Mother Tongue Slayer

Here's one to burst the bubble of Dubya and all wingnuts freaked out over Nuestro Himno and the foreign invasion that will soon get us singing The Star Spangled Banner in Spanish:

A report in the Population and Development Review found that far from threatening the dominance of English, most Latin American immigrants to the United States lose their ability to speak Spanish over the course of a few generations.

The study by sociologists Frank Bean and Ruben Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, and Douglas Massey from Princeton, drew on two surveys investigating adaptation by immigrant communities in California and south Florida.

It concluded that by the third generation, most descendants of immigrants are "linguistically dead" in their mother tongue.

Did all you language freakazoids get that? Not only do immigrants start speaking English fluently in a couple of generations, but they get assimilated so completely it kills their mother tongue. You happy now?



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