Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California

In what serves as a response to Samuel P. Huntington';s Who Are We? The Challenges of America's National Identity, the authors research the question of assimilation and English acquisition in Spanish-speaking households in southern California. The authors conclude that while the density of Spanish speakers in Southern California remains strong, the tendency to lose one's native language by the third generation at the latest mimics the patterns observed for earlier European immigrants to the U.S.