The next town over from me have a large Vietnamese community, the older generation frequently only speak Vietnamese, relying on their children and grandchildren to help them navigate in society, doctors appointments, interacting with the government and all those things. I'm continuously surprised that someone would refuse to learn the language of a country they lived in for almost 50 years... Like WHY?
Did you grow up with formal education? Did you grow up in a place where girls were encouraged to learn? If either of these is true, your starting condition is miles ahead of the starting conditions for many, many immigrants who came to the US.
It sounds simple, but in order to learn something, you have to first believe you “can.” Can in the sense that you have the ability and that you’re permitted to.
My PhD is in second language acquisition. For my thesis I interviewed, through translators, 276 “non proficient speakers” of the dominant community language. The most common attitudes I encountered were:
(1) I’m too old to learn a new language. It’s just not possible.
(2) I don’t have the right to speak the dominant language because I’m not the same ethnicity / religion / other attribute.
(3) If I speak another language, I will lose who I am to the dominant culture, and be unable to communicate with people “back home.” This last attitude was expressed often, even when the person had no living relatives or friends anywhere else.
These 3 reasons ring closely, its what i see in my own family. They are Cuban and came here older and have never bothered to learn the language mostly out of fear of being too old or loosing their culture. They also have their own micro country were they can get Spanish speaking doctors, jobs and community to socialize. They can go months without hearing a word in English. Confidence is big to learn a language, my own kids are 5 and 6 and they can write / read and speak Spanish and English and speak in french but my son is less extroverted and fallsback more to English on front of people.
Those are some seemingly crazy reasons. I live around a lot of Guatemalans, none of them speak English. (I'm in the US.)I've been wondering why not just learn even a little? But also why go to another country and make no attempt to be part of it.
> If I speak another language, I will lose who I am to the dominant culture
I find this reason very compelling.
Personally I see it as a huge positive to be able to communicate with people and to enjoy cultural benefits - but what about the harms? What about the negative or undesired cultural values that you might absorb and adopt? And what about losing or forgetting your original culture, values and sense of self, and becoming someone you no longer recognize?
It's amazing that this is being studied, but it's some rather weird reasons. You have people who migrated to the US in the 1950 - 1980 from Europe, they didn't care about losing their ability to speak their native language. It's alway interesting to hear a Dane that moved to the US 50 - 70 years ago. Their language is frozen in time but still fairly good.
Both sets of my grandparents came to the US (New York) from Italy in the 1920's. They learned very broken English, and discouraged my young parents from speaking Italian. All four grandparents felt this way. My parents aren't sure of the reasons, they were just told not to speak Italian outside the house.
Your grandparents were trying to protect your parents from the racism they encountered as immigrants in the 1920s. It was vicious, inexcusable, and largely forgotten due to the success of Italian assimilation in the US.
Jacobson’s “Whiteness of a Different Color” goes into this in detail.
It's unexpected, until you dig down into the reasons why immigrants might not learn a new language.
1. There may be a community of your type of immigrants so you might not need English and within the community there are trusted people who can translate, so you don't actually NEED to learn the language yourself. This is why immersion language programs work well since you're forced to learn a language. Otherwise it's much harder, even if you're motivated.
2. When they moved they likely were not given the tools to help them learn. And even if they were given some of these tools, were the immigrants able to balance work with these classes. California does this well, they have a lot of free ESL classes, which are well taught and agencies/non-profits push immigrants to attend them.
3. Learning a new language is HARD, especially when you're older. Especially if it's not similar to your existing language (learning Spanish, French, German is relatively easy for English speakers since there are many words that sound the same. Learning Russian or Mandarin or Arabic is much harder since the language aren't part of the same family).
Integrating large groups into an existing community requires a lot of intentional work, no matter if that's immigrants integrating into a country or a company meeting with another. If that intentional work isn't done, you end up with silos.
The Vietnamese people you mentioned who escaped to the US decades ago were refugees. They were escaping a country where bombs were being dropped daily, famines were normal, and literally millions had died due to lack of food.
The literacy rate was 3%. In other words, the majority of those poor folks are not even fluent in writing their main language. Many of them, including my relatives, expressed the wish to learn English, but as you can imagine, it's pretty challenging. Some picked up enough to communicate, some gave up and depended on their children/grandchildren for translation. They had seen war and hell; being alive is a blessing.
