 immigrants. (Though it does beg the question of where the other 100,000 went! All young children who grew up not knowing Russian, maybe? Seems kind of wild to be such a large figure if you ask me.)
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Last edited by Talon87; 03-19-2013 at 08:22 PM. |
03-20-2013, 06:24 AM | #7 |
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I found it interesting that more people spoke Armenian that Albanian. That was really interesting.
Considering that the Armenian massacre happened in WWI and the whole Kosovo(I think I spelled that wrong) happened in the 90s. Those Armenians must be REALLY resistant to assimilation.
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03-21-2013, 01:41 AM | #9 |
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There's loads of different dialects though. For instance, most of the Indians in my city speak Punjabi.
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03-21-2013, 03:00 AM | #10 |
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I think it's more that Indians generally have decent English as it was an English territory for so long. This makes less of a need for Americans to learn Hindi to do business with India whereas Chinese rose along with how much business is now down in China.
On top of that, they make up only about 3 million or 1% of the US population according to the 2010 census. |
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