Demographics of Adult Heritage Language Speakers in the United States: Differences by Region and Language and Their Implications

Abstract

Heritage language (HL) speakers have received scholarly attention in recent years as an interdisciplinary research theme, but relatively less attention has been paid to their demographics. Existing studies of HL speakers' demographics often focus on young children in areas of high immigrant concentration (i.e., California, Florida, and New York); no study has systematically investigated cross-regional and chronological demographic patterns of adult HL speakers. From the perspective of HLs as a national resource, such demographic data on adult HL speakers are useful to gauge the availability of a bilingual workforce and determine structures needed to support and develop a bilingual U.S. population. Using the Integrated Public User Microdata Series (Ruggles & Sobek, 1997), which is based on data from the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey, this study makes geographical and chronological comparisons among groups of adult HL speakers from 1980 to 2010. The data show major differences in the demographics of adult HL speakers in different regions. The analyses also reveal differences by language, specifically between the adult HL speakers of Spanish and other languages. Implications of these patterns are discussed.Keywords: heritage language; demographics HERITAGE LANGUAGE (HL) SPEAKERS HAVE drawn much scholarly attention in recent years as an interdisciplinary research theme among language educators, linguists, and policy makers. For language educators, understanding how to teach mixed classes with HL speakers and nonheritage second language learners in the classroom is a perennial issue. It is a challenge because these two groups of language learners have different instructional needs and goals for learning the target language. Unless the curriculum is specifically developed for HL speakers, their unique linguistic and instructional needs are often overlooked

Tiger Moms or Cat Dads: Parental Role in Bilingualism Among Asian and Latino Americans

“…Turning to other demographic variables identified as potential factors for language maintenance or shift in immigrant families and communities (Hakuta and D'Andrea, ; Kang, , ; Nagano, ; Pearson, 2007; Qin, ; Shin, ; Suárez‐Orozco and Qin, 2006), the distinct roles of gender, age, birth order, number of siblings, educational attainment, and related parental characteristics are examined.…”

“…Another observation is that Latino Americans have always been better at retaining their native languages across generations than Asian Americans. This may be due to the closer proximity in language distance and geographical distance that Hispanic immigrants enjoy compared to Asians (Nagano, ). Moreover, given the significantly larger population of Latino Americans, this immigration group enjoys an advantageous network effect, including language skills, compared to Asian Americans.…”

“…The maintenance of language is largely determined by an array of factors that include immigration and settlement patterns, immigration policies in the host country, and demographic factors unique to diverse ethnic groups (Kang, ; Nagano, ; Pearson, 2007; Qin, ; Shin, ; Suárez‐Orozco and Qin, 2006). In this article, we present a snapshot of parental‐language attainment across ethnic groups by comparing Asians and Latinos.…”

“…In this article, we present a snapshot of parental‐language attainment across ethnic groups by comparing Asians and Latinos. Nagano () shows that Spanish and Chinese are the two most common immigrant languages in the United States and that Spanish speakers are more likely to retain their language than Chinese speakers, which can be attributed to the typological distance between English and the heritage language (Bills, Chávez, and Hudson, ; Nagano, ). However, if one considers settlement and migration patterns as an explanatory factor, then one would think that Chinese speakers would have a better chance of retaining their language than Spanish speakers because Asian immigrants, including Chinese speakers, tend to reside in metropolitan areas, often creating ethnic enclaves, while Hispanic immigrants may not (Ehrenhalt, ).…”

Bridging interpersonal and ecological dynamics of cognition through a systems framework of bilingualism.

“…To quantify these dynamics, we mine population-level linguistic demographic data from the Canadian Census to quantify ambient language exposure. While researchers of bilingualism have leveraged census data to examine the distribution of bilingual speakers across the United States (Nagano, 2015) and Canada (Gullifer & Titone, 2019), our geospatial approach extracts census demographic statistics as precise indicators of language use in neighborhoods of residence for our sample.…”