This comment is interesting. What little I read about the "boat people" escaping Vietnam in the late 1970s was about comparatively privileged South Vietnamese fleeing the new regime that was out for revenge. So, I would have assumed high literacy from those demographics.
The privileged people in Saigon fleeing the new regime escaped mostly via connection. For example, I know people here who fled on US airplanes/ships. They were educated, and most likely knew some French/English before coming here.
The "boat people" were more likely from the coastal town (like Vung Tau), who dropped everything and got on tiny boats, packed like sardines, hoped to get rescued from other fishing boats when getting out far enough to the ocean. They are often poor folks with nothing to lose, and willing to accept a coin flip chance between death and escaping to the US. For this part, I don't have the concrete statistics. But from the stories I have heard, the survival rate of those boat escapes is worse than 50%.
I know folks like this. Cantonese and Vietnamese. Most of them are (were, back when they were trying to speak English) deeply embarrassed by their accents and utterly captured by that fear.
I’d have to imagine a good portion of that is most likely from immigration though.
Even if you’re a native English speaker if your parents are 1st generation Americans there’s still an effect on educational attainment especially depending on the cultural background.
It’s a chicken or egg situation.
Whenever aggregates are brought up about the US educational system it’s questionable. This country is so large and diverse. I believe if you cut out the Deep South and poor inner city communities our educational rankings shoot back up to the top. There’s a reason the best universities in the world are still in America. It’s not like public education is neglected until college age we just have certain parts of the country that drastically underperform and it’s lot easier to have those parts when it isn’t a small homogeneous community.
Learning language is not that impressive as a cognitive/educational feat. It is mostly a simple matter of practice. School reform is not going to change this. Case in point, Canada where schools are good and French is mandatory struggles to actually teach anyone how to speak French.
For Europeans the standard second language is English which is pretty straightforward as a result of globalization. Adding a third language that is spoke by everyone an hour train ride away is not that much extra.
Europe and United States have nearly equal land area of just shy of 4 million square miles. There are 24 official languages of the European Union and English as the lone, defacto language of the USA.
Why would anything else be expected from the American education system when, for example, you can travel the entirety of the US and most of Canada and not have to worry about finding someone who speaks English. The education system in the US is trash for a few reasons, but only teaching English to all is not one of them, and I say this as someone who lives in the US and speaks a few languages.
If I were busting my ass at a job just to make sure I could pay rent and keep food on the table for my kids, I probably wouldn't have much energy left to learn Vietnamese, either.
have you tried to learn Vietnamese !? it is really different.. also, someone told me that in South East Asia, like many places, there is a lot of difference between educated people there and uneducated people there.. an illiterate in their own language, has to learn English or else be "rude" ?
> someone told me that in South East Asia, like many places, there is a lot of difference between educated people there and uneducated people there
Such as their education level? Is that specific to South East Asia somehow?
The vast majority of Vietnamese American came to the US not really as immigrants seeking newfound opportunities, but as refugees who have lost their home. I imagine such a sudden uprooting has made them somewhat insular, as they bound together in a foreign environment for which they were not prepared.
That is true for the older generation (immigrating to US pre 1990-ish). The newer generation immigrating to US has a very different mindset now, and they embrace American values as much as the native born here.
yeah - I am not sure why I get the downvote and suspicious reply, since I explicitly said "like many other places"
yes East San Jose is a hotspot for displaced Vietnamese, who took the American side in the extended, ugly and deeply damaging conflict there. A war that almost all of the people in this area of California vigorously and without fail, opposed.
No, but I also haven't moved to Vietnam permanently. I can't imagine navigating another country with a low English or Danish proficiency and not wanting to learn the local language, if I planed to stay there permanently. It seems like you would be making life extremely difficult for no good reason.
Because they don’t need to, they’re large and it doesn’t culturally offer them anything. The kids and outside community wanting their business bend to their needs.
My grandparents hood had FOB Hungarian, Pole, Slovak, Ukranian, Russian, Latvian and probably half a dozen others. They didn’t need English to exist and we’re probably richer they didn’t pine to mimic WASP orthodoxy.
Seems rather rude in some sense.