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Old 03-19-2013, 01:46 PM   #1
Talon87
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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:
  • None of the top seventeen in 1980 have fallen out of the top seventeen by 2010. They've shifted around amongst themselves but nobody in 18th place or lower in 1980 has managed to break through to the top seventeen positions in the past thirty years.
  • The mother tongues of Americans linked to sociopolitical exoduses are well represented here. We see Vietnamese, Persian, Serbian, and Armenian presences here.
  • The "Chicago map" of cultures in America -- Italians, Poles, Germans, French, Greek, etc. -- held up pretty well in the 1980s, but with the exception of French (4th to 3rd), all of those languages have fallen by quite a bit in the standings between 1980 and now. (3rd to 7th, 2nd to 9th, 5th to 11th, and 8th to 14th.)
  • Yiddish, which many ethnologists have wondered about being a dying language and which in very very recent times has seen a resurgence of interest lest it completely vanish, does indeed show such a downward trend, dropping from 10th in 1980 to 17th in 2010. (Fewer Americans speak Yiddish than speak Serbian or Armenian, to put it into context.)
  • Not surprisingly, Russian saw its largest spike between 1990 and 2000.
  • Tagalog's steadily risen from 7th to 4th.
  • Chinese too, from 6th to 2nd, making the aggregate of Chinese dialects the 3rd most spoken language in America today. (Wow!)
There's a lot more too, but like they say, a picture says a thousand words. Take a look at the figure yourself and enjoy.
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Old 03-19-2013, 02:32 PM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
Not surprisingly, Russian saw its largest spike between 1990 and 2000.
Actually, this was the only piece of information that surprised me. The data is otherwise consistent with intuition - cultures that are more resistant to assimilation with the US, such as the East Asian cultures and Latin America, maintain presence. The less strongly represented European languages are going to fall since they can't really maintain a distinctly strong identity from mainstream America.

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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Old 03-19-2013, 02:56 PM   #3
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Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
Actually, this was the only piece of information that surprised me. The data is otherwise consistent with intuition - cultures that are more resistant to assimilation with the US, such as the East Asian cultures and Latin America, maintain presence. The less strongly represented European languages are going to fall since they can't really maintain a distinctly strong identity from mainstream America.

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.
1. After the Soviet Union dissolved, a lot of Russian entrepreneurs took their families and left for the United States; also, a lot of families doing the traditional "search for the American Dream" exodus came on over. In my small town, I knew no fewer than four Russians whose families had emigrated in the 1990s or 2000s:
  • a friend I graduated with in 2003
  • a guy a year younger than us
  • a girl three years younger
  • a girl four years younger
Four different families, all Russian.

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.

Last edited by Talon87; 03-19-2013 at 03:07 PM.
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Old 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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Old 03-19-2013, 07:41 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
1. After the Soviet Union dissolved, a lot of Russian entrepreneurs took their families and left for the United States; also, a lot of families doing the traditional "search for the American Dream" exodus came on over. In my small town, I knew no fewer than four Russians whose families had emigrated in the 1990s or 2000s:
  • a friend I graduated with in 2003
  • a guy a year younger than us
  • a girl three years younger
  • a girl four years younger
Four different families, all Russian.
While I don't doubt this is true, consider that Poland was part of the Soviet Union and saw a decrease in speakers over the same period as Russia. From what I've looked at in the immigration rates, there was indeed a huge spike in immigration from 1990-1999, but since the Russian Revolution the total immigration has been close to even. You might consider 30K people a bit more than even, but to me it's close to 5% and given the countries relative sizes, one would expect way more Russians than Polish immigrating at any time.




Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
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.
I think it means a lot. Russians don't have a ton of outstanding features that make them easily identifiable because of the prevailing European presence in the US. One might not be able to tell a Japanese person apart from a Chinese, but one can tell they're Asian. My father once told me that some of the people who work in hospitals in Florida are pure white with red hair, but they're not Irish, even if they look like it...they're 100% Cuban.

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:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
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.
I don't think you can make that analogy. The Spanish went and conquered the native peoples of Central/South America and tried to force their brand of European culture but it ended up blended with the pre-existing native culture. The United States began when Europeans moved here and had babies. The people who live in the lower Americas are mostly the descendants of the original natives with some Spanish blood, while most Americans are purely of European descent, not blended with the native North Americans.

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:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
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.
Oh, they talked Russian in front of me, and were quite proud they kept the tradition. But I mean, when discussing how they could still speak it, that's where that conversation came into play. Remember that when I was in Political Science, Russian culture/politics during the Soviet era was one of my emphases, so I got to hear a lot about the Russian integration in the US during the concurrent period.

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:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
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.
That's consistent with the table above, there was a huge upswing of Russian immigrants and that could have biased the census numbers. The ranking doesn't make it clear, but the difference between total Russian and total Polish speakers isn't that big, so I'd expect in the long run that those numbers stabilize barring another Iron Curtain. Immigration doesn't really explain the rise from 1980-1990 though, which is why I think Russians got a bit bolder for some reason during Reagen's screaming madness.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
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.
What they would do is have their kids speak to the census collectors, because the kids were bilingual and while the names might be a good give-away, one wouldn't be able to tell what generation Russian American they were. The kids would have a lot easier timing hiding the fact that the family still spoke Russian, which for that era might be interpreted as a bit unusual. We see it as trying to preserve a connection to the motherland, but others might think "what purpose would preserving that tradition have in an all-American city"?
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Old 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.)

Last edited by Talon87; 03-19-2013 at 08:22 PM.
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Old 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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Old 03-20-2013, 06:50 AM   #8
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I'm fairly gobsmacked that Hindi doesn't even figure on that list.
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Old 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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Old 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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