This paper examines the relationship between ethnic origin, immigration, and language usage in order to determine the degree to which heritage language (defined as languages other than English, French or Aboriginal) use is maintained from one generation to another. It examines five census variables: ethnic origin, immigrant status, mother tongue, language used in the home, and knowledge of official language(s). It is hypothesised that the relative strength and endurance of these minority languages is an outcome of a combination of demographic and socio-economic factors such as the age structure and proportion of immigrants in the group.

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. Whose America?; 2. The alien specter then and now; 3. Hyphenated identity; 4. Foreign accents and immigrant Englishes; 5. Multilingual practices; 6. Immigrant children and language; 7. American becomings

Includes statistics.

Exploring the complex relationship between language and immigration in the United States, this timely book challenges mainstream, historically established assumptions about American citizenship and identity. Set within both a historical and a current political context, this book covers hotly debated topics such as language and ethnicity, the relationship between non-native English and American identity, perceptions and stereotypes related to foreign accents, code-switching, hybrid language forms such as Spanglish, language and the family, and the future of language in America. Work from the fields of linguistics, education policy, history, sociology, and politics are brought together to provide an accessible overview of the key issues. Through specific examples and case studies, immigrant America is presented as a diverse, multilingual, and multidimensional space in which identities are often hybridized and always multifaceted.

The book presents case studies of immigrant minority groups and immigrant minority languages in Europe and abroad, analysed from demographic, sociolinguistic, and educational perspectives. The demographic perspective focuses on the role of language and ethnicity in multicultural population statistics, the sociolinguistic perspective on the vitality of immigrant minority languages, and the educational perspective on the status of immigrant minority languages in education.

This collection provides an overview of some of the most relevant concepts in the study of the language of inclusion and exclusion, specifically with a view to the functioning of nation-state categories. Categorizations, words, and phrases are constantly renewed with the intention to exclude (mostly) or to include (rarely), promulgating problematizations that highlight discursive distinctions between in-groups and out-groups. Such discursive constructions and the practices through which they are effectuated are sites of symbolic power, and their study reveals the workings of power. Historical analysis of the language of inclusion and exclusion can help elucidate contemporary transformations of discursive power. The chapters in this volume discuss forms of discursive problematization such as defining, claiming, legitimizing, expanding, sensationalization and suggestion, and it connects these to the discursive drawing of boundaries, focusing on discursive constructions of ‘illegality’, race, class, gender, immigrant integration and transnationalism. As state categorizations continuously differ, both the historical analysis of their genesis, functioning and transformation, and the contemporary analysis of their practical effectuation are crucial to an understanding of inclusion and exclusion. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.