4 ms·

I’d be curious to know what percentage of people in California speak no English at all.

olalonde 3y ago
I don't know but my wife used to play mahjong in SF Chinatown and almost no one spoke English, including some people who had been in the US for over 30 years. It was a bit surprising.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  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? Seems rather rude in some sense.
  - nayuki 3y ago
    Not just rude, but self-defeating. You lose access to a lot of jobs and consumer opportunities by not speaking the local language.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    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" ?
    - magnio 3y ago
      > 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.
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        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.
      - linhvn 3y ago
        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.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      If I lived in another country for 50 years I would absolutely learn the local vernacular. In fact, I’ve done so with much fewer than 50 years under my belt.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      > have you tried to learn Vietnamese 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.
  - caslon 3y ago
    Learning one language is hard. Only 46% of American native English speakers have above a 6th grade reading level. 20% are functionally illiterate. https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
    - niemandhier 3y ago
      Most of Europe speaks at least two, and most of Switzerland 3. I think this might be an effect of the American education system.
      - blululu 3y ago
        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.
      - samtho 3y ago
        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.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Reading is a separate skill from speaking. I’m certain those illiterate people have no problem communicating verbally.
    - 3y ago
  - scruple 3y ago
    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.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      I can respect that, not least because it's also why I don't use my Spanish.
  - triceratops 3y ago
    How many languages have you become fluent in as an adult?
  - bhpm 3y ago
    > 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.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      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.
      - musicale 3y ago
        It is the opposite of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Which is to say, don't hesitate to attend the next scheduled public execution or gladiatorial combat exhibition.
    - codeadict 3y ago
      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.
  - hindsightbias 3y ago
    > large Vietnamese community 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.
  - twunde 3y ago
    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.
  - thanhhaimai 3y ago
    I'm Vietnamese. 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.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      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.
      - thanhhaimai 3y ago
        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%.
  - beej71 3y ago
    > Seems rather rude in some sense. 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.
  - kingofpandora 3y ago
    How many American expats in other countries bother to learn the local language?
- jjjjmoney 3y ago
  I knew families like this growing up. To me it’s less about how long they have been here vs if they are first or second+ generation immigrants. It has always seemed like the second generation onward picks up English. * I’m obviously a small sample size dealing with a single immigrant population in one state, but that’s my experience.
beej71 3y ago
This doesn't answer your question, but answers a superset of it... https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/people-that-speak-english-less-than-very-well.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pe...
29athrowaway 3y ago
There is a town in Florida where nobody speaks English. Hialeah, FL

I don't know but my wife used to play mahjong in SF Chinatown and almost no one spoke English, including some people who had been in the US for over 30 years. It was a bit surprising.

mrweasel 3y ago
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? Seems rather rude in some sense.
- nayuki 3y ago
  Not just rude, but self-defeating. You lose access to a lot of jobs and consumer opportunities by not speaking the local language.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  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" ?
  - magnio 3y ago
    > 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.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      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.
    - linhvn 3y ago
      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.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    If I lived in another country for 50 years I would absolutely learn the local vernacular. In fact, I’ve done so with much fewer than 50 years under my belt.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    > have you tried to learn Vietnamese 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.
- caslon 3y ago
  Learning one language is hard. Only 46% of American native English speakers have above a 6th grade reading level. 20% are functionally illiterate. https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
  - niemandhier 3y ago
    Most of Europe speaks at least two, and most of Switzerland 3. I think this might be an effect of the American education system.
    - blululu 3y ago
      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.
    - samtho 3y ago
      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.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Reading is a separate skill from speaking. I’m certain those illiterate people have no problem communicating verbally.
  - 3y ago
- scruple 3y ago
  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.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    I can respect that, not least because it's also why I don't use my Spanish.
- triceratops 3y ago
  How many languages have you become fluent in as an adult?
- bhpm 3y ago
  > 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.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    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.
    - musicale 3y ago
      It is the opposite of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Which is to say, don't hesitate to attend the next scheduled public execution or gladiatorial combat exhibition.
  - codeadict 3y ago
    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.
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  > large Vietnamese community 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.
- twunde 3y ago
  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.
- thanhhaimai 3y ago
  I'm Vietnamese. 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.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    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.
    - thanhhaimai 3y ago
      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%.
- beej71 3y ago
  > Seems rather rude in some sense. 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.
- kingofpandora 3y ago
  How many American expats in other countries bother to learn the local language?
jjjjmoney 3y ago
I knew families like this growing up. To me it’s less about how long they have been here vs if they are first or second+ generation immigrants. It has always seemed like the second generation onward picks up English. * I’m obviously a small sample size dealing with a single immigrant population in one state, but that’s my experience.

beej71 3y ago

This doesn't answer your question, but answers a superset of it... https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/people-that-speak-english-less-than-very-well.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pe...

29athrowaway 3y ago

There is a town in Florida where nobody speaks English. Hialeah, FL