Are there still communities in the continental United States where English is not the first language?
By this I specifically don’t mean recent immigrants or their children. I’m looking for individuals who are US citizens, have lived in the US all their lives and whose ancestors for many generations have also been US citizens and who have also lived in the US all their lives.
I’m thinking of French speakers in Louisiana, the Amish people or perhaps Native Americans. So to give an example: Are there French speakers in Louisiana today or in the more recent past who:
a) speak French and have only a limited command of English, if at all, or
b) speak French as their first language but are also fluent in English (i. e. they are bilingual)
I believe that there are Amish communities in Pennsylvania and possibly other states that speak German as their first language and children don’t learn English until they start school. They have been there for a long time. I believe that they also become fluent or nearly so in English, and I have been to Lancaster, PA and English was certainly the language to use in the community if you were not Amish, so it’s not like German is required to get along in the area.
I understand it’s the case in many rural areas in the Southwest, both for Hispanics and Native Americans, and both people who are truly bilingual and people whose English is sorely lacking.
Here in central Texas, there are still a lot of communities that were established by Germans or Czechs in the 1840s, and where both languages are still widely spoken.
Its been a long time since many of those people spoke the old languages exclusively. Still, there are a lot of Central Texas communities where Lutheran churches were still doing services in German in the early Seventies.
Northern Maine has French-speaking towns:
Madawaska, Maine (pop. 4,534) - 84% French-speaking
Fort Kent, Maine (pop. 4,233) - 61% French-speaking
Van Buren, Maine (pop. 2,631) - 79% French-speaking
Frenchville, Maine (pop. 1,225) - 80% French-speaking
Woodburn Oregon has a community of Russian Orthodox old believers. They have been here a long time. There are 2 sects, apparently. One sect, the “milk drinkers,” is quite strict and they probably still speak Russian.
It’s not clear whether the big Chinatowns fit into this category. These are certainly places where there are many people – thousands in some cities - -who do not speak English as their first language. Many are also US citizens and have lived in the US all of their lives. Whether the two are the the same group, I am not sure.
The term that describes this phenomenon is “Heritage Languages”. Within that, there are several different categories. This is off the top of my head rather than an exhaustive list:
Indigenous languages. Some (e.g. Navajo) are doing reasonably well, but all are endangered.
Colonial languages. Some (e.g. New Mexico Spanish) are still around hundreds of years later, although the situation is complicated by recent immigrants from other Spanish-speaking areas. With these, there is strong pressure for speakers to conform to a prestige dialect from another nation, e.g. Mexican Spanish or France French.
Both of the above tend to be used in rather restricted domains—you can’t get a university degree through the medium of Lousiana French, for example, and you can’t run a government solely through Cherokee the way you could for Icelandic or Welsh or some of the other small languages with their own country.
Immigrant communities. These tend to have much more restricted domains. Nancy Dorian has discussed the way these work if you’re interested, in terms of the way a language dies over the generations. Almost all have some informal education (parent deliberately instructing child / peer correcting peer) except in the very last stages, where people who speak less than fluently are called “rememberers.” Some communities (e.g. Chinese, Korean) maintain formal education alongside instruction in English in the school system.
Some immigrant communities are refreshed through immigration, others are not. The main factors in language survival are threefold:
a) Size of the community. A language spoken by a million immigrants will persist longer than one spoken by three.
b) Geographical proximity. Three immigrants in one household will keep their language better than a million people who each has no one to talk to. (Skype and other internet-age comminications are dramatically changing how heritage languages function, though.)
c) Social benefits / stigma. Communities that value their language will keep it more readily. Immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries often just wanted to “blend in” and discouraged their children from learning the heritage language.
Up through the Second World War there were at least three communities within a half-hour’s drive of my home where German, Czech and Norwegian were the first language of a strong minority. In my childhood German and Norwegian were spoken on the streets and had a big enough following to support a weekly newspaper . In the years following the First World War the 100% American hysteria was strong enough to support an official ban on the public and private use of German, Dutch, Czech, Danish and almost anything else, including in religious services as when the scriptures would be read in German of Norwegian. Even today there are strong local dialects even though the Mother Tongue has pretty well died out among all but the very elderly…
I recall hearing from an educator about a Native American child in Oklahoma who was not taught English until he or she started school. I don’t remember the details, but it would have been within the last few years.
Sadly, there aren’t any parts of Louisiana where French is the first language of the people that live there. There were some isolated communities where that was the case until the 1950’s or even 1960’s but that is no longer true. Cajun and Creole French was purposefully killed off as a first language intentionally with great success. The most you would find are some extremely old people living in isolated places who speak Cajun or Creole French as a first language but those are almost extinct.
However, there is a language preservation movement in Southern Louisiana and many younger people proudly learn Cajun and Creole French as a second language through courses especially in Louisiana univeristies. You will also see French words and phrases intermixed with English in many parts of Southern Louisiana in written and spoken forms.
You can find some strange speech patterns in parts of rural Louisiana however. I was once quite lost and stumbled on a family reunion to ask for directions. It was all we could do to communicate and I am from the state. It was some mix of French and English.
By these criteria you’d imagine Irish would have established a foothold in the US but that doesn’t appear to have been the case. IIRC it was spoken in Newfoundland into the 20th Century.
Along the same lines as the Amish are the Hutterites, who are also communal-living Anabaptists, but who have no problems with cars and industrial agricultural equipment and such. One of their colonies in Montana even has a wind farm on it. They grow up being taught an archaic German dialect similar to Pennsylvania Dutch as a first language, but usually learn English pretty early. I think it varies from colony to colony how much they use each language, because some speak English with a very thick and distinct accent, whereas others just speak with a standard Midwestern accent.
