I live in South Florida where we have lots of Spanish speaking immigrants. All of those that I know speak very good English and their children prefer to speak English. Yes, all of them do speak Spanish as their first language, but all seem to have a desire to learn the language of our country which is mainly English. My wife is from South America and she and I always speak English. She and her friends who are from South America speak Spanish with each other and sometimes when I am around, they speak English. It is good to be bi-lingual. I speak Spanish also and when we go to South America, I speak the language of the people there. I don’t think that there will be a problem with language in this country.
Well, first move to a place where you can find a good number of farmworkers having garage sales . .
Seriously, saw a garage sale where this lady was selling of her Ingles Sin Barreras for that price.
XicanoreX
Many Hispanic-Americans speak “Spanglish” or Spanish that is heavily infused with English. You have what linguists call “calques” (word for word transfers of idioms)
For example.
" le voy a llamar pa’ atras" (I will call him back- litterally "I am going to call him ‘towards the back’).
‘Proper’ Spanish would be …le voy a llamar de vuelta, or le llamaré de vuelta…not a word by word English to Spanish transfer.
Also there is ‘code switching’, obscure slang, archaic words lost elsewhere in the Spanish speaking worldm and other features that marks it as different. Then there are many anglicized words. “troca” for truck, or “parquear” for park for instance. I recently read that there was a controversy involving several local linguists over where "Tex-Mex Spanglish"was developing into a “Creolized language”. Of course a Puerto Rican in the Bronx will have a Spanglish very distinct from that of San Antonio.
There are many people who do speak fluent Spanish, mainly in the border towns, or Miami and very large cities. But elsewhere, aside from immediate immigrants - the Spanish is rarely that fluent or ‘pure’.
The point is a lot of Anglo-Americans may hear many Hispanics speaking something that sounds like ‘Spanish’ but would barely be understood in Mexico City or San Juan.
I think there are several caveats to that.
"Hispanic descent"includes everyone from a Guatemalan Maya who speaks no Spanish, to an Afro-Cuban who identifies as ‘black’, to an Argentine Jew of Ukrainian origin. The fact that speaking Spanish or having any meaningful cultural link to the Spanish speaking world is not a critera adds to the looseness of the label.
I don’t see how such a braodly defined group can continue to hold together, given that it is very diverse. I think in the future some the descendants of today’s ‘Hispanics’ will identify as “white”, some as “black”, some as “brown”, and quite a few as simply “mixed/multiracial”. Keep in mind some 30% or so of Hispanics who marry at present marry a non-Hispanic spouse. Are people who are “Hispanic by marriage”, "half-Hispanic"or a “quarter-Hispanic” going to count as well?
Even in the censuses of 1990 and 2000 people identified as Hispanic under "ethnicity"and then under a “racial” group. While about half of all Hispanics didn’t identify as part of another “race”, many did identify as “white”, some as “black” or “Native American”, and quite a few as “Asian”.
Examples such as Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Jewish-Americans prove that ethnic identity is open to shifts. 100 years ago such groups were considered unabsorbable by many people. They were also often not considered “whites”. Now they are largely part of the ‘mainstream’. (Some extremists of course still exclude Jews or south Italians from “whiteness”).
The fact that Hispanics for the most part don’t fit in or play be the rules of the tradition black and white racial paradigm of the United States futher complicates all of this.
And lastly, say we were in New York City 100 years ago, reflecting on this same issue. We would probably have heard more than a few predictions that the United States would be mostly Italian, Slavic, and Jewish by the year 2000, that the English language would be severly endangered by Yiddish, Polish, German, and Sicilian, that Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Judaism would replace Protestantism, and so on. Even Theodore Roosevelt warned at the turn of the cetury that uncontolled immigration was turning America into a "polyglot boarding house’.
http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trquotes.html
Yet 100 years ago, they didn’t know about World War I and II, the Great Depression, the Iron Curtain, and all the other events that kept that from happening. Demography just cannot be easily predicted. Only ten years ago many people believed that in 50 or so years, the world’s population would basically strain our resources to the point of mass population disaster. Now it’s starting to look that those population predictions were probably 1 or 2 billion in excess of what looks likely today. Mexican, and other Latin American declines in growth are part of that equation.