Language in America: Diversity, Dominance, and Cultural Maintenance, 1910 – 2010

• In Event: 190 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Demography of Latino/as

Abstract

Viewing Language as a marker of ethnicity, we use census data and a range of indices to examine language usage change in the United States over a 100 year period, 1910 to 2010. Our research is guided by three major questions. First, how much language diversity exists over the 100 year period? Second, how dominant is the English language from 1910 to 2010? And, third, what factors affect the odds of speaking a non-English language. In regard to the three questions, we find, respectively: (1) only three languages other than English have survived in the top ten languages over the 100 year period: French, German, and Spanish; (2) English language dominance has declined over the 100 year period and that the biggest reason for this decline was the rise of the Spanish speaking population; (3) increased residential segregation among foreign born enclaves has increased the relative numbers of non-English speakers in them over time and with a logistic regression model we find that both foreign-born status and foreign-born enclaves greatly increased the odds of speaking a non-English language. While the impact of enclaves increased over time, as they simultaneously became more segregated. However, the most important determinant of speaking a non-English language was being foreign born.

Authors

• Richard Ruiz Verdugo, National Education Association

• David Swanson, Univeristy of California Riverside